This paper argues that Indian farmers’ suicides may fruitfully be described as public deaths. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian district of Wayanad (Kerala), it shows that farmers’ suicides become ‘public deaths’ only via the enumerative and statistical practices of the Indian state and their scandalization in the media. The political nature of suicide as public death thus depends entirely on suicide rates and their production by the state itself. But the power of representations complicates the ethnographic critique of statistical knowledge about suicide. In a context like Wayanad, which had been declared a suicide-prone district by the Indian state, public representations of suicides have taken on a life of their own; statistical categories and the media interpretations of these statistics have had a curious feedback—mediated by development encounters—onto the situated meanings of individual suicides. Local interpretations of individual suicides mostly commented on personal failures of the suicide and on the perils of speculative smallholder agriculture. Ethnography of farmers’ suicide based on case studies alone, however, would soon encounter limitations equally grave as the limitations of statistical analysis. Not only is the meaning of suicide (intentions, causes, motives) at the actor level off limits for ethnography, but in addition to that the (public) meaning of suicide is co-determined by state practice including statistical accounting.

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.

Muslim law confers supreme authority in marital relations on the husband, to such an extent that the husband can unilaterally and extra-judicially dissolve the matrimonial bond by pronouncement of the verbal formula of divorce (talaq). The wife's position may be to some extent protected by the fact that her deferred dower becomes payable to her upon termination of the marriage by divorce or the death of her husband. However, the dower may either have been set at a minimal amount or have been severely reduced by intervening years of inflation so as to provide neither an affective restraint on the husband's exercise of his power of talaq nor much real assistance to the wife after she has been divorced and turned out of her husband's house. On the other hand, if the dower is set at such an amount as to constitute a real restraint on her husband in regard to his exercise of talaq and the marriage breaks down, the husband may refuse to divorce the Wife by talaq (since by doing so he would incur liability for the dower debt) and may suggest that she agree to a divorce by mutual consent (Khul' or mubara' a). However, a concomitant of a divorce by mutual consent is some financial remuneratioin by the wife to the husband; usually the husband requires the wife to relinquish her rights to dower. The wife may thus easily be placed in position of having to buy her way out of an unhappy marriage.

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The really important ‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.

By a general consensus among historians, the modern age is characterized as the age of nationalism. Despite this general agreement, however, the phenomenon of Muslim nationalism in India, which finally fulfilled itself in establishing the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has remained misunderstood. In the first decade after the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan was explained away in terms of the divide and rule policy of the British and/or the religious fanaticism of the Muslims. This was so because Indian nationalists of all descriptions had assumed that Indian nationalism was a single and unified movement working for the unity or homogeneity of Indian civilization.

All too often the study of land tenure in agrarian states is treated either as a dimension of economic organization or, with respect to its more specifically formal characteristics, as pertaining to the sphere of law. With both approaches there is the danger of ignoring or at least underplaying the fact that the formulation and regulation of tenural arrangements is an expression of the political order of society. Paradoxically, familiarity with this idea has tended to limit its appreciation. Awareness of the ‘classic’ and explicit example of feudalism and its place in grand social theory may well direct attention away from the detailed examination of more diffuse forms of the relation between land tenure and political structures. Such a lack of interest is readily observable in the case of Thailand where the history of the relationship is both unusual and highly significant for the analysis of contemporary social change.

Some Hindus are killing animals in larger numbers, more regularly, and in more spectacular fashions than they have ever done before. In contradiction of the ethnographic record asserting the diminishing significance of ritual killing since the nineteenth century, sacrifices to tutelary deities that had long been abandoned are being reactivated or enacted for the first time. However, such a counter-intuitive surge in the popularity of sacrifices is occurring at a time when the very deities to whom they are dedicated are apparently losing their potency. This seeming paradox, this article proposes, is an implication of both the entrenchment of electoral democracy and the material transformations accompanying economic liberalization in rural Tamil Nadu. In an electoral democracy, the political significance of tutelary deities—and consequently their charisma—has diminished. Their productive valence however, as exemplified in ritual sacrifices, has become ever more resonant in India's post-liberalization milieu, with its heightened sense of opportunity but also competitiveness and uncertainty.

