Indian historians have tended in the past to explain the origins of nationalism and political activity in the subcontinent in terms of all-India organizations such as the Indian National Congress or in terms of the political thought and background of important national figures. As research on modern India accumulates, however, it is becoming apparent that this limited explanation of Indian political history is no longer adequate. The major regions had their own distinct social and political development which molded the response of local politicians to the larger political movements and which in turn had some effect on the speed and direction of the Indian nationalist movement. A fruitful approach to understanding the Congress would thus be to view it as an assembly of politicians who had regional political ties and who were strongly influenced by regional organizations. The significant role of the Arya Samaj in the politics of North India particularly supports such an interpretation. The revivalist Arya Samaj contributed to Hindu militancy and aggravated Hindu-Muslim relations. Although this aspect of Arya activity has yet to receive systematic treatment, the broad outline of the Samaj's part in hardening divisions between Hindus and Muslims is well known. The role of Aryas in provincial and national politics, on the other hand, has received little or no attention.

The central theme of my book, reviewed in the previous article by Ramon Myers, is that, contrary to the expectations of the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, commercialization does not necessarily bring modern development to the countryside. China before 1950 saw six centuries of vigorous and protracted commercialization, but rural underdevelopment persisted, so that the great majority of the population remained tied to the land and to bare-subsistence food production (down to the 1980s). In spite of fairly vigorous expansion of urban industrial production after the 1890s (and accelerated development after 1950), the countryside remained poor, with per capita incomes hovering around subsistence. The classical vision of market-driven capitalist development, with mutually reinforcing and spiraling urban and rural development, simply did not occur in China. What happened instead were commercialization without rural development and urban industrialization without rural development—combinations of empirical phenomena that appear paradoxical to us from the standpoint of Western-derived expectations.

James Scott's and Samuel Popkin's theories must undergo the test of historical facts. The author considers three points: the village community; the individuals and the spirit of enterprise; and the peasant protest movements in Vietnam. Having not worked in exactly the same fields (South or Central Vietnam) or on the same periods (colonial or postcolonial eras), both, Scott and Popkin have generalized their own experiences. In fact, the Vietnamese peasants cling to “moral economy” or engage themselves in “political economy” according to the general situation and to what is at stake for them. Thus, the two explanatory schemes—Scott's moral economy and Popkin's political economy—cannot be used separately or one against the other but must be used together to permit an adequate consideration of the transformations of the Vietnamese peasantry.

The characteristic feature of Japanese warfare, prior to the introduction of firearms in 1543, was the use of swords and spears in hand-to-hand fighting. Armies were made up of small, independent bands of soldiers who fought more as individuals than as units of a tactical formation, and naval units consisted of fishing vessels that were commandeered for transporting armies within bow-range or sword-reach of the enemy. Thus, all battles, whether on land or at sea, were little more than “monster fencing matches.” But the introduction of the Portuguese arquebus and the subsequent widespread manufacture of firearms soon led to radical developments in military techniques.

This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trace a history through Japanese-influenced U.S. scholars of the mid-twentieth century like Robert Bellah to Japanese imperialist and Chinese Republican nationalist scholarship of the early twentieth century. This scholarship employed new individualistic and modernist visions of religion and philosophy to isolate fields of “Confucian values” or “Confucian philosophy” apart from the realities of social practice and tradition, transforming Confucianism into a purely intellectualized “empty box” ripe to be filled with cultural nationalist content. This article contends that current scholarship, by continuing this modernist approach, may unwittingly facilitate similar nationalist exploitations of Confucianism.

We possess in ancient Tamil a large body of poetry which antedates for all intents and purposes the incursion of Sanskrit culture into Tamilnad. This poetry, found in the eight anthologies and the Pattuppāṭṭu, dates from the first and second centuries A.D. The culture which produced it was a continuation of the megalithic culture which dominated the Deccan for the millenium before Christ. The special importance of early Tamil poetry for cultural history is that it describes this civilization, which according to the Allchins was characterized by a very conservative and unchanging culture, before it was appreciably influenced by Sanskritic culture from the North. Thus a study of early Tamil reveals elements which were contributed to India by this culture and which were later assimilated by the rest of India. Other sources for this culture—the Sattasaī in Māhārāṣṭrī, for example—show the influence of Sanskrit culture, so that it is not possible to determine from them which elements belonged originally to the Deccan culture and which to the culture of the North.

