The British impact on India perhaps was as profound on issues of the death rate and population growth as on political and economic development, but it has been less thoroughly examined.1 And in contrast to successes by the mid-twentieth century in limiting small-pox, malaria, and cholera, there was an earlier and darker tale, almost as obscure as the lives of the millions who perished in terrible epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was how new economic conditions, ineffective village sanitary practices, the impact of modern transport and irrigation works, and population pressure and poverty all helped the spread of disease, and how public health measures failed to prevent a high mortality.

For decades, scholarship on the Thai peasantry has proceeded as if the history of the peasantry were known. Scholars have luxuriated in tourist-brochure images of primeval abundance, reiterating unchallenged the famous adage from the thirteenth-century stele of King Ramkhamhaeng, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.” Little hyperbole exists in Thadeus Flood's statement, “For the past century much Western imperialist scholarship and Thai royalist scholarship has sought to perpetuate the image of benign Thai royalty ruling over a happy, carefree, and subservient populace dwelling in a land of sunshine and smiles” (1975:55). For observers of modern Thai society, demonstrations by discontented peasants and assassinations of their leaders have destroyed the myth of a rustic paradise. Nonetheless, the theme of self-sufficiency continues to dominate the literature on Thai history.

Out of that anthropology which rested on studies of isolated primitive or tribal peoples arose the concept, “a culture.” The Andamanese had a culture, the Trobrianders, the Aranda of Australia, and the Zuni. Each culture came to be conceived as an independent and self-sufficient system. Recently words have been found to make clear this conception of an “autonomous cultural system.” It is “one which is self-sustaining—that is, it does not need to be maintained by a complementary, reciprocal, subordinate, or other indispensable connection with a second system.” Such units—such cultures as those of the Zuni or the Andamanese—are systems because they have their own mutually adjusted and interdependent parts, and they are autonomous because they do not require another system for their continued functioning. The anthropologist may see in such a system evidences of past communications of elements of culture to that band or tribe from others, but, as it now is, he understands that it keeps going by itself; and in describing its parts and their workings he need not go outside the little group itself. The exceptions, where the band or tribe relies on some other band or tribe for a commodity or service, are small and do not seriously modify the fact that that culture is maintained by the communication of a heritage through the generations of just those people who make up the local community.

I deas about gender organize the social relations between men and women. They gain their power because they seem to be the products of a natural order of things, deeper than any social conventions. Reproductive processes, like eating and drinking, sickness and death, appear as part of the biological substratum of human experience, operating according to universal laws that apply to all human beings and to other living creatures as well. Older practitioners of the history of science, when confronted with the bewildering variety of customs, rituals, and medical aids surrounding childbirth in remote times and places, usually recorded these as superstition or the products of naive empiricism. The consequent interpretation of the history of medicine as the gradual replacement of error by science retains its positivist appeal even today.

In 1934 Liu Jihua, a classically trained feminist at Yanjing University, published an article on the history of the concept of chastity in China. Meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated with quotations from the classics (beginning with the Book of Changes), her long essay argued that, by the Qing dynasty, female chastity had “become a religion” (zongjiaohua): a prescriptive norm accepted as a matter of faith by most men and women.

Eighteenth-century chinese commentators were eloquent on the subject of official corruption, characterizing it as one of the greatest scourges on the Qing state and society. Xu Wenbi (n.d.), in an administrative handbook based on his experiences as magistrate of Yongchuan county in Sichuan province from 1764 to 1768, bemoaned the devastating effects of corruption on the Chinese populace, writing: “Wherever corruption manifests itself, there are a hundred stratagems to suck out the lifeblood of the people. How can one imagine that the wealth of the region would not be exhausted in the space of a few years?” (Xu n.d., 1:26a). Yin Huiyi (1691–1748), who served as Henan governor from 1737 to 1739, stated that avoiding corruption should be the primary goal of any provincial official. “An official who has been appointed to a post should, first and foremost, remain pure,” he wrote, adding, “No matter whether his rank is lofty or humble, in the end, incorruptibility should be his most precious jewel” (Yin 1940, 4–5). Using similarly strong language, the renowned official, essayist, and historian Qian Daxin (1728–1804) pronounced that “when a single individual is corrupt, an entire dynasty may erupt into chaos” (Qian n.d., 2:10a–11a, 1:124–25).

Chinese geomancy (feng shui) holds that if a man is buried in a properly sited grave, his descendants will prosper; and that the siting of houses, cities, and whole regions similarly works good or ill for their inhabitants. Although taken seriously by many eminent thinkers of traditional China (the philosopher Chu Hsi, for example), it is likely to impress us today on first encounter as a baffling and silly mishmash of things better sorted out as physical science, religion, esthetics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Understanding is easier if we can look on it as first, a kind of integral experience, and second, certain meanings given to such experience.

