By 1690 the Supreme Government of the Indies in Batavia agreed that, financially speaking, it was no longer wise to continue the direct trade between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and China. It was argued that the vessels so far used for the China trade could be better deployed in the Indian Ocean.

This paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical and symbolic representation of stateness, and, secondly, the pursuit of mundane everyday life. These are embedded within Sri Lanka's landscapes and histories of colonial and post-colonial rule, and the ethnic conflict, riots, and war which inextricably shaped the railway's journeys and passengers. Railways are more often thought of as large-scale, high-tech artefacts rather than the smaller everyday technologies that are the themes of other papers in this special issue. However, this paper highlights the ways in which railways also make particular kinds of everyday life possible and how, in being woven into routine daily and weekly journeys, the Northern Railway Line came to intertwine the changing circumstances and histories of its mainly Tamil passengers within an increasingly ethnicized national landscape. In the aftermath of its closure, the railway has now come to symbolize a desire for a return to the normalcy of the past, an aspiration to an everyday experience that younger generations have never had, and which has, in consequence, become a potent force.

This paper will build on my ethnographic engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami to explore aspects of a shift in Islamist practice and imagination from the ‘state’ as the inspiration for projects and movements to the ‘market’. In doing so I hope to investigate not just what this might tell us about Islamism in Pakistan, but also about the ability of the state to manage religion more generally. My aim is three-fold: first, to record the particular modalities of changes within Islamism in Pakistan; second, to show that these shifts betray a closer alignment between the global political imagination and Islamism than has previously been acknowledged; and third, in discussing these issues, to explore the implications of the idea of market as an important contender to the dominance of the idea of the state in political mobilizations. While recent discussions about secularism, following Talal Asad,1 have tended to focus on the disciplinary force exerted by the state, this paper suggests that the market has emerged as a potentially more significant, though under-recognized, disciplinary force.

According to Prasenjit Duara, the sacredness of the nation hinges on its ‘regimes of authenticity’ where timelessness and the politics of embodiment are key to an authentic national identity. This paper looks at three different cultural impulses that have attempted to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are: the Malay literary movement Angkatan Sasterawan 50 prior to independence; the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and the romanticization of the working-class ‘heartlander’ through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization. In doing so, this paper articulates the difference between the regimes of authenticity of state elites and non-state cultural producers, as well as their ‘national imaginaries’. It concludes that the regime of authenticity, that operationalizes the representations of the working class as a diametric opposite to the logic and force of globalization, offers the most popular symbols of national identity in Singapore.

All countries with significant coastlines and groups of islands inevitably produce seafarers at some time or other in the course of their economic development, and the two countries which are the subject of this paper are no exceptions. Chinese ships and seafarers were famously exploring the Indian Ocean more than a century before the arrival of the Portuguese and once the Spanish Pacific empire was established in the sixteenth century, the ships linking Mexico to Manila were mainly crewed by Filipinos. And it need hardly be said that Chinese and Filipinos have both been employed by foreign ship-owners throughout the twentieth century. What is unquestionably new is the magnitude of Filipino seafarers' employment in the world's merchant ships and the extraordinary growth of China as a nation with a major stake in the shipping industry, both as ship-owner and as a source of seafarers.

In 1817–21, the Indian subcontinent was ravaged by a series of epidemics which marked the beginning of what has since become known as the First Cholera Pandemic. Despite their far-reaching consequences, these epidemics have received remarkably little attention and have never been considered as historical subjects in their own right. This article examines the epidemics of 1817–21 in greater detail and assesses their significance for the social and political history of the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, it examines the meanings that were attached to the epidemics in the years running up to the first appearance of cholera in the West. In so doing, the article makes comparisons between responses to cholera in India and in other contexts, and tests the applicability of concepts used in the study of epidemics in the West. It is argued that the official reaction to cholera in India was initially ameliorative, in keeping with the East India Company's response to famines and other supposedly natural disasters. However, this view was gradually supplemented and replaced by a view of cholera as a social disease, requiring preventive action. These views were initially rejected in Britain, but found favour after cholera epidemics in 1831–32. Secondly, in contrast to later epidemics, it is argued that those of 1817–21 did little to exacerbate tensions between rulers and the ruled. On the rare occasions when cholera did elicit a violent reaction, it tended to be intra-communal rather than anti-colonial in nature.

This paper discusses the rise of the East India Company in the contested political world of eighteenth century India, with reference to the manner in which economic power was deployed to enhance military power. It is shown that there was only one successful model of military-fiscal strategy during this time, and that the Company's success was due to interactions between three factors—taxable resources, the strategies of its rivals, and institutional choices.

