The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

An essential feature of beijing's long history as China's imperial capital was the ability to feed its population despite a geographical location distinctly unfavorable to agricultute. For all ancient and modern states, provisioning the capital is not only a matter of pride and prestige but a question of survival. The failure to feed civil officials, military supporters, and the urban population that serves them is a visible sign of a government's inadequacy and easily leads to political unrest. For these reasons, all states have tended to favor the food security of their cities, and especially their capital cities. In this China has no claim to uniqueness.

Humiliated and shaken by the depredations of the imperialist nations, early twentieth-century Chinese leaders sought the establishment of a strong nation-state. Bitter struggles over the means to reach that goal—primarily over the distribution of political power—ended in the demise of the Ch'ing, the defeat of Yuan Shih-k'ai, and the turmoil of the “warlord” period. After Yuan's death in 1916, the dispute over distribution of power thrust into serious consideration the model of a federation for building a nation out of China's disparate regions and interests. Some felt that a federation was perhaps a more effective integrating form than the centralized bureaucratic model the late Ch'ing and Yuan Shih-k'ai had supported. The debate was not new in China. However, during the empire, proponents of centralization (chün-hsien) and decentralization (feng-chien) had been concerned with finding the form that would produce the greatest stability and administrative efficiency; now the Chinese were obsessed with the issue for life-and-death reasons. 2 Rapid national integration seemed imperative for China's survival. In 1901, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao had discussed the possibilities of a Chinese federation; 3 but, until 1916, federalism was effectively submerged by the centralizers. Amid increasing turmoil after Yuan's death, federalism seemed to provide an answer to chaotic instability.

Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original ‘hat photograph’ by tracing the portrait's journey from the time it was taken, in 1929, to the early 1930s. The portrait was devised as a tactic of political subversion and intended as revolutionary propaganda, although it became more widely interpreted as an icon of defiant nationalism and a symbol of imperial injustice. The image quickly morphed from its original format, and rapidly circulated in the form of reproductions, paintings and drawings, travelling well beyond the confines of the literate domain, making a decisive impact on the charged political landscape of the early 1930s.

This Presidential Address explores Korean Buddhist travel undertaken for religious training, missionary propagation, and devotional pilgrimage. By traveling to India and throughout East Asia, as well as to the mythic undersea bastion of the faith, Koreans demonstrated their associations with the wider world of Buddhist culture, whether it be terrestrial or cosmological. Simultaneous with continued travel overseas to the Chinese mainland and the Buddhist homeland of India, Koreans also brought those sacred sites home through a wholesale remapping of the domestic landscape. As local geography became universalized, there was less need for the long, dangerous journeys overseas to Buddhist sacred sites: instead, the geography of Buddhism became implicit within the indigenous landscape, turning Korea into the Buddha-land itself. Once this “relocalization” of Buddhism had occurred, Korean Buddhists were able to travel through the sacred geography of Buddhism from the (relative) comfort of their own locale.

Perhaps best known today as a pioneering scholar of Inner Asia and a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, Owen Lattimore was more basically, like his friend Arnold Toynbee, a major player in the vogue of comparative history that captured wide public attention in the second quarter of the twentieth century. His lifelong intellectual project was to develop a “scientific” model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate, and interact with one another along “frontiers.” In the process of working out this model, Lattimore appropriated for his own purposes, and often later discarded, some of the analytic devices most popular in his day, including ecological determinism, biological racism, economic geography and location theory, and Marxist modes of production. At every stage in his thinking, he sought to confound complacent teleologies, both those of Western “progress” and those of Chinese “civilization” of its pastoralist neighbors.