Financial chaos was the rule during China's warlord period from 1916 to 1928. The Central Government in Peking was often short of funds because the warlords who controlled the provinces refused to forward tax receipts to the capital. The effectiveness of the financial administrative machinery in each province varied greatly, and if careful accounts were kept by the provincial governments, they have not been made public. Most confusing of all was the assortment of currencies circulating in the provinces. A bewildering variety of coins and paper notes, generally issued by local banks and money-changing shops, were used in each province, though they would probably not be accepted at face value in the neighbouring province. In some areas foreign currency, such as Mexican silver dollars or Japanese gold yen notes, could also be found in the key market towns. So many currencies were in use that local chambers of commerce met daily to calculate the relative values of the currencies traded in their immediate area.

Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imperial rule, analogous to the Hindu-Muslim communalism which emerged in north India? Or, as one opinion has it, was the ideological change an opportunistic maneuver on the part of a group of politicians, encouraged by British officials anxious to foil the nationalist movement? This paper takes an approach more in line with the first alternative and sees the propagation of an ideology of ethnic antagonism as a result of processes of the reformation of group and personal identities. I link the reformation of group identity to the confusion in rules regarding group behavior which resulted from the imposition and operation of the imperial system of dispute management, the Anglo-Indian legal system.

This article argues that the late 1940s in India should no longer be reduced to the twin events of partition and independence. A generalized political crisis unsettled, for a brief period, the structures of social and economic power, and not just intercommunity relations and the constitution of the state. These years were thus, among other things, a catalytic moment for the definition of ‘labour’ as both a political category and a parameter of post-colonial politics: processes dating back to the First World War, at least, were consolidated, under pressure from this crisis, into a new labour regime that has withstood political pressure for almost seven decades. The article offers an analysis of the almost-forgotten post-war strike movement, which was nevertheless unprecedented in its social and geographical spread. The movement elicited both repressive and reformist responses: the extraordinary level of emergency powers applied to suppress it are, therefore, as much examined as the series of momentous legislative and institutional changes of the late 1940s. In conclusion, the long-term consequences of this cycle of strike–reform–repression for India's post-colonial labour regime are adumbrated. A strongly etatist, potentially authoritarian, regime of industrial relations, it is argued, was checked by an enduring political trade union pluralism. At the same time, divisions within India's working classes were deepened and consolidated as labour law and social legislation sealed off the comparatively small ‘core workforces’ of public sector and large-scale industrial enterprises from the majority of workers in what would soon be called the ‘informal economy’.

When in August 1933 the German Minister to China, Dr Oskar P. Trautmann, reported to Berlin, ‘daβ die Völkerbundsmelodie politisch hier ausgespielt hat’, he had jumped to a conclusion too soon. When two years later the Journal Round Table commented, ‘to-day the League of Nations is no longer a political factor in the Far East’, this assessment was vindicated by evidence of every description. The two years between had witnessed the peak and decline of the League of Nation's ‘technical co-operation’ with the National Government of China. This episode plays its part as one of the major accomplishments of the League during the dismal second decade of its existence. It figures, however, only marginally in the history of twentieth-century China. Western works on modern Chinese history tend to neglect it altogether, and the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of China's foreign relations during the Republican period does not even deem it worth a reference in passing. On the other hand, the one authoritative textbook on modern Chinese economic history published in the People's Republic of China devotes ample space to the denunciation of the League's Chinese enterprise.

This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation.

