The political development of India during the first half of the twentieth century was conditioned by constitutional reforms introduced by the British rulers, and by a vigorous agitation for national freedom. A constitution is a normative description of existing or intended relationships of political power; under the circumstances prevailing in India at that time, such a description was bound to be challenged again and again by an agitation for the revision of the status quo. In this way a peculiar relationship developed between constitutional reform and agitational advance. The constitutional reforms were designed to fulfill agitational demands on the one hand and to forestall more extreme demands on the other. Therefore they conformed to agitational patterns. In a similar way, the agitation was conditioned by the particular circumstances created by each constitutional reform; the constitution of the national movement itself, i.e., of the Indian National Congress, had to be adapted to the new situation whenever constitutional reforms were at stake. Finally when independence was achieved, an Indian Constituent Assembly adopted a constitution which closely resembled the previous constitutional structure introduced by British Acts of Parliament.

The colonialism of Richelieu first brought the French to the Indo-Malayan peninsula in the seventeenth century. Ayuthia, which was then the capital of Siam, was the chief entrepôt of the area and as such naturally attracted the French. But their efforts to establish diplomatic and commercial relations were terminated abruptly by two revolutions half a world apart. In Siam the Revolution of 1688 placed an antiforeign king on the throne. In England the Revolution of 1688 established William of Orange, implacable enemy of Louis XIV, as king of England. The former event dislodged the French from the favorable position they had won in Siam. The latter was the signal for the outbreak of general war in Europe, which so engaged French attention that the venture in Siam was forgotten.

Rohilkhand, at the time of the Mutiny of 1857, was a division of the North-Western Provinces comprising the districts of Bijnor, Moradabad, Budaun, Bareilly, and Shahjahanpur. It was here and in neighboring Oudh that the uprising achieved its greatest intensity. Hitherto, it has been assumed that the proprietary mutations which occurred in Rohilkhand after its cession in 1801 by the Nawab of Oudh to the East India Company are highly significant as a cause of the uprising. G. J. Christian, the Secretary to the Sudder Board of Revenue of the North-Western Provinces, reported in 1854 that “in no other country in the world probably do landed tenures so certainly, constantly, and extensively change hands. These mutations are effecting a rapid and complete revolution in the position of the ancient proprietors of the soil.” William Edwards, the Collector of Budaun at the time of the Mutiny, wrote:

To the large number of these sales during the past twelve or fifteen years, and the operation of our revenue system, which has had the result of destroying the gentry of the country … I attribute solely the disorganization of this and the neighbouring districts in these provinces. By fraud or chicanery, a vast number of the estates of families of rank and influence have been alienated, either wholly or in part, and have been purchased by new men … without character or influence over their tenantry. … I am fully satisfied that the rural classes would never have joined in rebelling with die sepoys … had not these causes of discontent already existed.

Japanese poetry has for a long time been credited with truly miraculous powers of concision, suggestion, and philosophical insight by some of its Western admirers. Other Westerners, from Chamberlain and Aston on, have been less charmed, and have criticized the classical poetry of the Japanese court in particular, for excessive artificiality, and for a lack of breadth, grandeur, and sustained power.

The court poetry which was the supreme literary genre of the Heian and Kamakura periods is indeed restricted. In mode it is confined to lyricism; in form, to the 31-syllable tanka which becomes synonymous, in these periods, with waka, or Japanese poetry. Its vocabulary is circumscribed, generally limited to that employed in the KokinshŨ of 905, first of the twenty-one imperially sponsored anthologies of verse. There are some subsequent additions, primarily from the lexicon of the great early collection, the Man'yōshŨ (ca. 759), but the admissibility of such words was hotly contested.

Mr. Chairman; My Friends:

I much appreciate your invitation to speak today. And I appreciate it even more as the result of coming to know so many of your members in these last years. Our disposition is to attach a good deal of importance to practical economic, political, social, and diplomatic experience in areas of overseas study. I, by contrast, have emerged from these last years, which have been fairly rich in practical experience, with a much enhanced respect for the role of scholarship.

It is an essential feature of merit bureaucracy that there must exist within the institutional framework of government some method of guaranteeing that fixed standards of recruitment, promotion, and discipline are applied without discrimination to all members, or potential members, of the public services. In the Federation of Malaya, as in most Commonwealth countries, institutional machinery intended to satisfy this requirement of merit bureaucracy takes the form of public service commissions. It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of these institutions in Malaya, to outline briefly the organization, composition, and procedures of the commissions, to point out social and political factors in Malaya which affect the application of the principles underlying the institutional machinery, and to comment on the future of the service commissions in the Federation.

A major shortcoming in much Western writing about recent events in Indo-China is that the inhabitants of the region are seen as objects of policy rather than as subjects of history. Focusing in this, way leaves out much of the picture and demeans the inhabitants of Indo-China who are largely responsible, after all, for defeating France and the United States. A number of the books reviewed here take a sympathetic insider's view of U.S. intervention in the region and try to approach the war objectively but still have an American focus. One book is a systematic attack on U.S. behavior in Cambodia since 1970. Finally a recently published collection of documents will be indispensable to students of the war, partly because it pays close attention to Vietnamese as well as American decisions.

