The British territories of greater Southeast Asia were administratively connected to London and Calcutta, and while local censuses show that these centres could exert some influence at the furthest peripheries of the Empire, a close analysis of the ways in which race and religion were approached in the classification of colonial subjects in Southeast Asia shows peculiarities specific to the region.

In this article I argue that the demographic and socio-political contexts of British Burma and Malaya (with references to Hong Kong) led to a framing of ‘race’ that challenged European ‘scientific’ definitions and embraced instead the interweaving of multiple aspects of an individual's identity, most prominently religion. This shift, potentially empowering as reflective of local understandings of belonging, and an improvement from the period's anthropometric framework, was to backfire, however. With the emergence of nationalism, majoritarian identities came to be homogenised in these ethno-religious intersectional communities, marginalising and excluding those who did not fit.

Muḥammad ibn Maslama was a prominent companion of the Prophet Muḥammad who belonged to the Ḥāritha clan of the Medinan tribe of Aws. He played a key role in the events leading to the defeat of the three Jewish tribes of Medina and participated in the assassination of the Jewish leader Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf. Muḥammad ibn Maslama was connected to the Jews in various ways, as is evident, for example, from accounts claiming that he was Kaʿb's maternal nephew, and that his clan, the Banū Ḥāritha, lived in the predominantly Jewish oasis of Khaybar for nearly a year in the pre-Islamic period. Muḥammad ibn Maslama's role in Kaʿb's assassination has recently been argued to be of dubious historicity. This article offers a reassessment of this conclusion by placing the accounts of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's ties with the Jews, on the one hand, and those that depict him as their enemy, on the other, in the broader context of the change in the attitudes of some of the Anṣār towards the Jews during the Prophet's Medinan period. It argues that this change of attitudes is an attested historical pattern and, accordingly, that the fact of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's participation in the assassination of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf can be deemed reliable.

The present note offers a new, and hopefully more nuanced, reading for a cryptic marginal legend on an issue of the Umayyad-era rebel ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ashʿath (d. circa 85 ah/704 ce). Comparing this legend with several marginal legends of like character, and contextualising the formulae within contemporary religious idiom as expressed in late ancient Arabic-Islamic epigraphy, it is argued that all these legends contain proper nouns invariably belonging to the issuing authority, in conjunction with invocations addressed to God, in an attempt to establish a hierarchic relationship between the two. Drawing on literary sources, it is then demonstrated that the legend of the Ibn al-Ashʿath issue does indeed mention the name of an individual, the local governor, Kharasha ibn Masʿūd ibn Wathīma, a new name in the repertoire of governors known through Arab-Sasanian coinage. Based on these results, a case for further reliance on literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and other forms of evidence in the study of numismatics is made. A new chronology, based on numismatic evidence, for Ibn al-Ashʿath's rebellion is also proposed.

This article examines the linked sets of paintings commonly known as the “small Guler” Rāmāyaṇa by Paṇḍit Seu, the “Mankot” Rāmāyaṇa and the “Siege of Laṅkā” by Mānaku in the light of the text from the Vālmīki Rāmayaṇa on the versos of the paintings. This allows significant conclusions about the intentions behind their production and the original extent of each set.

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

This paper is about an Old Indian judicial institution called paṇa (“wager”). Within a court proceeding, a judicial wager is a certain sum of money that a conflicting party offers to pay if he ends up losing his case. This paper explains the rationale of judicial wagers by showing that they may signal truthfulness.

This article examines the question of whether the created human nature, or fiṭra, is portrayed as mutable in Shāh Walī Allāh's (d. 1762) Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bāligha. I argue that Walī Allāh uses the fiṭra — or the perfection of four qualities that make for human flourishing — to anchor a unified concept of human perfection that can fit different ages without essentially changing. Walī Allāh accomplishes this by affirming the particularity of divine laws and the efficacy of local customs in realising the eternal demands of the human form. More specifically, he posits that established practices can become second nature to a community, enter the divine system of requital, and thus help a people develop the necessary qualities through highly contingent means, all without violating the Qur'anic and traditional claim that the original nature itself never changes. With recourse to some of his other works and potential influences, I conclude that Walī Allāh's conception of the fiṭra accommodates traditional theological assertions regarding the singularity of human perfection, on the one hand, and the possibility of reformed norms, on the other.

This article examines a collection of manuscripts of travel writings kept in the National Library of China. Many of the texts are copies of articles and travel accounts published in magazines, papers, or books during the first decade of the Republican period. Although the majority of texts are by Chinese authors, nine of them can be verified as translations from other languages, even though almost no information is available regarding their source texts and original authors. Identifying the sources of the translations permits a better understanding of how this group of writings ended up as a collection. More importantly, we can consider how their content and function changed when they became adopted into an entirely different environment.