The nationalist rhetoric of Aurobindo Ghosh and other leaders of the political movement protesting the decision of the Government of British India to partition Bengal province in 1905 contained frequent allusions to Hindu myths and symbols. Militant political leaders primarily drew upon Śakta symbolism, especially the imagery of the Hindu cult of Kālī worship, and they adopted philosophical justifications of nationalism which were based on modernist, Neo-Hindu interpretation of Śaṁkara's Vedānta philosophy. The nation was described as an incarnation of the goddess Kālī, and nationalists were considered her devotees.

In 1800, British India was emphatically a multi-region economy, with political and physical boundaries separating the different parts. The British were on the eve of bringing the whole of India (except Sind and the kingdom of Ranjit Singh in the North-West) under their political control. But political control did not at once bring a real unification of currency or banking that serviced long-distance or external trade, let alone the network of cash or credit transactions that kept the locally centred economic activities going.

Fascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the League of Nations’ handling of the crisis resonated strongly in Nationalist China, where it recalled the League's failure to thwart Japan's claims to Manchuria in 1931. As these two crises unfolded, the League became a nexus around which Nationalist Party debates about the position of colonized and semi-colonized countries within the extant world order crystallized. Party adherents reflected on China's and Ethiopia's positions as independent nation states with limited territorial integrity or juridical autonomy, and assessed this situation in light of their respective League memberships. While party liberals continued to view the League as a flawed but worthwhile experiment in global governance, newly-emerged fascist activists within the party denounced it as an instrument for curtailing the sovereignty of weak nations. From these conflicting views of the League, it can be discerned how Nationalist disunity was partially grounded in disagreements over the nature and ideal structure of the global order, and how Chinese fascists agitated to escape from modern structures of imperialist domination while reiterating the latter's racial and civilizational exclusions.

Islamic political rhetoric has had a wide variety of meanings in twentieth-century South Asia. This variety has often been obscured by observers who assume Islamic political symbols to have a single set of meanings as well as by contemporary political figures who attribute to earlier figures their own particular views. In Pakistan today, for example, all national heroes of the past are assumed to have used Islamic symbols exactly as does the current regime. In a recent contest—in which so far no winner has emerged—prizes were offered for portraits depicting Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, the urbane, westernized lawyer, in Islamic dress. Such re-interpretation can force resort to explanations of expedience to reconcile apparent inconsistencies, arguing, for example, that political figures spoke differently to different audiences. What else could one make of a Jinnah if he is clothed as a fundamentalist? But desire for legitimacy—here as everywhere—outweighs accurate history.

An enduring question with regard to the voluntary sector is how it can nurture civic engagement and provide public goods. A World Heritage listing for Penang highlights this question by revealing a vibrant civil society network that has made heritage conservation an issue for public discourse and policy agenda. This paper discusses how the marginalized trajectory of Penang is related to the development of its civic realm, social cohesion and local identity, which are sources of Penang's voluntarism. It then examines the engagement pattern of the Penang Heritage Trust, a leading association, which has mounted resistance against the state's failure in heritage provision. This bottom-up approach has preserved Penang's cultural heritage and associated identity, and reveals the distinct nature and capacity of Penang's voluntary sector that goes against the general pattern in Malaysia.

Calcutta's failure to insulate itself from the communal hysteria that plagued the length and breadth of India in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 came as a rude shock to the city's intelligentsia. True, the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 had initiated a vicious circle of communal rioting in the subcontinent climaxing in the ‘truncated settlement’ of 15 August 1947. The events of 1946–47 were viewed by left-wing intellectuals as a defeat of radicalism in post-Second World War Bengal politics. But the structural disarticulation between class and politics experienced during these Partition days was rapidly bridged in the western half of British Bengal that came to form a part of the Indian union. While other regions of India continued to be struck by periodic bouts of Hindu–Muslim violence, West Bengal remained relatively free of the communal virus. Calcutta, its capital city, emerged as the crucible of the country's left and democratic politics.

In August 1851, James Russell travelled to London from his estate on the banks of the Tweed. As a young man decades earlier, Russell had served as a cavalry officer in India, and he was anxious to exploit this visit to the metropolis to renew his acquaintance with the men who had formed his social circle years ago in Hyderabad. Having arrived in London, James Russell called on Charles Russell (no relation) at the latter's residence in Argyle Street. Chairman of the Great Western Railway, Charles Russell too had passed his youth in India, serving as a lieutenant in the Company's army and as an assistant to the diplomatic Resident at Hyderabad—his older brother, Henry. In a letter to his brother—now Sir Henry and (thanks to his Indian fortune) the proprietor of an extensive landed estate in Berkshire—Charles described James Russell as ‘still a great oddity, almost mad I think’, but conceded that ‘all his feelings are those of [a] gentleman and his pursuits have always been intellectual’. To substantiate this assessment of his old friend's sensibilities, he instanced James Russell's retention and use of a dictionary given to him by Charles in Hyderabad. ‘He gratified me by telling me that he still retained “a handsome Greek Lexicon” which I gave him, when he resumed the study of Greek’, Charles informed his brother Henry. ‘On his way home [from India] he followed the retreat of the ten thousand with Xenophon in his hand; and he has since worked hard, he tells me, at the Greek historians, poets & dramatists’. Having reminisced in London with Charles, James Russell journeyed to Berkshire to visit Sir Henry Russell, who read excerpts from Charles's letter aloud to his guest. ‘I always liked him’, Sir Henry wrote to his brother upon James Russell's departure, ‘and when I read to him your reference to early days, his eyes filled with tears’.

