In the 1800s it was not only merchants from British India who participated in the expanding trade with China, but also those from the princely states who sought to profit from the increased demand for cash crops. Smuggling—just as most commercial activities unsanctioned by the Bombay Government were labelled—was a source of great anxiety for the colonial authorities in India, especially in the western territories. This article looks at smuggling activity in and around the Bombay Presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century. It will assert that local ‘smuggling’ was, in many cases, the continuation of pre-colonial trade relations, labelled as illegal as a result of ill-defined boundaries and ambiguous legal restrictions. In fact, the success of these activities was less a reflection of widespread criminality than structural weaknesses in the colonial administration. Evidence suggests that British anxieties over smuggling had a greater effect on the political economy of western India than the actual financial damage caused by the illicit trade. The coordinated subversive smuggling network, ultimately, did not exist, and held power largely as a figment of the imperial imagination.

The last few years have seen a great and almost universal interest in the history of medicine. It is strange that, in spite of the researches that have been made in the epidemics and diseases of ancient times, none of the writers who have worked on the various aspects of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis, as the Baghdād Boil is called in medical languagehas been able to trace the history of the disease before the nineteenth century. It is not as though it were a disease that could have escaped the notice of the ancients. Cutaneous Leishmaniasis is characterized by a superficial ulcer, sometimes as large as the top of a coffee cup, which runs a slow and protracted course. It is not as though it were a disease confined to some distant and uncivilized part of the globe. It is found in South America, North Africa, and all over the Middle and Near East. Why, then, is there no history of the disease ? Where did it start ? Who can claim the honour of introducing the Bouton de Biskra into Moroccothe Baghdād Boil into 'Irāq, the Delhi Boil into India, and the Tropical Sore into non-tropical Persia ?

The Huainanzi is a corporate work which was compiled at the court of the king of Huainan, being first presented to the imperial throne in 139 B.C., and possibly receiving certain additions between then and 122 B.C. For various reasons, however, the book did not meet with the same type of acclaim that had accompanied other texts. By the eleventh century at least, the comments of Xu Shen (c. 55–149) and Gao You (c. 168–212) had been fused together into a single set of notes. The book attracted the critical attention of Su Song (1020–1101), and then that of some of the most notable scholars of the Qing period, such as Wang Niansun (1744–1832), Huang Peilie (1763–1825) and Gu Guangqi (1776–1835). In the early days of western sinology the work evaded the attention of scholars such as Legge and Couvreur who necessarily followed the lead of their Chinese masters and fastened on what they regarded as the basic texts of traditional learning, i.e. mainly the classical texts and the Confucian teachers, and the Daode jing. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that western scholars have felt ready to examine, appraise and translate parts of the Huainanzi, and the results may be seen in the writings of Eva Kraft (1957–58), Benjamin Wallacker (1962), Roger Ames (1983), Charles Le Blanc (1985), Hal Roth (1992), Claude Larre (1993) and now John Major. Further research in the future will be immeasurably improved and brought to new standards thanks to the publication of the concordance to the text by D. C. Lau (1992).

In view of the lengthy descriptions of tattooing from many other regions in Southeast Asia, it is odd that the Chao Phraya basin receives but little attention. The custom is usually not mentioned, or is given a passing reference as one rather old-fashioned habit to which modern observers need pay little regard. Accounts of central Thai tattooing which cover more than a single paragraph are rare. Moreover, this is in marked contrast to the extensive local literature on closely related subjects such as magical diagrams, protective spells, amulets and astrology.

The paper discusses the questions of the alleged conversion of Arghun Aqa, the powerful Mongol governor of great parts of Western Asia in the mid-13th century, to Islam, claimed by the famous Armenian historian Kirakos. While in the end dismissing the historicity of this claim, the paper uses a variety of archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic and literary sources in order to highlight the great role the Islamic beliefs and identity of the surrounding Persianised society played in the continuous Islamic acculturation of Arghun Aqa and his family since the earliest phases of their presence in Iran.

