Horace Irvin Poleman, Chief of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress, died on November 6,1965, in the Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. He was born in Philadelphia on September 5, 1905, graduated from the College of the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, received the degree of M.A. in classical languages from the same university in 1930 and the Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit in 1933. His doctoral dissertation (unpublished) was an edition and translation of the Aurdhvadehika-paddhati, a mediaeval Sanskrit text on death ritual. In 1939 he married Jenny Falk, who with their sons, Karl and Robert, survives him.

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.

Despite the rapid growth of Chinese historical studies in the United States, a crucial epoch in the background of modern China has for a long time received the attention of comparatively few scholars. I refer to the early and middle Ch'ing period-the two centuries before the Opium War that saw the consolidation and the heyday of the Manchu rule in China. In the nineteen thirties American sinology was fascinated by the period. It was then that Pritchard published his books on the early relations between England and China, and Goodrich his study of the literary inquisition under Ch'ien-lung; that the great biographical dictionary, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, was prepared; that Fairbank and Teng were working on the Ch'ing documents and on the tributary system, and Michael on early Manchu military and political organization.1 But the Pacific War and the events in China that followed focused scholarly interest on that country's more recent experience. While many took up the study of “modern China,” inquiry into the Ch'ing before the nineteenth century was continued by only a few. Only in the last twelve years have we again seen the appearance of major studies touching upon the China of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Ho's works on commercial capitalism, population, social mobility, and voluntary associations; books on the shen-shih, the bureaucracy, and local government by Chang, Hsiao, Marsh, and Ch'ü; an analysis of rural social structure by Skinner; writings by de Bary, Nivison, and Wilhelm on intellectual history.

The first emergence of modern Chinese nationalism is usually placed in the A period just after China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. It was in 1895 that the youthful Sun Yat-sen made his initial revolutionary attempt to destroy the Manchu house. In the same year the nationalist-minded interpreter of Western political and social thought, Yen Fu, published a series of important essays which brought him for the first time before the public eye. Something of the spirit of the gathering tide of nationalism could be seen in the forceful editorials of Wang K'ang-nien (1860–1911) in Shih-wu pao (“The Chinese Progress”), a newspaper which he founded in August 1896 with Liang Chʻi-chʻao as chief editor. In one of his editorials (1896) Wang listed the components of China's national sovereignty that had been whittled away by the West and implored his countrymen to view this as the common shame of China's four hundred millions, rather than the shame of one or two persons alone. Wang struck a similar chord in another piece in which he argued that since the interests of all members of society were linked together, people should look upon the whole of society as one family and identify the common interest as their own.

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.

The most often mentioned impediments to the development of private enterprise in underdeveloped countries are: (i) shortage of capital; (2) deficient economic setting such as poor infrastructure, small market and inadequate credit facilities; and (3) shortage of the right kind of entrepreneurs, sometimes presented within a broader context of the low level of awareness of and responsiveness to economic opportunities.

Although the Ch'ing period is generally regarded as one of the better studied and understood periods of Chinese history, the existing fund of our knowledge is actually far from adequate. A systematic discussion of the significance of the entire period from 1644 to 1912 would require a large number of articles, monographs, and fresh syntheses. Since the purpose of this paper is merely to stimulate further discussion and research, I hope to be excused for making a few highly tentative generalizations.

Lack of agreement on basic definitions has often bedeviled the anthropological study of Indian society. A case in point is “caste,” which has enjoyed almost as many definitions as there are students involved in its study. This multiplicity undoubtedly promotes a broadened investigation of caste phenomena, and thus ultimately increases our knowledge. But it also leads to the danger that competing definitions will masquerade as factual explanations, or that theoretically valid distinctions are lost in the rhetoric of definitional arguments. Especially in studies of the breakdown and reconstitution of caste institutions, the absence of a firm, explicit definitional base impedes evaluation of the nature, direction, and novelty of social structural change.

The Iwakura embassy's encounter with Hamilton Fish at the State Department in 1872 is far more than a quaint but insignificant episode in the relations between Japan and the United States and deserves resurrection from the footnotes of history. The two sides, much to the surprise of both, met in a long, drawn-out series of trying and painful interviews, stretching from mid-March to the end of July, to argue and then attempt to revise the terms of Japan's 1858 treaty of friendship and commerce with the United States. This confrontation marks the proper, though halting, beginning of the treaty revision movement in Meiji diplomatic history and also illustrates the Grant administration's policy, or more accurately, cluster of attitudes toward East Asia during the early period of post-Civil War expansionism.

