The history of the Shaw enterprise in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, is a history of Chinese cinema in a century of business evolution. The Shaw industrial model of “vertical integration”, which combines production, distribution with exhibition, keeps pace with the technological developments and manages to expand its retail outlets from the stage to cinema, television, DVD and the Internet. Although the Shaw organization embraces a western industrial model to expand its business, it retains the very nature of a traditional Chinese family business. The issues surrounding the cultural and institutional evolution of the Shaw enterprise over the past 80 years are profound indications of its time.

This essay argues that too much of scholarship on state formation in late pre-colonial India has displayed an elitist bias and focused exclusively on the activities and concerns of upper-caste ruling groups alone. Building upon recent trends that have brought into view the roles of a greater diversity of groups, this article explores the agentive role of the crafts and artisan communities in the state formation of Jodhpur during the eighteenth century. This was a period when the Rathor rulers of Jodhpur were unable to rely on the external support of the Mughal Empire and felt compelled to forge alliances with new groups who, perhaps, were previously marginal to political processes in the region. This, of course, did not dissolve the difficult and often exploitative conditions under which artisans worked, and though their agency was more reactive than creative, it did serve to define and limit the levels of state appropriations in revenues and labour.

Environment and sustainable development have been accorded great emphasis since the last quarter of the twentieth century. In India, the environmental protection is enshrined in the Constitution of India (42nd Amendment) under the Directive Principles of State Policy in 1977. According to Article 48A, ‘State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife in the country’. Article 51A(g) enjoins upon the citizens ‘to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes and rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for the living creatures’.

The current article examines temple building and shifting monastic patronage in twentieth and twenty-first century Sri Lanka. Drawing heavily on fieldwork conducted in two separate upcountry villages over the past five years, the author argues that far from passively accepting the failings of local monastics, lay Buddhists are actively and directly involved in shaping their own religious experiences. In examining closely numerous conversations centered on temple construction, this article pays particular attention to how notions about ideal ritual performance, caste discrimination, and merit-making provide lay donors with the needed impetus for building new monastic institutions and, thus, establishing a choice of temple patronage where little or no such choice previously existed.

The Raj Quartet is a novel in which Scott has transmuted contemporary history into fiction—the many forces at work in India over a period of five years, from the ‘Quit India’ motion of the Congress Committee in 1942 to the eve of Independence and Partition. Deeper than Scott's interest in history and politics, however, is his aim to probe the nature of human destiny, conveying a philosophy of life that shows man's destiny and moral sense sometimes at variance. He also focuses an ordinary human point of view on the world around him, valuing integrity and decency. Staying On is not a political or historical novel, although its background has political implications. It focuses mainly on problems relating to personal destiny. Scott's later novels constitute a major achievement in colonial, indeed, all, literature.

The war in Afghanistan was one of the most brutal and long lasting conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century. Anthropologists specializing in Afghanistan who wrote about the war at the time reiterated the United State's Cold War rhetoric rather than provide objective analyses. Others ignored the war altogether. What happened in Afghanistan, and why, and the need for objective reassessments only came to mind after the September 11th attacks. This paper examines the genesis and various permutations of the Afghan war in terms of causal dynamics embedded in the broader interstate relations of the world system and its competing military complexes during the second half of the twentieth century and changes in that system in the post-Cold War period.