The standard criteria for using apocalypses as historical sources were established by the late Byzantinist, Paul J. Alexander. Examining the process of literary embellishment and adjustment of a few Syriac and Greek apocalypses, he arrived at the conclusion that historical apocalypses are in fact “prophecies ex-eventu”, i.e. having actually already materialised around the time of their circulation. The amount of such material, he argued, may serve as a kind of barometer for measuring the eschatological pressure at a given time in history since apocalypses are written to provide comfort in times of tribulation, particularly during grave military crises.

The decolonization of history in the Islamic world has for a number of years proved a fascinating and profitable pursuit. For that portion of North Africa occupied by the French this process has consisted for the most part of two more or less separate activities: studies in depth and detail for the period after 1830, and for the preceding centuries (700-1830) a number of very general and frequently superficial recommendations, reflecting a sincere but not always clearly planned intention to controvert the presuppositions seen to underly colonialist historiography.

When the decisive battle of the Yarmuk in 636 AD gave the Muslim Arabs control of Syria, they gained a land that had been Roman for 700 years. Yet in the memory of most of its inhabitants, their recent subjection to the Sassanian Persians would have been fresh and even dominant. The forces of Chosroes II, which had controlled Syria for a generation, had only been withdrawn in 630. Anyone who had reached adulthood by the time the Arabs arrived had already experienced the Persian occupation; many were born or raised during it. This period of Persian rule, which lasted twenty years or more in Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia, fifteen in Palestine and ten in Egypt, may have played a major role in accustoming the locals to non-Roman rule, or may have had violently disruptive effects that facilitated the subsequent Arab conquest. So far, the period has been poorly known and never studied as a whole, allowing many theories to be projected upon it. For the most part, historians and especially archaeologists have assigned to the Persians a highly negative and destructive role.

Bodily mutilations, such as nose-cutting, are recorded worldwide from different cultural settings. Hence the custom is not solely an example of “Oriental violence and cruelty” (at times quoted in Orientalist sources from the colonial period). I want to emphasise that I am not arguing from the vantage point of a colonial discourse with its criticism of “degenerate and barbaric” social customs. Instead, this paper deals with the human body as a symbol of society. It is particularly focused on the symbolic significance of nose-cutting and on understanding this violent impulse as a social practice. The underlying notion is that cultural categories, such as “honour” and “shame”, are encoded in body morphology and affect behaviour.

This paper involves an syncretic study of the structural characteristics, semantic stratification, graphical evolution and contextual analysis on a chronological base of the perplexing graphs and words which designate the Chinese, such as xia, hua and zhongguo, non-Chinese, such as yi, di, rong, and man, in early palaeographic and documentary sources. It shows how these terms evolved to distinguish between the two distinct ethnographical concepts in the early mind.

The study shows that the conception of Hua-Xia and Zhongguo carried different connotations in the Western Zhou period from that defined in Spring and Autumn philological sources. The relocation of the Zhou capital to the east during the transition from Western to Eastern Zhou had generically diffused the concept of Xia and the elegant Ya culture. The conception of Xia and Yi, which had formerly distinguished between the Zhou elites and the non-Zhou people, came to distinguish between the central states and peripheral groups in the geographical sense, as well as between the Zhou subjects and the non-Zhou subjects in the political sense. Thus the conceptualisation of the so-called “Chinese-ness” postdates the actual formation of the ethnographical bulk of the Chinese people.

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the most alien aspects of Islamic history is the role played in it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? To seasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is the virtual disappearance of tribes from Europe after the age of invasions that is puzzling: why are there no Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who could imagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus as places renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Though tribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, they did not play the same role in Chinese and Indian civilisation either as they did in the Muslim Middle East; nor is it obvious that they played the same role in the Middle East before the rise of Islam as they did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then, that Islamicists talk so much about tribes that non-Islamicists often suffer from the misconception that there is nothing but tribes in the Islamic world.

