The American Revolution, as recent studies have shown, was appropriated by Chinese revolutionaries to use in their anti-Manchu propaganda in the early twentieth century. Few scholars have fully recognised Japan's important role in mediating Chinese revolutionaries’ understanding of the American Revolution. This article aims to bridge the gaps in existing scholarship through a close reading of Chinese and Japanese writings on the American Revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I will show that Chinese and Japanese elites’ understanding of the American Revolution was structured by the changing power relations between China, Japan, and the West. Before Chinese and Japanese elites internalised the ideology of Western cultural superiority, the former inspired the latter to see the American Revolution through a Confucian lens. After the ideology of Western cultural superiority became entrenched in Japan, Japanese elites reinterpreted the American Revolution through the lens of Western ideas of liberty, civil rights, and popular sovereignty. Their new interpretation, in turn, inspired Chinese revolutionaries in Meiji Japan to view the American Revolution as a model for their anti-Manchu revolution in the 1900s when the ideology of Western cultural superiority started to take root in China.

Scholars commenting on the reception of the historian and theorist ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) in modern South Asia have held that it was orientalists and Westernised intellectuals rather than indigenous intellectuals who popularised him in the region. Contesting these impressions, I argue that local intellectuals displayed their agency in using the historian's work to respond to various crises of colonial modernity. They read, translated, and appropriated Ibn Khaldūn to seek inspiration for modern Muslim nationalism, as validation for sectarian convictions and the rhetoric of Islamic reform, and to resist colonial and Hindu revivalist narratives of despotic Muslim rule in India.

In this article, I discuss the vilification of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful sorcerer in the Mughal poet-laureate Shaikh Abū'l Faiḍ bin Mubārak, or ‘Faiḍī's Mahābhārat and his correspondent apotheosis as the ‘essence of the True God' in the Shāriq al-maʿrifat, a treatise also ascribed to Faiḍī. As I argue, this inconsistency, or ambivalence, is a common and overlooked facet of the elite Islamicate engagement with religious diversity and difference in early modern Hindustan. In the case of the Mahābhārat, however, Faiḍī's portrayal of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful illusionist reflects not only an Islamic discomfort with Vaishnavite theology, but Faiḍī's own performative insecurities as a Hindustani writer of Persian poetry and literary prose. Kṛṣṇa's so-called ‘magic’ lies in large part in his way with words: the verbal and social manipulation he uses to stoke the flames of conflict. The character thus becomes a kind of shadow or double of Faiḍī himself-a demiurgic author of the Mahābhārat upon which the poet can displace the classical Islamicate association of poetry with sorcery and deceit.

Standardisation is a product of the second wave of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. This article examines how Western standardisation practices were introduced, transmitted, and promoted in China during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the critical role played by British, American, and local Chinese engineers in the transmission process. The topics covered in the present article have seldom been considered, and this article tries to fill the gap in scholarship. It analyses the shifting patterns of various standardisation efforts that are closely related to the governance of both cities and the wider nation. Work examined includes that of the Engineering Society of China, led by British engineers, which initiated standardisation in the Shanghai International Settlement in the early twentieth century; that of the Association of Chinese and American Engineers, founded by engineers of China and the USA, which, after World War I, began to implement the standardisation of railway infrastructure, with the cooperation of the Ministry of Transportation of the Beijing government; and efforts in the 1930s under the Nanjing government to establish an ‘engineering’ or ‘technocratic’ state, which included the execution of national schemes for the development of industrial standardisation. From the period of World War I until the 1930s, the orientation and practices of American standardisation strategies dominated China; then, due to the worsening situation of the Chinese–Japanese War, ideological tendencies and national strategies for standardisation began to diverge.

Multiple copies of a particular clay sealing bearing the Buddhist Bodhigarbhālaṅkāralakṣa-dhāraṇī (mantra) inscription were discovered in Gua Berhala—a cave in Perlis, Malaysia. These sealings can be roughly assigned to the tenth century and they appear to have been stamped with an identical seal. However, critical reading of the textual rendition of the dhāraṇī had not yet been done despite several attempts to study it. Therefore, based on several fragments of these sealings, this article provides a detailed reading and translation of the dhāraṇī and considers the cultural significance of their production. The article also examines the textual structure of this Perlis dhāraṇī and compares it with similar dhāraṇīs preserved in a palm-leaf manuscript and other materials found across Asia. This includes a survey on the wider transmission of the dhāraṇī in the continent. In this comparative exercise, the physical characteristics of the Perlis sealing appear to be unique and express a distinct artistic style, while its textual tradition is slightly compressed compared with others, with no identical equivalent found elsewhere. This observation suggests that Perlis, with its proximity to the Bujang Valley, participated in the wider network of dhāraṇī culture rooted in Eastern India and was just not a passive recipient of this practice.