The mid-Ch'ing monarchs are usually considered to have been hard-headed realists, acting the way they did because they had the personal and institutional power to do so. The corollary of this, however, appears to be that they were also moral hypocrites: time-serving Confucianists who trotted out the higher ethical values only to justify their actions or to camouflage them. This part of the theorum, I believe, is at once too simple and too modern. It reduces imperial action to the level of the Big Lie and makes of the monarch either a calculating schizophrenic, able to turn his Confucianism on and off at will, or a political pervert, checked in his Legalist promiscuity only by the intermittent remonstrances of a closed orthodox community. Worse, this view makes the monarch a philistine, working the system to his advantage but somehow standing outside it, as if he were exempt from the values he was manipulating.

The Osaka Conference of January 1875 usually receives rather scant attention in political histories of modern Japan. To some extent this is justified, since of the two important results of the Conference, Itagaki's reconciliation with the government proved shortlived, and the establishment of a new legislature, the Genrōin, did not greatly affect either the existing conduct of government business or the future direction of constitutional progress. However, the Osaka Conference was a critical event, despite its seemingly disappointing results.

Monarchy was the dominant political institution of the Buddha's time. The Enlightened One was on very cordial terms with some of the leading monarchs of the times, whose interest and patronage early Buddhism appreciated a great deal. Many a rule of the Vinaya code was discreetly amended in deference to the convenience of kings such as Bimbisara and Pasendi, the Kosalan. And quite a few scions of royal families joined the order of monks and nuns and played a leading part in the propagation of the creed during its early critical years.

In a recent essay on “Some Mid-Ch'ing Views of the Monarchy,” Harold Kahn announced that he was moving past “the one-dimensional, simple cliché” and “the two-dimensional, complex stereotype” to add a third dimension so that he could show Ch'ien-lung as “a composite figure made up of several images.” Talk of three dimensions immediately prompts any healthy layman to try to add a fourth: to the three spatial dimensions which are historiographical, perhaps we can add a fourth dimension of time which is more positively historical.

In recent years, Taiwan's rapid economic growth and agricultural improvement have drawn increasing public and academic attention in the Western world. Taiwan is often referred to as a country demonstrating that economic progress can be achieved if domestic resources are effectively mobilized and outside assistance is efficiently utilized1 Several recent studies attempt to analyze one or more aspects of Taiwan's past, present and future development. The objective of the present paper is to examine one aspect of the agricultural sector, namely, the increase of agricultural output during the period 1953–1964. Emphases are given to its record and contributing factors.

Studies of the early Khmer empire have so far been inevitably concerned with establishing the chronological structure of its history and with its religious institutions, of which much is now known. Other areas of inquiry have tended to be postponed in order to undertake these basic tasks, and the impression may exist that the inscriptions, which are the principal documents for such research, contain no other types of information. This impression is ill-founded. The extensive library of translated Cambodian inscriptions, available in the Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient and, above all, in Professor Cœdès' Inscriptions du Cambodge, contains a storehouse of material relevant to studies of Khmer social and economic institutions as well as to further work in political and religious affairs. Professor Cœdès himself has called for continuing research in these epigraphic materials. Such studies promise exciting contributions to the scholar's understanding of the Angkor monarchy, and of earlier Southeast Asia in general.

Sinhalese Buddhists state that their religion was founded by the Buddha, who was a human being and is now dead. Cognitively this position is held by every Buddhist from the most learned monk to the most ignorant layman. Yet they usually behave as if the Buddha appears to them as a powerful and omnibenevolent god, a supreme being who is still in some way present and aware. (Perhaps we might say that cognitively the Buddha is dead, but affectively he is alive.) For instance, if assailed by dangerous demons a pious Buddhist will recite the qualities of the Buddha and thus keep any malevolent forces at bay. If asked to explain the apparent inconsistency, Buddhists say that the gods and demons are restrained by respect for the Buddha—but it is respect for his memory or for his doctrine, not for his active power. Moreover, Buddhists have dealings with the Buddha in which they behave as if he were at least numinously present; in particular, offerings are made before statues of the Buddha.