This article delineates new approaches to the study of food and famine in Chinese history. Drawing primarily from the three other articles in the symposium, the author asks in what ways the Chinese state, primarily in the high Qing period, affected population growth, agricultural production, natural cycles, and food distribution, and what a historical perspective suggests about the People's Republic of China's efforts to feed its population.

The pacific war (1937–45) marked the most innovative period in the development of public welfare in Japan, comparable to the 1880s in Germany, the 1908–14 era in Britain, and the 1930s in the United States. Wartime welfare policy set precedents that shape many aspects of welfare provision in Japan to this day. It is a cruel paradox, but war, despite its immediate, catastrophic effects on human well-being, has played a major role in the evolution of the welfare state.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. As he put it, “morals are closely linked with health. A perfectly moral person alone can achieve perfect health” (CW 2:50). Following a statement such as this, my purpose in this essay is to work toward an analysis of Gandhi's genius by focusing on that which appears most enigmatic about his program of sociopolitical action: his somatic concerns and what I am calling his faith in the biomoral imperative of public health.

In the years immediately prior to Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, the historian Sin Ch'aeho posed a fundamental challenge to conventional assumptions about the limits of Korean territoriality: was the nation bound to the peninsula or did it more properly extend into the lands of Manchuria? For Sin, the answer was straightforward. Despite writing during the waning years of the Chosŏn dynasty—a time when the court could neither defy Japan's imposition of a protectorate nor resist Japanese pressure for Emperor Kojong to cede the throne, and when thousands in the Righteous Armies (Ŭibyŏng) were dying at the hands of the Japanese military in defense of the peninsula—Sin nevertheless called brazenly for a Korean Manchuria.

The history of industrialization of many developing countries in Asia is related to conflicts between foreigners and a growing local bourgeoisie over industrial ownership and control. This article analyzes one such country—India—from the end of World War I until a few years beyond independence.

In the summer of 1966, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh provinces in India experienced one of the worst and most widespread droughts and crop failures in the history of the region during the twentieth century. Massive local, national, and international relief efforts were provided to prevent death by starvation on an immense scale. Nevertheless, the seriousness of the situation was only gradually and reluctantly accepted by the agencies, institutions, and governments that were ultimately involved in the relief effort. In order to convey the seriousness of the situation to those in a position to help the people of Bihar, local, state, and national politicians adopted a rhetoric that involved defining the situation as a “crisis” of unprecedented proportions. The Bihar Famine of 1966–1967 illustrates the importance of rhetoric and political definitions in distinguishing crises from “normal” situations and in defining the quantity, timing, and recipients of relief.

For more than three decades now, scholars have been debating whether or not a “general crisis” occurred in European social, economic, and political history during the seventeenth century. The debate is far from over, but one of its happy side effects has been that students of seventeenth-century Spain, France, or England now are rarely satisfied to study their chosen countries in total isolation. Indeed, it is generally agreed that many aspects of European history during the early-modern period need to be studied from an international perspective in order to be understood fully.

The author maintains that the same is true for early-modern China and Japan. Although they had radically different economic, social, and political systems, the Ming dynasty and Tokugawa shogunate experienced a number of problems during the midseventeenth century that were at once interrelated and strikingly similar to those occurring in other parts of the world at the same time.

The death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, followed more recently by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has indeed incited a degree of historical awareness among Japanese from all walks of life. In the wake of an enigmatic period of social self-restraint (jishuku) during the final months of the Shōwa period (1926–89), fettered reflections of Shōwa Japan inundated the media. Despite a few outspoken critics at the margins, retrospectives appearing on Japanese television and in mainstream print media after Hirohito's death have largely glossed over touchy subjects such as war atrocities, war responsibility, and the continued existence of the emperor system in the postwar era. No doubt that threats of right-wing terrorism aimed at even the mildest of critics of Japan's involvement in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) have done their share in encouraging such self-censorship. By most accounts, such efforts have proved effective in diffusing critical public opinion and in pruning public memory. Yet, the ending of the era has provided an extra impetus and a rhetorical rationale for a reckoning of everyday life in Shōwa Japan by the masses whose lives coincided with it: it is over, so now we can tell its story.

Many asian cultures have rich traditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial art karate (1993) explores how, in the West, karate's symbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinese taiji quart (1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to create taiji quan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is, Taiji quan “may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.

Early on the morning of February 24, 1989, my companion and I set out from our lodgings in central Tokyo for the Imperial Plaza. Though we knew that Emperor Shōwa's funeral procession would not be leaving the Palace until 9:35, we planned our arrival for 6:30 because a policeman had told us the day before that a huge crowd was expected. He suggested we arrive at 4:30, but 6:30 seemed early enough since we surmised that the rain and the near-freezing temperatures would keep the crowds away. Later, we would discover that the crowds that day were indeed smaller than had been expected—570,000 people along the funeral motorcade's route rather than the 870,000 spectators that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had originally projected (Asahi jaanaru, March 10, 1989; Asahi shinbun, February 25, 1989)—but by around 7:30 people filled the area fronting the Palace's main gate.