A consideration of colonial Bombay enriches the understanding of the activities and ideas of Christian missionaries and Orientalists in India and elucidates British conceptions of “the religions of India” and the production of colonialist knowledge. This article focuses on nineteenth-century Scottish missionary-Orientalists and examines how they and other Bombay-based Protestant missionaries understood the concept of religion, Christianity, and the structure, similitude and distinctiveness of “the religions” at the crucial moment when newly “discovered” religions were gaining recognition and a new vision of “world religions” was coming into being. It considers the writings on the religions and ethnographic scholarship of the Bombay Scottish missionaries, as well as their extensive and multifaceted interactions with Bombay's Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Parsi, Jewish, Roman Catholic and Andivasi communities. More specifically, it details the ways in which Bombay missionaries applied and related the concept of religion to diverse configurations of language, text, and practice that they understood as isomorphic species of the religion genus. By examining how Christian missionaries who were also Orientalists conceptualized a number of “religions” and interacted with numerous communities this article seeks to elucidate the presuppositions that shaped the ways in which Hinduism and the other “religions” of nineteenth-century Bombay were imagined.

This paper is a study of entrepreneurial problems in nineteenth-century China as seen in two types of enterprise—foreign enterprise under the treaty system and Chinese enterprise sponsored and controlled by government officials. These two types existed in different institutional environments; their capacities for efficient operation and growth were therefore also different. Case studies of both types are conveniently found in a field of modern transport—the steamship business which arose to serve the trade in the treaty ports. After 1860 a large number of foreign firms began to operate steamships in Chinese waters, and between 1862 and 1881 the following specialized “steam navigation companies” were established in Shanghai.

The roles of various castes (jatis) in Hindu religious activities have been of interest to many students of rural Indian society. As a result, we are quite familiar with the patterns of ceremonial activity of Brahmin priests and of other participants in Brahmanical ritual such as temple keepers of various castes, barbers, carpenters, musicians, etc. (Dube, 1955; Opler and Singh, 1948; Planalp, 1956; Srinivas, 1952). Many of these patterns of religious participation are described and prescribed in the Sanskritic literature of Hinduism, and so fall within the “great tradition” of Hinduism (Redfield, 1956).

In the quarter century preceding the August 1945 Revolution, social change was a subject often on the minds of Vietnamese. People of diverse class backgrounds and political predilections knew that Vietnamese society was being altered fundamentally. How to understand, what attitude to ake, where to go in the future—these were questions receiving constant attention.

On june 30, 1990, between twenty-five and thirty thousand people took to the streets of downtown Kathmandu to protest the possibility that a new constitution, then being drafted, might reassert Nepal's official legal identity as a Hindu kingdom. Carrying banners and chanting slogans, they demanded the country's redefinition as a secular state. The march was arguably the largest demonstration in modern Nepali history, with protestors representing a range of religious, ethnic, political, and cultural groups. Even more significant, the marchers explicitly rejected the longstanding alliance between religion and the state in Nepal by challenging the interpolation of Brahmanical Hinduism into the country's political and civil institutions, and its centrality to Nepali nationalism as a collective identity.

I am greatly honored to have had the opportunity to serve as president of the Association for Asian Studies during the past year, and I am cognizant of the distinction of this afternoon's occasion. This being Washington, where everything is “political”—even more so perhaps than in Beijing—my original thought was to deliver a political sermon on a theme something like “Bush in China.” In fact, I found a possible text for my homily: a book published in Philadelphia in 1865 by a Presbyterian minister, Charles P. Bush, entitled Five Years in China; or, The Factory Boy Made a Missionary: The Life and Observations of Rev. W. Aitchison. But the Reverend Mr. Bush's hagiographical account of the life of William Aitchison, once a missionary to heathen China, was of little help; and I quickly decided that my talents as a fabulist of this variety were exceedingly limited. Hence the quite different fables to which I shall expose you today.

This paper focuses on the majority population in the People's Republic of China—the Han—and their various collective identities. The Han play a pivotal role in consolidating the Chinese territory and the multiethnic Chinese nation. Therefore, the governments in the twentieth century have invested substantial efforts in promoting a unitary Han identity. In spite of that, powerful local identities related to native place, occupation, and family histories persist. This essay traces these identities and analyzes their intertwinement. Further, it discusses the question of ethnicity of both the Han and local identity categories, and concludes that while Han enact ethnicity in their relations to other minzu, local identity categories are more social than ethnic. It further posits that moments of confrontation, “degree” of ethnicity, scales of categorization, and relationality of identities are notions that should be given particular attention in the studies of ethnicity in China and elsewhere.