On 19 may 1856, qing officials in kunming, the capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, systematically carried out a three-day massacre of the city's Hui (Muslim Yunnanese). Han townspeople, the local militia, and imperial officials methodically slaughtered between four and seven thousand Yunnan Hui—men, women, and children—burned the city's mosques to the ground, and posted orders to exterminate the Hui in every prefecture, department, and district in Yunnan (QPHF 1968, 6:20a, 8:4a; Gui 1953, 73). This massacre and the widespread attacks that followed signaled the beginning of the eighteen-year Hui-led Panthay Rebellion (1856–73).

The new materialism underlying economic modernization in post-Mao China rests on the principles of the primacy of productivity over ideology, use of incentives based on material interests, and acknowledgment of economic and social complexity. An impressive array of political reforms has accompanied the vast changes in economic policies that these principles have inspired. These include legal and constitutional reform, a decrease in public interference in the private lives of citizens, an increase in mass voice in most organizations, and a strengthening of the people's congress system. The reforms are intended to contribute to modernization by institutionalizing orderly participation by intellectuals and the masses. The capacity of such reforms to limit arbitrary power through institutional and electoral checks is rendered ambiguous by the continued hegemony of the Chinese Communist Party.

The world's two most populous countries each made international headlines in 2008, thanks to the Sichuan earthquake and Beijing Olympics, the Mumbai terror attacks, and reports of how the global financial crisis affected the Chinese and Indian economies. However, China and India were also seen in 2008 as making up, together, one of the ongoing development stories of the twenty-first century—and there are good reasons to think this trend will continue throughout 2009. Thanks to years of strikingly high growth rates for India and even higher ones for China, comparisons of the two countries have proliferated. This has resulted in a slew of books and articles, often aimed at investors, that worry over or enthuse about the way the “dragon” and the “elephant” have been upending or bringing new energy into the global economic order. Scholars immersed in the study of Asia often find these publications lacking in depth, but there is no question that economic shifts in the two countries and surging interest in their current trajectories are important. With this in mind, we decided this would be a useful time to revisit a familiar governance issue that has long been associated with joint discussions of China and India: the relationship between democracy and development. We invited economist Pranab Bardhan, author of a forthcoming book on the political economy of India and China titled Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay, to reflect on the subject, concentrating in particular on issues of governance—a topic he has explored in plenary and keynote addresses given everywhere from Montreal to Manchester, Beijing to Bogota, Canberra to Calcutta.

With these stirring lines Takekoshi Yosaburō opened the preface to the 1893 edition of his Shin Nihonshi {History of New Japan). It is difficult to imagine a more enthusiastic celebration of the Meiji Restoration than one likening it to the epochal founding of the Chou dynasty. Yet those who read beyond the confident affirmation of the preface soon encountered a rising note of anxiety, concern, even alarm in the pages that followed. For it was clear that however highly Takekoshi regarded the ideals of the “great revolution of the Restoration,” he also saw them in jeopardy. “Today,” he wrote, “slightly more than twenty years since the Restoration, the general public has begun to tread the path of unrighteousness. Ministers in power err in their policies, and those in opposition err in their views, and together both make pronouncements that give comfort only to themselves. That is why the author has taken up his brush in indignation to narrate a general outline of the changing times since the Restoration.” The revolution, in short, was a revolution betrayed, or at least unfulfilled.

Let me begin with a conversation I had with the late David Wyatt of Cornell University, a prominent historian of Thailand and the 1993 president of the AAS, at one of the AAS meetings in Boston. I asked Professor Wyatt, what was the question about Thai history he got most often from Thai colleagues? His answer was:

1. 1) Was the execution of the king in 1782 by the founder of the current dynasty legitimate? If not, why did he do it?

2. 2) Was the death of another king in 1946 an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, and if it was the last one, who did it?

China's protracted regional conflicts of 1967 and 1968 have long been understood as struggles between conservative and radical forces whose opposed interests were so deeply rooted in existing patterns of power and privilege that they defied the imposition of military control. This study of Nanjing, a key provincial capital that experienced prolonged factional conflict, yields a new explanation: the conflicts were prolonged precisely because they could not be characterized as pitting “conservatives” against “radicals”, making it difficult for central officials, local military forces, or Mao Zedong to decide how to resolve them. Furthermore, Beijing officials, regional military forces, and local civilian cadres were themselves divided against one another, exacerbating and prolonging local conflicts. In competing for approval from central authorities, local factions adopted opportunistic and rapidly shifting political stances designed to portray their opponents as reactionary conservatives—charges that had no basis in fact.

