As China approaches economic superpower status, its need to achieve considerably higher standards of corporate governance is becoming paramount. Despite impressive recent advances in its capital and stock exchange markets, the on-going overhang of state ownership in its former state-owned enterprises, together with an unwieldy and ineffective dual board governance system, has left China facing major corporate governance problems that will deter the private investment necessary for its continued growth. This paper illustrates these problems, and suggests possible reforms that will provide the foundation for the efficient further development of China's capital markets that is needed to help China become a major economic superpower.

The existing literature has examined the Chinese nationalism of Chinese overseas merchants, detailing their financial contributions to the anti-Japanese war and their participation in boycott movements of Japanese goods. This paper uses Japanese consular reports, prewar Japanese publications, as well as Chinese and Japanese newspapers from Taiwan, Fujian, Japan, Singapore, and the United States to study the adoption of multiple nationalities, including Japanese nationality, by overseas Chinese merchants to reduce commercial risk and seek out economic opportunity. The phenomenon suggests that overseas Chinese merchants were not simply agents of Chinese nationalism.

The 1895 riot at Kalugumalai in the Tirunelveli District of Madras Presidency, South India, pitted the local Nadar community, then newly-converted to Roman Catholicism, against the main Hindu castes of Kalugumalai, particularly those associated with its Hindu temple and the Ettaiyapuram zamindari estate within which the town lay. It was the violent climax to a long-running dispute over the Nadars' right to take processions through the main streets, and one of the bloodiest episodes in a conflict which posed a severe threat to public order throughout South India in the late nineteenth century.

This paper explores the politics of Sri Lanka's Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the post-1994 period, when it re-created itself as a mainstream parliamentary political party and came to play a critical role in the collapse of the 2001–2004 peace process. The fundamental analytical enigma of the JVP lies in explaining its hybrid Marxist/Sinhala nationalist persona, which enabled it to craft a highly effective campaign of opposition to the Ranil Wickremasinghe government's two-track agenda of peace with market reforms. This paper examines how the JVP's Marxism relates to its Sinhala nationalism, and how it fits within the Sri Lanka's Marxist tradition as a whole. It argues that the JVP's increasing emphasis on Sinhala nationalism post-1999 has occurred in the context of de-radicalisation and parliamentary habilitation, and discusses the relevance of its ideological orientation to the material basis of Sinhala nationalism and its relationship with the social democratic state.

While it is very well known that the small Indian state of Kerala has many extraordinary anthropological, demographic, ecological, economic, educational, historical, political, religious, etc. features (which are reflected in a vast and to some extent learned literature), so that it is quite unlike what Stokes denotes as ‘the great agricultural plains areas, which for centuries before the British had experienced large-scale political organization’, it is yet possible that certain of its peculiarities are still insufficiently appreciated. So I here note some of the ‘surprises’ (as well as the uncertainties) which I experienced as a result of spending nearly three months in 1981–82 doing fieldwork in the lowlands of rural Trivandrum District, in the extreme south of Kerala, while also consulting the excellent library of the Centre for Development Studies near Trivandrum city. Whether Kerala bears comparison with Java, as some have claimed, I cannot say; but, of course, it provided an extraordinary contrast to the villages in southeastern Karnataka where I had worked in 1977–78.

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of ‘permanent wage work’, ‘short-term wage work’, ‘casual work’ and ‘self-employment’ or ‘dependent work’ in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.

Siam and the Semi-colonial Issue

The issue of Siam as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, mooted by Thai Marxists in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, has by the 1990s by and large been set aside by critically-minded academics for its inability to provide a lineage for the strain of capitalist mode of production that has emerged by the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the ‘semi-colonial’ as an analytical framework retains its force in confronting the assumed independence and an unreflexive racially based elite nationalism that has so defined Thai self-representations and public culture, but also in how Thailand is understood by others.

India and China were the most important producers of textiles in the world prior to the industrial revolution. However, whereas the Western historiography usually discusses Indian cotton and Chinese silk in connection with European imports, or with their sales in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, cotton and silk were also exchanged between India and China. Indeed, Indian cotton and Chinese silk were probably the principal manufactured goods exchanged between these civilizations. Although Indian records are fragmentary, especially when compared with the voluminous Chinese sources, Indian cotton goods are known to have reached the Indianized states in Xinjiang in the early Common Era (CE), and may have been produced there, in Khotan and the neighbouring states, by the time that indigenous silk production was known to exist in India in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Yet, while in later centuries large amounts of cotton cloth were produced in China while indigenous centres of silk production developed in India, exchanges of the finest types of cotton and silk cloth continued, usually driven by cultural and social factors in each civilization.