One of the features of the Gupta-Vākāṭaka age is the growth of Śaivism. In this article some of the epigraphical evidence for this process is assembled and discussed. While the direct evidence for the adoption of Śiva worship among the Guptas is limited to ministers of the Gupta court, it is clear that the Vākāṭaka kings were predominantly Māheśvaras. New fragmentary wall inscriptions uncovered from Mansar, the site of Pravarasena II's palace, hint at a possible connection with the teachings of the Śvetāśvatara-Upaniṣad. Two post-Gupta inscriptions from the area around Mandasor are discussed in the light of a tendency towards religious hierarchisation, an attitude which came to be increasingly characteristic of early medieval Śaivism. In the second part attention is drawn to the variety of Pāśupata and Māheśvara worship in the Gupta-Vākāṭaka age, as well as to the trifold organisation of the Pāśupata movement. The article ends with a note on the interaction with non-Śaiva traditions, in particular Buddhism, and its possible impact upon the formation of the Pāśupata movement.

The pottery and glass fragments examined here were collected in 1941 from three sites on the Aden littoral. They were picked up on the surface at (1) Kawd am-Saila, the “Dune of the Flood-Course”, a large isolated mound situated on the main Aden-Lahej-Yemen road, (2) Al-Ḥabīl, lying north-west of Lahej, just a little off the main Yemen route, and (3) Zingibar. The lastnamed site lies within the Abyan oasis on the coastal plain, some 35 miles north-east of Aden. For an area of some miles there, extending almost to the foothills, the surface is covered with potsherds of all kinds and periods, both glazed and unglazed. In places the ground is quite red with fragments of unglazed earthenware. Abyan is a site of great antiquity well known to Arab authors, and in pre-Islamic inscriptions, but the other two places have not yet been identified.

The educated woman and the college girl were, for the great part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India, subjects of immense anxiety. In this article, I examine the gossipy narratives that a missionary educator in South India, Eleanor McDougall, wrote biannually for readers in America and Britain, whilst she was Principal of Women's Christian College (WCC) in erstwhile Madras, along with the book on her experience that she eventually published. In doing so, I locate the circulation of gossip in transnational circuits as a site where colonial anxieties about young Indian women as subjects of uplift came to be produced. For women like McDougall, the expression of urgent anxiety about young women's moral and social conditions served as a means to secure legitimacy for the work they did, and position themselves as important participants in a new discourse of philanthropically mediated development that emerged in the early twentieth century with the influx of American charitable capital into countries like India. At the same time, I show, in responding to her writing about them, that the Indian staff and students at WCC did not concur with colonial authority marks a site of refusal: suggesting the anxious boundaries of colonial knowledge production at a time when the surety of discourses of racial difference was beginning to unravel. In its study of McDougall's gossipy writing, this article therefore contributes to a complicated and non-linear understanding of emotions as a site of power and hierarchy.

In an excursus to his article on “The Early Sasanians” in BSOAS., xi, 42 sqq., S. H. Taqizadeh has given a full and illuminating discussion of the Manichæan two-day fasts which preceded the feast of the Bema. All hitherto known about these fasts is contained in a passage in the K. al-Fihrist, 333, 28–334, 1, which runs as follows:—

As regards the fasting—

(1) when the sun is in Sagittarius and the moon is full, they fast two days without break,

(2) then when the New Light appears, they fast two days without break,

(3) after this, they fast two days when the moon is full (and the sun is) in Capricornus,

(4) then when the New Light appears and the sun is in Aquarius and eight days have passed of the (lunar) month, they fast for thirty days, but break the fast each day at nightfall.