This article examines the relationship between the manuscript translation of Mingxin baojian 明心寶鑑 (Precious Mirror for Enlightening the Mind) (circa 1590) by Juan Cobo (circa 1546–1592) and the Fujian book market in China. It explores the cultural implications of Cobo's translation by focusing on the commentary he provided in the marginalia of the manuscript. By investigating Cobo's translation and marginalia notes on three Chinese concepts—Chinese monks, dragons, and reincarnation—this article highlights the complex cultural issues present when the early Spanish missionaries in the Philippines negotiated with Chinese culture in their writings and publications.

This article analyses labour-intensive workforce strategies in Japan's government-run informational infrastructure (post, telegraph, and telephone) and in the adjunct services associated with their administration in the decades up to the Pacific War. It asks to what extent the growing scale of employment in Japan's communications infrastructure in this period confirms the existence of labour-intensive growth outside the manufacturing sector, and how far the growth of the labour force in post and telecommunications was facilitated by specific labour-absorbing institutions—that is, formal or informal institutions designed to mobilise or incentivise large numbers of employees. The discussion of these two associated questions shows not only that this area of infrastructure provision was highly labour-intensive in terms of the numbers employed and the diverse tasks undertaken, but also that the government-run postal system in effect depended for its growth and development on labour strategies and labour-absorbing institutions analogous to those usually associated with manufacturing development. The article also seeks to establish how far we can see in this sector the gradual improvement in the quality of labour normally associated with the labour-intensive industrialisation process, providing evidence that the evolving institutions were closely associated with a gradual improvement in the quality of labour and its ability to interact with rapidly changing needs and technologies.

By the end of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), olfactory culture in China had evolved significantly as coveted aromatics continued to be imported and in increasing quantities from Southeast Asia. Although there is no surviving treatise dedicated to aromatics from this period, anecdotes in prose literature describing the uses and curation of scents reveal a process in which imported aromatics were being actively incorporated into existing olfactory culture and accrued new social, aesthetic, and ritual significance. This process is discernible in two major respects. First, a discourse of connoisseurship for aromatics arose in contrast to the conspicuous consumption of imported aromatics that flaunted wealth and status. Secondly, aromatics that were once the privilege of the very few began to be circulated among a wider (admittedly still elite) population, as seen in the case of the dragon brain aromatic in late-Tang and Five Dynasties accounts. By delving into these and related prose narratives and by cross-examining these accounts against other types of records, this article examines how imported aromatic goods shaped the Tang elite's perception of how scent was—and could be—used as part of a socially rooted sensory experience.

In this article, we explore the longue durée philosophical background of Mughal Emperor Akbar's sun worship. Although Akbar's sun project may have been triggered by contemporary Hindu and Zoroastrian ideas and practices, we argue that Akbar's Neoplatonic advisers reframed it as a universal cosmotheistic tradition that, at the start of the new millennium, served as the perfect all-inclusive imperial ideology of Akbar's new world order. The astonishing parallels with the much earlier Neoplatonic sun cult of Roman Emperor Julian demonstrate that, although having characteristic of its own, Akbar's sun project was not that unique and should be seen as a fascinating late example of a so-far completely forgotten ancient Neoplatonic legacy of seeing the philosopher king, via the Sun, via illumination, connected to the One.

During the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), many silk portraits were made of kings and other public officials. Most of these are now lost. Silk canvases are partially transparent, which allows pigments on both sides of the canvas to be seen. Before working with a silk canvas, artists would create several drafts of their portraits on paper, which was made translucent through the application of oil. In this research, a set of three paper drafts for a portrait from the eighteenth century was analysed via X-ray fluorescence spectroscopic data and microscopic imagery to identify the type of paper and pigments used. Using this analysis, along with surviving historic records, comparisons to other historic portraits, and an artistic analysis of the line and colouring techniques, new insights into the process of making these portraits are presented. Novel features of the three sketches are identified. Furthermore, the step-by-step process used to create these sketches is discussed and illustrated using a reproduction that employs traditional techniques and materials.

