The village S lies in the plain that is known as the rice store of West Java. Surrounded by fields on which paddy is cultivated for a large part of the year, the visitor sees S as the prototype of the agrarian settlements that fill the landscape: a small-scale concentration of houses hidden amongst trees and farmyard crops, whose inhabitants have for centuries lived in the shelter of their community and depend for their living largely or even entirely on cultivating the land in the locality. This is the classical image of peasant society as laid down in the literature, but one that is in need of revision also in this particular case.

At the heart of modern social science lies the belief that if societies understand the causes of their current condition, their people will foresee what future ills may befall them unless particular public policies are implemented to avoid the undesirable consequences of previous actions. Analysis and prediction thus provides the power to alter the future, which is only inevitable if people and governments do nothing to understand the causes of their present complaints. J. S. Furnivall, arguably the most prescient foreign analyst of Burmese political and economic life this century, was a true disciple of this idea.

The present day economy of Sarawak is characterized by a small but rapidly growing, largely rural population engaged in low productivity, semi-subsistence agriculture; a dependence on the export of a few primary commodities; the relative absence of modern transportation linkages, and a small industrial sector. In many respects, therefore, Sarawak represents a microcosm of the underdeveloped world. Yet for about a hundred years Sarawak was ruled by the white Brooke dynasty and was touted as a true frontier for western expansion and an ideal setting for the exploitation of its natural resources. There was very little development during this period because Brooke rule was inimical to economic progress—the Brookes gave little or no financial assistance to the natives, undertook few developmental initiatives, and expected foreign entrepreneurs and missionaries to provide the rudiments of physical and social infrastructures. The Brookes believed that change, particularly far-reaching or rapid change, would be harmful to the natives. Consequently, when Brooke rule ended, the problems of economic development seemed more intractable while the supposed benefits of ‘white’ rule appeared less tangible.

Laos constituted one of the five territorial entities making up French Indochina—comprising in addition the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia. It was never, however, one among equals. Even before the annexation of Lao territories east of the Mekong river in 1893, Laos was perceived as little more than an extension of Vietnam west towards Siam (Thailand), a much more significant potential prize. The addition of minor extensions west of the Mekong demarcated by treaty in 1904 and 1907 still gave France no more than half the former Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang. Any possibility of reconstituting a greater Lao state was thereafter lost.

The Rise of the West, the creation of the Third World, the beginnings of disparity between Asia and Europe, or whatever other phrase is used, is obviously the great event of world history; hence the attempts to explain and date it, going back to the time when the Rise was actually beginning in the later eighteenth century. The literature is vast, complex and mostly of high quality. Some of it is concerned with causation—how did ‘the West’ get ahead, why did ‘Asia’ fall back or perhaps just stay the same? Others are interested in trying to date the beginnings of inequality—when can we see the beginnings of dominance, where did this occur and in which sectors of human life was this first to be seen? The first matter is, of course, the more important for an historian. It has been argued that, in the most general way, the fundamental cause of the beginnings of inequality is the series of changes in western Europe, and at first in England, known collectively as the Industrial Revolution. I will use this term as a shorthand for these collective changes, which Marshall Hodgson called the ‘Great Western Transmutation.’ Put most crudely, western Europe advanced and changed in a paradigmatic way, while Asia did not. At the most, Asia kept doing what it had been doing for centuries; Europe changed basically.

This paper traces aspects of the evangelical encounter in Chhattisgarh, a large region bound through linguistic ties in Central India. Evangelical missionaries, bearing the Cross and signs of civilization, arrived in Chhattisgarh in the 1860s. Oscar Lohr, the pioneer missionary of the German Evangelical Mission Society, chanced upon a group of heathens, the Satnamis, whose faith enjoined them to believe in one god and to reject idolatory and caste. Was this not the hand of ‘divine providence’? The missionary, it seemed, had only to reveal the evangelical ‘truth’ to the Satnamis before they would en masse‘witness’ and be redeemed by Christ-the-Saviour. The group did not see the coming of the millennium. It did not go forward to meet its destiny. The missionaries persevered. The halting enterprise of conversion in the region grew primarily through ties of kinship among indigenous groups and the prospects of a better life under the paternalist economy of mission stations.

Much has been written and published about Christianity in China, less has been known about the particular interest that the Mission had evinced toward the Muslims of China, much less has been recorded about the Muslim reactions to this activity, and almost nothing has been concluded in terms of the dialectical interaction between Christianity and Islam in that part of the world.