On October 28, 1891, one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern Japanese history rocked the main island of Honshu from Tokyo to Osaka. Centered on the populous Nōbi Plain north of Nagoya, this was the first daishinsai (‘great earthquake disaster’) of the Meiji era, and the strongest to visit central Japan in 37 years. The Great Nōbi Earthquake killed only 7–8,000 people (compared to the over 100,000 destined to die in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923), mostly inhabitants of towns and villages in Nagoya's hinterland. But its breadth and power were unprecedented in the memories of most Japanese, and the event became the subject of many dozens of books, newspaper and journal articles, paintings and woodblock prints, and even images on fans, plates, and lampshades. This was Japan's first truly national natural catastrophe. It was national in the sense that it was deemed by many of its narrators to have affected the new nation-state directly, and a nationalizing discourse of alarm, regret, recrimination, sympathy, and even patriotism was generated around it by a newly-consolidating modern print media.

This article has four important goals. First, I want to ask why liberalization and market-friendly reforms failed to curb corruption in India. Indeed, confounding the predictions of most proponents of reform, corruption seems to have increased after the neoliberal reforms of 1991. Second, I aim to develop a typology in which the importance of particular sectors to corrupt practices is highlighted and explained. Third, I point out that India has failed to make the ‘transition’ historically seen in low-income countries as they develop. Nation-states have in the past moved from a system of vertical corruption—marked by the extraction of small sums from a large number of transactions with citizens in everyday life—to a system of horizontal corruption, in which governmental elites extract large sums in a small number of transactions from corporate and commercial bodies. Finally, I argue that anti-corruption movements cannot be understood without paying attention to the affective and emotional ties that bind citizens to the state. We have to take account of contradictory feelings about the state: cynicism about the state and popular anger against corruption on one side, and an attachment to popular sovereignty and patronage on the other. These contradictory sentiments will better enable us to understand the conjunctures that lead to effective institutional change.

In the summer of 1920, when the Khilāfat movement (1918–24) was at its height, thousands of British Indian Muslims, under severe emotional stress, began to emigrate to the neighbouring Muslim country of Afghanistan. Believing that British India was no longer safe for Islam they had sought refuge in the hijrat or voluntary withdrawal as the only course left open to them.

Ever since the late eighteenth century, no subject has been more prominent in histories of ‘the transition to colonialism’ in south Asia, than the issue of taxation. In particular, the complex system of agrarian taxation that was developed under the Mughal empire, and further elaborated by various post-Mughal regimes, has often been seen as the defining institution of both the pre-colonial and colonial states. What the British called ‘land revenues’, which included taxes on land proper (mal) and taxes on trade and markets (sair), were the main source of income for both Indian and British rulers. Assessments of the impact of colonial rule have often depended on supposed changes in the tax regime. Since the nineteenth century historians have tended to focus their attention on the relationship between the land tax and structures of agrarian property. They have generally argued that British rule both substantially increased the tax burden, and modified structures of agrarian tenure by splicing together rights of revenue collection and private property in land. But they have focused much more on early colonial policies with regard to private landed property, and less on the issue of the actual tax assessment. This paper takes up the issue of the land tax demand (known as jama in the terminology of Mughal and post-Mughal administration) tracing British debates about tax assessments through the first three decades of colonial rule in Bengal.

Like most research on Japanese involvement in Korea in the latter years of the Meiji period, this article is deeply indebted to the pioneer work of Professor Hilary Conroy. I have also drawn heavily on the work of Eugene and Han-kyo Kim. However, a detailed study of the railways of Korea does not come within the framework of Professor Conroy's book, and there is little material on the subject available in English. In Japanese there is the official government history, the Chōsen Tetsudō Shi, but the purpose of this essay is to show the views of the business world on the subject, and so contemporary articles in the leading economic journals have constituted the most important source. A consideration of those articles which comment on the changing state of affairs will perhaps clarify the reasons underlying dōmestic pressure for Japanese involvement in the construction of Korean railways.

In 1981, on the eve of the general strike that convulsed the Bombay cotton textile industry, millowners, managers and workers alike acknowledged that the jobber was a thing of the past. The jobber system, they agreed, had been dismantled decades previously.