An important branch in recent debates on the nature of the judiciary in colonial south India has focused on the extent to which the judicial institutions—and the social transformations mediated through them—were controlled by the colonial state. This debate is of interest not only from the point of legal history. From the broader perspective of social and cultural history the debate is important because it draws attention to issues such as indigenous agency, conceptual negotiation and the hybrid nature of institutions under colonial rule. It is these issues I intend to address through an analysis of indigenous litigation in the Mayor's Court in late eighteenth-century Madras. The analysis falls in two parts. First, I analyse how indigenous agents availed themselves of the court, despite an official colonial policy of excluding disputes between Indians from its jurisdiction. In the second part, I focus on the ways in which the nature of property was contested and negotiated in complex dialogues between indigenous litigants and representatives of the colonial judiciary. Both parts of the analysis indicate that important aspects of the litigation in the Mayor's Court were largely beyond the control of the colonial authorities.

Among anti-colonial nationalists, Bhagat Singh and M.K. Gandhi are seen to exemplify absolutely contrasting strategies of resistance. Bhagat Singh is regarded as a violent revolutionary whereas Gandhi is the embodiment of non-violence. This paper argues that Bhagat Singh and his comrades became national heroes not after their murder of a police inspector in Lahore or after throwing bombs in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi but during their practice of hunger strikes and non-violent civil disobedience within the walls of Lahore's prisons in 1929–30. In fact there was plenty in common in the strategies of resistance employed by both Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. By labelling these revolutionaries ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’, the British sought to dismiss their non-violent demands for rights as ‘political prisoners’. The same labels were adopted by Gandhi and his followers. However, the quality of anti-colonial nationalism represented by Bhagat Singh was central to the resolution of many of the divisions that racked pre-partition Punjab.

The 24th of April 1905 is a date of no particular significance in the current historiography of China. However, the memorial submitted this day by the Imperial Commissioners in charge of legal reforms, Wu Tingfang and Shen Jiaben, entailed the immediate suppression of so-called ‘cruel punishments’ (kuxing), such as dismemberment (lingchi), exposure of the head (xiaoshou) and desecration of the corpse (lushi). Judicial torture and bamboo flogging were suppressed straight after. From then on, cruelties of the past were illegal, and prohibited in practice, even though a penal code conforming to modern standards was not completed before 1928. China thus entered into the age of uneven and uncertain eradication of illegal but recurrent practices of torture. Though spectacular outbursts of violence occurred in contemporary China, with the complicity or under instigation of the highest authorities, those were not openly authorized by law, and they were eventually denounced, and some of their authors prosecuted. The shift from cruelty openly legitimized and practiced by the state to its official prohibition and ashamed toleration is an epochal change, which stems from the April 24th 1905 memorials.

The Japanese invasion of Rehe in 1933 proved to be a walkover, despite the intense rhetoric of resistance which had characterised statements by leaders in north China in early 1933. This article looks at the local context of the governorship of Tang Yulin, at the role of Zhang Xueliang and regional leaders, and at the central government's involvement, principally through Song Ziwen (T.V. Soong), in order to understand China's failure in Rehe. This failure strongly influenced the subsequent Tanggu truce and affected the careers of Song and Zhang in the short term, but did not deter Jiang Jieshi from continuing his anti-communist encirclement campaigns.

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.

It is immediately apparent to anyone who juxtaposes those two massive works of scholarship and patient investigation, Sudō Yoshiyuki's History of Land Tenure Systems in China, which is mostly concerned with the Sung dynasty, and John Lossing Buck's Land Utilization in China, which describes the early 1930s, that in the intervening thousand years the character of Chinese rural society changed, and changed radically.

This article offers a comprehensive set of explanations for why people vote. Based on evidence from Indian elections, where voter turnouts remain consistently high—and rising—despite voting not being compulsory, the article shows that two broad sets of reasons exist. First, a set of transactional factors, labelled ‘money’ here, encompass within it the instrumental and coercive reasons that propel people to vote. Secondly, evidence shows that people also attribute ‘meaning’ to the act of voting itself so they vote for the sake of performing the act itself. Drawing from the wider literature and the author's own ethnographic work, including comparative ethnographic research conducted by a team across India, this article brings together these diverse set of reasons to propose a holistic explanation for why people vote.