In an age sceptical of the historic role of great men there is universal agreement that Mahomed Ali Jinnah was central to the Muslim League's emergence after 1937 as the voice of a Muslim nation; to its articulation in March 1940 of the Pakistan demand for separate statehood for the Muslim majority provinces of north-western and eastern India; and to its achievement in August 1947 of the separate but truncated state of Pakistan by the Partition of India. Subcontinental judgements of Jinnah are bound to be parti pris and to exaggerate his individual importance. While Pakistanis generally see him as the Quaid-i-Azam, Great Leader, or father of their nation, Indians often regard him as the Lucifer who tempted his people into the unforgivable sin against their nationalist faith. Among distinguished foreign scholars, unbiassed by national commitment, his stature is similarly elevated. Sir Penderel Moon has written:

There is, I believe, no historical parallel for a single individual effecting such a political revolution; and his achievement is a striking refutation of the theory that in the making of history the individual is of little or no significance. It was Mr Jinnah who created Pakistan and undoubtedly made history.

With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the analysis maps juridical trajectories on the idea of charity, its relationship with trade, and, more specifically, profit-making. It demonstrates how the legal mechanism of the public trust, which serves in the late nineteenth century to institutionalize a strict distinction and separation between charity and profit-making, later reconfigures and connects them by buttressing the main legal criterion for charity in India, that is, ‘general public utility’. This legal story is deployed to draw attention to philanthropy more broadly as a key terrain for research on processes of economization and neoliberal governing. At the same time, the argument also works against the grain of palimpsests in contemporary public discourse which stage a continuous and direct line from pre-colonial vernacular practices to Indian philanthropy today.

Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called ‘political transition’ has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests from groups who felt their needs were marginalized in the final version. In this article we are concerned to probe how struggles over different technologies of government help throw into relief the various terrains within which public authority is claimed and contested, and, as a result, help to expose the limits of the state. Using the forestry sector as an ethnographic lens, we argue that there is both a profound failure by the state to provide services and stable governance as well as an ability to reproduce itself and to function in some contexts. It is therefore important to understand public authority during this period as both stable and unstable—and at times, instability is what helps to perpetuate particular imaginaries of the Nepali state.

The merchant who arrives in a locality unknown to him must also carefully arrange in advance to secure a reliable representative, a safe lodging house, and whatever besides is necessary, so that he is not taken in by a slow payer or by a cheat.

During the last ninety years of British rule in India, the ‘Jewel of the Empire’ was, as Lord Salisbury remarked in 1882, easily regarded by many British imperialists as ‘an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’. In more prosaic terms India was seen as a permanent strategic reserve and the principal means by which British interests were secured throughout Asia, from Suez to Wei-hei-wei. As such, India was a central component in the British imperial system. The empire's matchless prestige, its wealth and apparent power all stemmed in large measure from India. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Raj, the East India trade and the Indian Army demonstrated a combination of power which Britain's imperial rivals might envy but never surpass. The central importance of India is illustrated by the Victorian conception of imperial defence, which was seen to depend on the twin pillars of naval supremacy and the defence of India. The only serious military commitment which British planners admitted before the turn of the century was the possibility of meeting a Russian invasion of India across the North West Frontier. This threat existed mostly in the minds of British generals. Britain and Russia came closest to war on the Frontier at the time of the Penjdeh incident in 1885, but even then the likelihood of a Russian expedition against India was hardly more than remote. Nevertheless, the threat of invasion was the principal rationale for the nature and size of the Army in India and this consideration guided Lord Kitchener's reforms of the Indian Army during his time as Commander-in-Chief from 1902 to 1909.

Introduction

The Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.

The consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate coincided with the Mongol devastation of Transoxiana, Iran and Afghanistan. This paper studies the Persian literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries invested as it was in the projection of the court of the Delhi Sultans as the ‘sanctuary of Islam’, where the Muslim community was safe from the marauding infidel Mongols. The binaries on which the qualities of the accursed Mongols and the monolithic Muslim community were framed ignored the fact that a large number of Sultanate elites and monarchs were of Turkish/Mongol ethnicity or had a history of prior service in their armed contingents. While drawing attention to the narrative strategies deployed by Sultanate chroniclers to obscure the humble frontier origins of its lords and masters, my paper also elaborates on steppe traditions and rituals prevalent in early-fourteenth-century Delhi. All of these underlined the heterogeneity of Muslim Sultanate society and politics in the capital, a complexity that the Persian litterateurs were loath to acknowledge in their records.

Post-independence ethnic minorities inhabiting the Southeast Asian borderlands were willingly or unwillingly pulled into the macro politics of territoriality and state formation. The rugged and hilly borderlands delimiting the new nation-states became battlefronts of state-making and spaces of confrontation between divergent political ideologies. In the majority of the Southeast Asian borderlands, this implied violent disruption in the lives of local borderlanders that came to affect their relationship to their nation-state. A case in point is the ethnic Iban population living along the international border between the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Based on local narratives, the aim of this paper is to unravel the little known history of how the Iban segment of the border population in West Kalimantan became entangled in the highly militarized international disputes with neighbouring Malaysia in the early 1960s, and in subsequent military co-operative ‘anti-communist’ ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts by the two states in the late 1960–1970s. This paper brings together facets of national belonging and citizenship within a borderland context with the aim of understanding the historical incentives behind the often ambivalent, shifting and unruly relationship between marginal citizens like the Iban borderlanders and their nation-state.

This article draws together two studies: one that explores the intimate relationships of young slum-dwelling Dalit women in Mumbai and the other of young middle-class women in Baroda, Gujarat. Using an intersectional lens, we trace the ways that gendered ideals of respectability shape women's freedom of movement and relationships. The comparison produces new insights into the ways that class, caste, and location cut across gender to shape young women's lives in India. We argue that the distinctive positionings of the women structure the ways in which they react to gender norms and the means with which they strategize around them. Middle-class young women strike a ‘passive bargain’, upholding ideals of respectability by shoring up symbolic capital for a ‘good’ marriage and class privilege. The Dalit women show more active resistance to an ideal that they struggle to achieve, despite heavy control and surveillance over their movement and relationships. However, contrary to previous research, we show that both groups are beholden and lay claim to similar gendered and intimate ideals.

The Qing Myanmar campaign (1765-1770) was the most disastrous frontier war that the Qing dynasty had ever waged. In the beginning, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) of the Qing dynasty had envisaged winning this war in one easy stroke, as he deemed Myanmar no more than a remote barbarian tribe without any power. But he was wrong. After the Green Standard troops in Yunnan failed to bring the Myanmar to their knees, Qianlong sent his elite Manchu troops in. A regional conflict was thus escalated into a major frontier war that involved military maneuvers nationwide. At the front, the Manchu Bannermen had to deal with the unfamiliar tropical jungles and swamps, and above all, the lethal endemic diseases. Not only did one after another commander-in-chief of the Qing dynasty fail to conquer Myanmar, but the Qing troops also suffered extremely heavy casualties. After a gruelling four-year campaign, a truce was reached by the field commanders of the two sides at the end of 1769 with the Qing invading expedition failing to conquer Myanmar and withdrawing in disarray. To rehabilitate itself, the Qing dynasty kept a heavy military lineup in the border areas of Yunnan for about one decade in an attempt to wage another war while imposing a ban on inter-border trade for two decades.

In general, during the nineteenth century the British were indifferent to the condition of the insane in colonial Burma. This was most apparent in the Rangoon lunatic asylum, which was a neglected institution reformed reluctantly and episodically following internal crises of discipline and the occasional public scandal. However, whilst psychiatry was generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the colonial order. This occurred in the criminal courts where the presence of suspected lunatics was disruptive to the administration of justice. Insanity was also a problem for the colonial regime within the European community, where erratic behaviour was viewed as a threat to racial prestige. This paper shows how, despite its neglected status in Burma, psychiatric knowledge contributed to British understandings of Burman masculinity and to the maintenance of colonial norms of European behaviour.

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between stateand society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classificationof the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization throughpropaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than withtheir Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the keyprovince for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards andwelfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugeesfrom occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propagandacampaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to supportwartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize thepopulation in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant changein the conception of Chinese citizenship.