For most of the Islamic period central and southern Jordan has existed on the periphery of larger states. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the political and economic life of the Muslim and Frankish polities of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) was dominated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Acre. These urban centres contained the greatest concentrations of the military and civilian elite, and provided the largest markets for locally produced and imported commodities. Intellectual activity also prospered in such urban environments and, with few exceptions, it was the occupants of the cities of Bilad al-Sham who composed the histories of the Crusader states and the Ayyubid confederacy. These chronicles tend to reflect the interests of the ruling elites and generally pay rather less attention to rural areas. The lands between the Wadi Zarqa' and the Red Sea – populated as they were by villages and small market towns – excited little interest among historians, and only Karak and Shawbak merit relatively regular mentions in the chronicles of the period.

This, the second of our three articles on the role of the karguzar in the foreign relations of Iran, focuses on internal issues, and, in particular, the problems of security. Its main period of study is the years following the Constitutional Revolution during which Iran witnessed a gradual breakdown of social control resulting from severe government weakness. The Revolution, itself the product of financial fragility, led to the virtual bankruptcy of the country, despite the attempts of the Majlis at fiscal reform. Thus by 1910 the government did not have the means to enforce law and order. Problems of personal security placed considerable pressure on people at all levels of Iranian society. This article is, however, concerned with the experiences of the non-elite and the implications for them of financial crisis and weak government. These circumstances were also to have repercussions for Iran's relations with foreigners.

From the late nineteenth century until the hand-over of Macao to Chinese rule about one hundred years later, Russia and the Soviet Union demonstrated discernible, though far from overwhelming, interest in the tiny Portuguese territory of Macao. Their activities and involvement in the enclave served as an interesting contrast and coda to their more extensive dealings with the larger entities of British Hong Kong and even more problematic Taiwan. Both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union had definite policies towards both Hong Kong and Taiwan; though policy emphasis altered dramatically over time, especially towards Hong Kong, both regimes sought to expand their trade with, and activities in, those territories. Soviet and Russian policies toward Macao were in some ways less consistent, circumscribed by the relative insignificance of the territory, and also for several decades from the 1920s onward by the implacable long-term hostility of the fascist Portuguese government toward Soviet Communism. Even so, the fact that first Russian and then Soviet foreign policymakers assigned some importance to Macao is amply demonstrated by the Foreign Ministry Archive, which contains nearly thirty files of varying size spanning the period from 1910 to 1987.

The history of the regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 in the name of social revolution made on behalf of Cambodia's poor peasants has been researched and documented according to many sources. When the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, spearheaded by a massive force of the People's Army of Vietnam, took back the capital, Phnom Penh, on 7 January 1979, they captured official documents, particularly the forced confessions of thousands of political prisoners, which threw light on the nature of the regime and its catastrophic course after victory in April 1975. Other contemporary sources included monitored radio broadcasts of the regime, the dossiers of Khmer Rouge defectors to Thailand compiled by the US State Department, and the rich vein of information provided to western scholars of Cambodian history by refugees in the Thai camps and in other countries which received them after 1979.

Research in Mahāyāna sūtras is a slow and painstaking process. Typically, it involves a careful study of multiple versions of individual texts, composed in different languages (Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan) as well as immersion in the voluminous but largely unchartered corpus of canonical literature preserved in the bKa' 'gyur and the Chinese ‘Tripiṭaka’. Years may easily go by without any noteworthy publication. Thus, when a new book appears, scholarly expectation tends to be high. Jan Nattier's study of the Ugrapariprcchā is no exception. Eagerly awaited among colleagues for its research on early Mahāyāna Buddhism – the Ugrapariprcchā is widely recognised to rank among the first Mahāyāna sūtras – Nattier's work promised to dispel at least some of the mist that continues to cloud this ill-understood period. Even though hers is not the first study and translation of the Ugrapariprcchā (Nancy Schuster wrote her PhD dissertation on this text, 1976), Nattier managed to produce a remarkable, original piece of scholarship that brims with thought-provoking ideas about the formation of the Mahāyāna, persuasive refutations of old-seated misconceptions, well-conceived approaches to textual interpretation and a competently crafted translation of the Chinese and Tibetan versions. In short, it is a book that needs to be taken seriously.