Gulbuddin hekmatyar made the above statement in a speech to Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the early 1980s. As the leader (amīr) of Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan (the Islamic Party of Afghanistan), one of the principal Islamic parties then fighting to overthrow the Marxist regime in Afghanistan, Hekmatyar was primarily concerned in this speech with condemning the leftist leadership in Kabul and its Soviet sponsors. However, the head of the most radical of the Afghan resistance parties also took time to inform his audience about the origins of his party as a student group at Kabul University in the late 1960s. This reminiscence of student days was not a digression or flight of fancy. To the contrary, Hekmatyar's historical reflections have major significance in the context of Afghan national politics, for it is through history that Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan has staked its claim to rule Afghanistan.

This essay attempts to discover patterns of communicative and hermeneutic practices in the Analects, as well as in the commentary tradition, known as jingxue (classicism). The Analects contains at least two distinctive paradigms showing different ways of interpreting speech: One is Confucius's pragmatic approach, which emphasizes the intention and purpose of the speaker, and the other is Gongxi Hua's approach, which focuses on the literal meaning of the speech. Examples of each paradigm can be found in the long history of the exegeses of the Analects. Commentaries by two groups of scholars are discussed: those whose approach is similar to that of Confucius (Sima Qian, Zheng Xuan, Mouzi, Huang Kan, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi) and those whose approach is similar to that of Gongxi Hua (Xianqiu Meng, Han Fei, Wing-tsit Chan, Ya Hanzhang, and Wang Yousan).

In the nineteenth century Taiwan's economy depended mainly upon agriculture, and its social customs resembled those of South China from which most of its population originated. As both population and cultivated land steadily expanded during the century, aggregate output undoubtedly increased, but whether or not per capita income improved significantly is uncertain. During the third quarter of the century the island began to trade and enter into various contacts with the West; yet, like the mainland, Taiwan did not respond to this stimulus in a sustained, positive manner. Therefore, at the end of the nineteenth century Taiwan, by any criterion, still remained an underdeveloped economy: the few small cities on the island were poorly integrated with villages by transport and markets; unsanitary health conditions prevailed; economic activities depended entirely upon an uncertain harvest. If past performance was a guide to its future, the economic outlook for Taiwan appeared to be more of the same patterns of the past. Yet, a few years after Taiwan's cession to Japan in 1895, the economy began to grow and to change, and such development continued steadily until World War II.

In reinterpreting traditional history according to the Marxist world view, the question of periodization is vitally important. This article examines the controversies surrounding the periodization and the nature of the new interpretation of traditional history in North Korea. One characteristic that stands out prominently in North Korean historiography is the nationalistic emphasis placed on the uniqueness and the superiority of the Korean civilization unaffected by any external influence. Also noteworthy is the attempt to reinterpret modern history largely in terms of glorifying the immediate forefathers of Kim Il-sŏng at the expense of historical objectivity.

An assault upon the massive problem of economic stagnation fundamentally requires the pursuit of three kinds of basic social and economic changes. First, and perhaps most important, a society must either mobilize domestic savings or attract foreign financing in order substantially to raise its level of investment. This is the problem of financing. Second, these resources must be employed to change production functions in important sectors of the economy to provide increased yields from the utilization of the country's economic endowments. This is the problem of technology. Third, the society must revamp its institutions in such fashion that high levels of savings and investment are perpetuated and the search for new and more productive techniques of production—innovation—becomes a basic social propensity. This is the problem of institutional change.

This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through an examination of lists of physicians. I consider the debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on the contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical histories, I argue that temporally organized lists document the place of medicine across time, geographically organized lists document the reach of medical knowledge across space, and thematically organized lists document the intertwining of medical knowledge and skill with other aspects of intellectual and civil life. In making these lists, medical historians paint a portrait of the Tibetan medical tradition that evokes connections to Buddhism and the strength and cosmopolitanism of the imperial period. Medical histories thus emphasize a picture of Tibet in the broader context of Asia—a Tibet whose empire lives on culturally or intellectually, if not militarily.