This study employs annual reports, time-series statistics, and internal training records of the colonial-era Korean Government Railways (KGR) to conduct a quantitative analysis of its labour management practices. It addresses the colonial characteristics associated with Japanese techno-imperialism beyond ethnic discrimination, revealing a dual-pronged labour strategy that adopted a Japanese government employee system to manage middle- and upper-level personnel and directly recruited on-site workers for the lower echelons. This deviates from the low rates of local employment in Western colonies, particularly self-governing British territories or integrated French territories. In contrast, KGR's employment practices demonstrated economic and ethnic inequalities. It predominantly made Koreans on-site labourers, whereas Japanese not only held similar roles, but also occupied upper- and middle-management positions. Worker mobility, particularly among Japanese employees, grew following the outbreak of war between Japan and the USA, leading to the mass external recruitment of Koreans and the expansion of internal education to alleviate labour shortages. Nevertheless, preferential treatment toward Japanese individuals, which had been in relative decline for promotion, wages, and admission rates to training schools, ultimately persisted. Understanding KGR's employment structure shows how colonisation mediated Korea's modernisation and imposed technical limitations on the management of local labour. National technological decolonisation thus required Koreans to further introduce external technologies after the end of Japan's imperial reign.

In parts of southern and western Asia, as elsewhere, the cannon once served as one of the most dramatic tools in the inventories of state executioners. The practice of ‘blowing from a gun’, by which the condemned was bound to the front of a cannon and quite literally blown to pieces, was most infamously employed in British India and the Princely States, and the vast majority of English-language scholarship focuses on these regions. However, blowing from guns was commonplace in several other contemporary states, and the British use of the practice has rarely been situated in this context. The tactic was considered especially useful in Persia and Afghanistan, where weak governance, rebellion, and rampant banditry all threatened the legitimacy of the nascent state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a history of the practice of execution by cannon in southern and western Asia, positioning it within the existing literature on public executions in the context of military and civilian justice. In doing so, the article seeks to situate the British use of the tactic within a broader regional practice, arguing that, whilst the British—following the Mughal tradition—used execution by cannon primarily in maintaining military discipline, states such as Persia and Afghanistan instead employed the practice largely in the civilian context. This article also provides a brief technical review of the practice, drawing upon numerous primary sources to examine execution by cannon within the Mughal empire, British India, Persia, and Afghanistan.

Hazariprasad Dwivedi's 1946 novel, Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’, has long been considered one of the most prominent historical novels in modern Hindi literature, canonised in literary history for its progressive view of the past and for elaborating an autobiographical voice for the seventh-century Sanskrit poet, Bāṇa. However, the many layers of fictive authorship that enfold the main narrative of the text are rarely taken into account. Examination of the metatextual materials of this text reveal, however, that Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’ is meant to be read in terms of the problem of its authorship, in such a way as to problematise the autobiographical voice that it presents to the reader. In this article, I analyse this material and argue that the actual author of the text, described as an Austrian woman named Catherine, is most likely inspired by Stella Kramrisch. Further analysis shows this novel to be deeply shaped by the intellectual milieu of interwar Bengal, where Dwivedi was a teacher at Shantiniketan and engaged in commenting upon the complex intellectual traditions that existed in part of that world.

This article analyses the prison industries and state industrial exhibitions of three Indian princely states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tracing how princely elites sought to develop distinct labouring and industrial cultures. Drawing on examples from three Muslim-led princely states, namely Rampur, Bhopal, and Hyderabad, the article argues that state elites distinguished their forms of cultural and religious authority from that of the British Raj by coercing and displaying new industrial practices. They aimed to cultivate an industrial modernity that could compete with colonial projects while also promoting what they characterised as Indian Muslim characteristics and courtly traditions for artisan labourers and their work. The article asks how princely elites worked to conscript their subjects—including marginalised subjects such as convict labourers—into visions of regional industrial authority. Princely visions of Muslim and courtly industrial futures in Rampur, Bhopal, and Hyderabad were rooted in the attempts of state administrators to fashion distinctive regional identities and assert authority in a context of circumscribed, quasi-colonial rulership. Industrial cultures associated with princely prisons and exhibitions ultimately exceeded the bounds of these projects, placing pressure on other state subjects to adopt new material practices and engage with state-defined regional craft traditions.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

In Japanese scholarship, the notion of public health is closely associated with modernisation and the adoption of Western medicine in the nineteenth century, which influenced the centralisation of medical affairs and the establishment of hospitals. This article aims to challenge this assumption. A closer look at Japan's medical history shows that government institutions caring for the sick and destitute existed before the introduction of Western concepts of medicine. Furthermore, Japan had other ways of providing welfare, in addition to establishing hospitals. These included government-sponsored medical manuals designed to deliver healthcare via published texts, an aspect of welfare that has been neglected in the history of public health in Japan. This article fills this gap by illuminating and grasping lesser-known strands of healthcare delivery to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the state and medicine in early modern Japan. In particular, it examines welfare initiatives implemented by the tenth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–1745), a prominent and well-researched figure in the history of Tokugawa Japan and a key player who laid the foundations of welfare in this era.