Temür has been many things to many people. He was nomad and city-builder, Turk and promoter of Persian culture, restorer of the Mongol order and warrior for the spread of Islam. One thing he was to all: a conqueror of unequalled scope, able to subdue both the vast areas of nomad power to the north and the centres of agrarian Islamic culture to the south. The history of his successors was one of increasing political fragmentation and economic stress. Yet they too won fame, as patrons over a period of brilliant cultural achievement in Persian and Turkic. Temür's career raises a number of questions. Why did he find it necessary to pile conquest upon conquest, each more ambitious than the last? Having conceived dreams of dominion, where did he get the power and money to fulfill them? When he died, what legacy did Temür leave to his successors and to the world which they tried to control? Finally, what was this world of Turk and Persian, and where did Temür and the Timurids belong within it?

The Mongol conquests produced the last in a series of realignments of the Turkic peoples, creating, more or less, the configurations in which we find them today. The earliest of these realignments was associated with the rise and fall of the Hsiung-nu polity (second century BC to mid-second century AD). This was the first of the attempts at a pannomadic state. Mao-tun, the “Great Shanyü whom heaven has set up”, the founder of the Hsiung-nu union, boasted in a letter to the Han Court that because of his efforts “all the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family.”2 Činggis Qan expressed similar thoughts regarding the “people having skirts of felt” i.e. living in feltcovered tents.3 Although it cannot be demonstrated that all the Eurasian nomads were, indeed, incorporated into the Hsiung-nu polity, substantial numbers of the Turkic nomads undoubtedly were. In its formative, “heroic” years of conquest and in the course of its collapse, a number of Turkic (and other) pastoral, nomadic peoples were brought into motion along China's northern frontiers and adjoining regions. Others were pushed westward, some making their way to what is today Kazakhstan and into the Caspian-Pontic steppelands. This marked the first large-scale movement westward of Turkic peoples from Inner Asia to Central Asia and thence to the Western Eurasian steppelands. The final stages of these migrations ultimately brought some of the nomads to Danubian Europe and the Hungarian Plain.

The subject of Dreams has invited the inquiry of science in many ages and countries. A phenomenon of such frequent occurrence in connection with one of the ordinary functions of the animal economy could not fail to interest men of all classes and temperaments. To develop its theory as a mechanical working of the brain in sleep, or a secret energy of the mind during the temporary inaction of the bodily powers, equally forms a part of physics and of metaphysics; but, further than this, the association of dreams with objects and events having no immediate affinity with the waking thoughts, pursuits, or interests of the dreamer, thus seeming to indicate a sense of things to come, has led inquirers, with more or less of superstitious belief, to rely upon this as a species of foreknowledge within the reach of all, even of ungifted persons. Mankind, naturally anxious for direction in their worldly undertakings beyond the limits of human wisdom, studied every mode of possessing that information which might be supposed attainable by mysterious agency, and, in addition to the less permissible means of sorcery and divination, have endeavoured to obtain the desired instruction from observation of their sleeping thoughts, and even to reduce this process to a system.

Aid donors, civil society groups and the Cambodian government have tended to focus their policy initiatives concerned with communities and their forests on Cambodia's indigenous minorities. Few attempts have been made to document the relationship between ethnic Khmers and forests. However, with almost three quarters of Cambodia covered with forests until quite recently, and a large proportion of the Khmer population living in proximity to forests, it is not surprising that Cambodia's dominant ethnic group has had a close and meaningful relationship with forests. In this article, we examine the traditional systems of forest management of Khmer social groups and how these systems are changing. We argue that traditional Khmer systems of forest management are still relevant in the context of the rapid changes that have occurred in rural Cambodia over the past two decades. These systems shape how Khmer groups make sense of the natural world and claim rights of tenure over forest areas. They continue to play a vital role in preserving Cambodia's natural forests in the face of deforestation driven by plantation schemes and logging operations.

A study of historical, political and religious thought of the early Mongols undertaken during the last few years has provided a thesis that, during the period of their world domination in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they initiated an original universal concept with the purpose of substantiating and justifying the world's largest land empire. Furthermore, this concept was so developed that it constituted a cohesive theory that can be called Tenggerism or Heavenism.