In 1944, a rebellion in China's northwestern Xinjiang Province prompted Chiang Kai-shek to send his most trusted lieutenant, Zhang Zhizhong, to negotiate with the rebels and to attempt to consolidate Nationalist China's hold over the perennially restive frontier province. Zhang's innovative adaptation of tested Soviet models of minority representation tapped into and reinterpreted a long tradition of established cultural paradigms for digesting and representing the internal “other” within China. The most visible and widely disseminated projects that Zhang sponsored in the waning days of Nationalist China represent a determined eleventh-hour propaganda attempt to integrate the seldom-seen Central Asian frontier into the greater conception of a unified Chinese republic. This effort also marks one of the earliest instances of the Chinese state attempting to employ mass propaganda media to disseminate—among a large and diverse audience—a modified version of established modes of ethnic representation previously in currency only among a limited subsection of elite and official society.

Border studies in South Asia privilege everyday experiences, and the constructed nature of borders and state sovereignty. This article argues that state elites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s actively pursued territorial sovereignty through border policy, having inherited ambiguous colonial-era frontiers. By comparing security and development activities along the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the better-known case of India and Pakistan's ceasefire line in Kashmir, this article demonstrates that the exercise of sovereignty required a bounded space that only borders could provide and a rejection of competing border zone authorities. The local specificity of each border, however, created the historical conditions in which political elites acted. Combining an archival history methodology with conceptual insights from political geography and critical international relations, this article uses an original integration of two important Asian border spaces into one analysis to highlight tensions between sovereignty's theory and practice.

The Changsha rice riot of April 12–16, 1910 was one of the series of popular revolts that racked the Ch'ing dynasty in its closing years.1 Triggered by serious crop failures and peasant demand for relief, it involved over twenty thousand participants and the occupation of a heavily garrisoned provincial capital. Rioters put the torch to the governor's yamen, foreign property and government offices and looted over one hundred rice shops. In outlying districts secret societies made spasmodic attempts to incite a general uprising against the dynasty.

Socialization is “the process by which someone learns the ways of a given O society or social group so that he can function within it.” Socialization occurs in many different groups and settings, but in all societies, the first and usually the most important of these is the family. For this reason, family socialization has been of interest to scholars in several different disciplines using a variety of conceptual frameworks.

Two tamil mahābhārata folk cults that I have studied recreate the Indian epic's “sacrifice of battle” in their festivals, and rethematize, in the symbolic registers of south Indian village goddesses and regional kingdoms, its meditations on death and regeneration (Hiltebeitel {1976} 1990:245–360; 1988a:394–435). One is the cult of Draupadī (the epic's chief heroine); the other that of Kuttantavar, son of Arjuna (the epic's chief hero) and the serpent-woman UlupT. I will focus here primarily on the latter. Kuttantavar is a Tamil deity whose myths and rituals orchestrate multiple, multiform deaths. The enormity of death that is incorporated in either cult's performance of the Mahābhārata war is, in the Kūttāṇṭavar cult, condensed into the reiterated deaths and revivals of this one hero, and expressed metaphorically through mythic and ritual forms of body-building—involving icons, effigies, and persons—that construct, transform, dismantle, and reconstruct bodies and heads. Although the metaphor could also apply to Draupadī cult rituals, it is especially appropriate for Kūttāṇṭavar, who is built up like Kirilov in Dostoievsky's The Possessed. What is surprising in his cult, and or moment for this paper, is that this primarily martial metaphor has been appropriated by Alis, Tamil transsexuals or “eunuchs.”

The hit was typical in many ways. A gunman fired a nine-millimeter pistol into the car of Mass Communications Organization of Thailand chief Saengchai Sunthonwat, then fled with the driver on a waiting motorcycle. Two other members of the gang who had identified the victim also escaped. Due to the prominence of widely respected Saengchai, the police devoted a great deal of attention and resources to solving the crime. Ultimately, they traced the gunmen, who led them to the alleged mastermind. The assassination, according to police, was the result of a conflict of interest in the granting of concessions for provincial radio stations. When the accused mastermind had offered Saengchai a gift of an expensive gold chain and a valuable Buddha image to smooth relations, Saengchai refused the offer. He further insulted the mastermind by saying that the gift would only be good enough for his dog. This insult, as much as the loss of income, lay behind the killing. Although the hit was typical in many ways, two things, beyond the tragic death of a good man, make this killing academically interesting. First, the alleged mastermind was not a godfather but a godmother. Second, the press paid no attention to the fact that the culprit was a woman. In almost every reference, the word “godfather” could have been substituted for “godmother” with no change in meaning or inference.