This article investigates the growth of cross-border movement and migration in the northern portion of the Yellow Sea during the sixteenth century, which generated ongoing interactions and tensions with the coastal governance of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China. The fluid flow of private seafarers reconnected the northern Yellow Sea and revitalised its maritime economy, making this space an integral part of wider trade networks. Meanwhile, the Chosŏn and Ming authorities also attempted to discern, categorise, and institutionalise this transmarine mobility in their discursive, administrative, and geographic spaces. Instead of considering the two polities as land based and inward looking, this article foregrounds the dynamics of their coastal control mechanisms, while at the same time paying close attention to their constraints on filtering and scrutinising maritime violence.

Although Chinese was not an official language in early colonial Hong Kong, translation between English and Chinese played a crucial role in daily life and politics. The first part of this article discusses the making of some important translated terms for government units and departments as well as foreign consulates in Hong Kong. In doing so, it accounts for different approaches in translation and lexical innovation, and their historical significance behind the making of newly translated terms. The second part of this article investigates salient features of the translation experiment initiated by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1834–1891; term of office: 1877–1882). The experiment aimed at strengthening the political legitimacy and colonial governability in Hong Kong. In return, the social standing of Chinese community leaders was duly recognised through their association with translation projects between English and Chinese, and the presentation of translated messages at important occasions hosted by Government House.

In 1856–7 the French diplomat Charles de Montigny visited the three countries of Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, hoping to establish some form of formal relations with all three. While he was able to sign a full diplomatic and commercial treaty in Bangkok, his negotiations with the Cambodian and Vietnamese rulers were largely fruitless. Even so, Montigny's visit prepared the ground for future French intervention and can be considered as the beginning of French implantation in Southeast Asia. Yet this article argues that his mission must be understood not as an episode of “gunboat diplomacy” resulting in “unequal treaties”, but rather as an example of largely non-coercive diplomacy occurring within an imperial framework.

The elephant at Dhauli, site of Aśoka Maurya's inscriptions, is the earliest Indian monumental sculpture. Aśoka reigned between 270–235 BC and the Dhauli elephant is dated c. 257 BC. Only the elephant's forefront is sculpted; about half of the animal's bulk remains within the rock (Figure 1). One art historian claims that Emperor Aśoka is in the vanguard presenting himself to the people of Kaliṅga. Usually, however, the Dhauli elephant is considered symbolic of the Buddha. The well-known story that Māyā dreamt that Siddhārtha entered her womb as a white elephant motivates this view; to wit śeto (i.e. śveta), ʻthe white one’, is inscribed at the end of the 6th Rock Edict.

This article interrogates the early reception history of the late Qing Chinese novel The Travels of Lao Can authored by Liu E (1857–1909). It argues that for decades this novel was widely read as a book of prophecy that revealed the future of China based on traditional Chinese occult wisdom. It was this alleged mystique, instead of its literary merits, that accounted for the high popularity of the text in the late Qing and Republican book market. This argument is predicated upon the discovery and reappraisal of a 1916 “fake edition” of the book until now unremarked in Chinese literary historiography. Investigating this forgery reveals that it was arguably the most widely circulated edition of The Travels of Lao Can in the Republican period. Bound with a newly fabricated sequel that explicitly manifested its “divinatory efficacy”, this edition greatly shaped the popular reception of the text as a book of prophecy. Revisiting this “fake edition” and the forgotten stories behind it not only enables the rereading of The Travels of Lao Can in its full complexity, but also points to deeper questions about the relationship between print culture, literary consumption, and the production of occult knowledge in China's modern transition.

This article analyses the construction of religious origin myths for Islam within ‘universal religion’ and esoteric frameworks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia and beyond, and sheds light on the role of ‘Western’ and Anglo-Indian converts in this process. At its core is a case study of the elusive Hamid Snow, founder of the so-called ‘Church of Islam’ in 1891 in Sikanderabad, Deccan. On the following pages, I reconstruct Snow's biography from little-known Urdu and English sources, analyse his writings, and place him within a context of religious modernist, esoteric, and convert networks encompassing South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Philippines, and other parts of the world. By focusing on the nature of the scholarship of religion at the time, and the reconstruction of religious pasts under the influence of esotericism and religious modernism, the article traces the influence of Orientalist and Eurocentric views on perceptions of the Islamic tradition and contributes to larger debates about the role of laypeople, especially those with an interracial background, in interpreting religious history and acting as cultural mediators between different communities during a time of ‘hybrid transnational occultism’.1