The campaign to establish a Muslim University at Aligarh is a good example of the confluence of education and politics in modern India. The political motives involved were similar to those that lay behind the founding of the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875: a sense that English education was a prerequisite to enfranchisement. By the turn of the century, the stakes were higher and the interests involved had expanded in number and complexity. The Muslim University movement represented nothing less than an effort to create an all-India Muslim constituency and to carve out for it a decisive piece of political power. It was political both in its attempt to consolidate support to influence specific government policies, and also as a direct challange to British control of the educational access too power.

What were the relationships between agriculture, natural calamity, standards of living, and population growth in India? To what extent were Indian agriculturalists able to raise their standard of living in the nineteenth century under British rule? Why did population grow, or fail to expand, in particular regions and provinces at certain times? Historians have left these questions virtually untouched. Population growth has been at the center of the controversy about the impact of British rule. But only preliminary work has been done on the actual expansion of population, and hardly a page has been written on the economic and medical reasons for change.

The subject of magistrates, the local administrative leaders in the hsien, districts, is central to the study of Chinese government and society. The district has always been and still remains the basic administrative unit in China. Magistrates, the ‘offcials close to the people’, in the districts, are the chief administrators, who have always been singly responsible for the direct implementation of governmental policies at the local levels. Although several studies have been published on local administrators of the Ch'ing dynasty and the Communist period, district magistrates of the Republican era have been little studied.

George Sansom once called the history of education in late nine-teenth-century Japan ‘a useful example of a reaction against foreign influence and a return to tradition in the midst of a strenuous process of “modernization”.’ Sansom and others have depicted Japanese education during the first three decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912) as follows: during the 1870s Japanese education was completely dominated by the Western philosophies and principles which were flooding a country newly opened to foreign intercourse after two and one-half centuries of isolation. This extreme Westernization led to a ‘conservative reaction’ in government and education circles during the 1880s. This, in turn, culminated in the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 and the emphasis on ‘traditional’ moral education which was the hallmark of schooling in the 1890S. This shift in educational policy on the part of the Meiji government has been seen as ‘part of the general swing during the 1880s away from unnecessarily close imitation of the West and back towards more traditional values.’