Georges Dumézil's research on the myths, legends, rites, and social structures—in short, what he calls the “ideology”—of the Indo-Europeans has had, for the most part, considerable impact upon recent scholarly interpretation of the various Indo-European traditions. This holds not only for articles and monographs on specific matters. Better measure might be taken by noting the favorable discussion of his views and results in works whose intent is introductory or popular: Proinsias Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology (London, 1970), E. O. G. Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North (New York, 1964), H. R. Ellis Davidson's Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, 1964) and Scandinavian Mythology (London, 1969)—of whom none of the above are to be associated with Dumézil's “school”— and in responses pro and con by Iranicists. What one misses is a similar impact upon studies in two areas: Rome and India. And this is a remarkable and ironic fact, for it is Dumézil's work on these two pillars that, if one may say so, has fashioned the entrance to his edifice. It is not my intent to talk about Rome, but it is my impression that the situation is comparable to what one finds in the recent introductory and panoramic works on Hinduism: either no recognition of Dumézil's contribution at all (Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition [Encino, Cal., 1971], Veronica Ions, Indian Mythology [London, 1967]), or facile dismissals (Robert C. Zaehner, Hinduism [London, 1966]).

Western economists who wish to study economic conditions in Communist China are plagued both by the quantity and the quality of economic statistics made available by the Chinese Communist authorities. Quantitatively, the meagerness of statistical data makes the task of serious research difficult. Qualitatively, most Western economists have little confidence in these statistics as reliable representations of the actual situations. This paper will examine the general reliability of the physical output data of industrial commodities published by the Chinese Communist authorities. Industrial output data have been selected for our purpose for two reasons. First, great emphasis has been given to industrial production in the economic plans. Second, the Chinese Communist authorities have released relatively abundant data concerning industrial production so that it is possible to conduct certain empirical tests, as will be seen later, to determine the general reliability of the output figures for certain commodities.

In a recent interview with Edgar Snow, Mao Tse-tung asserted that he did not remember having written “Dialectical Materialism,” and that if he had written it, he surely would have remembered it. There is both internal and external evidence to support Mao's assertion. If the article was published under his name without his approval, then those who undertook this venture may have had the support of Soviet authorities, perhaps even of Stalin himself. There is also the possibility that it was forged and published by intriguers within the CCP who disapproved of the united front policies which Mao had just elaborated in his “New Democracy.” By first weakening his position with a damning forgery, they might then have hoped to overthrow him with Moscow's tacit approval. The Russian returned student leaders, Wang Ming and Po Ku, might well have devised such a plot.

The fact that England, the home of the Industrial Revolution and modern economic growth, was also a leading shipping and trading nation, at one time prompted the notion that flourishing overseas trade and modern economic growth are somehow related. There are, of course, plenty of examples in European history of once flourishing trading nations which failed to industrialize. Spain, Portugal, the Hanseatic ports, and the Italian trading cities never became centres of industry. Moreover, such comparatively industrialized areas as Czechoslovakia and Prussia were not leading trading centres.

What does the dog mean in Chinese culture? The answers can be found in China's first dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi, written by Xu Shen in 121 CE. The Shuowen holds cynological knowledge well beyond the dog's olfactory ability, because it includes notes on vocalization discrimination, situational gait, and even behavioral and personality traits. The dog is also upheld as the representative of all nonhuman animals, undoubtedly because of its morphological and functional versatility but certainly also because it was the human's main interface and companion at the beginning of Chinese civilization. The Chinese graphs for the word “dog” embody both views: generically animalistic or eerily resembling human depictions. As a rift slowly took place in the partnership between humans and dogs when urbanization began, the graphs themselves were manipulated to clearly demarcate one from the other. Eventually dogs became discursive scapegoats. This paper traces the destiny of the dog in semantic and graphic terms.

Comedy is a powerful tool for public meditation on and critique of lived experience and discursive practice. In China's post-Mao period, comedy also provided a means for Tibetan intellectuals to access state-sponsored stages and airwaves in minority-dominated Northwest China's restrictive cultural climate. This article examines a series of four comedic dialogues popular in Tibetan regions in the mid-1990s. Centered on the fictional Careful Village, these four performances juxtapose urban sophisticates and country bumpkins in ways that allow comedians to grapple with questions of tradition and modernity in a rapidly modernizing society. Though superficially similar to Chinese state-sponsored modernity—itself centered on Chinese Putonghua—attention to these performances’ juxtaposition of characters, social issues, and linguistic practice reveals the promotion of certain forms of the Tibetan language at the center of uniquely Tibetan modernity. This Tibetan modernity is no longer assimilationist, but based on mastery of the proper, Tibetan linguistic competences.