In this paper my main empirical data are taken from the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, but much of what I say applies equally to the other East Malaysian state of Sabah. What is more, my argument is relevant in large part to the southern two-thirds of the island of Borneo—that is, to the four provinces of Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan. For the purposes of this discussion I have to treat the small, newly independent oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam on the north-west coast of Borneo as an exception. My general concern is with the peripheral position of the Borneo territories, economically and politically, in relation to the developed core areas of the nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. As a result of its environmental and demographic characteristics, its historical experiences under British protection and then colonialism in the north, and Dutch colonialism in the south, and its subsequent post-independence experience, Borneo is admirably suited to perform the role of a natural resources area for the national development programmes of Malaysia and Indonesia (Avé and King, 1986). For Indonesian Borneo there is an additional issue; it is also an area for the resettlement of some of the excess population from the densely populated islands of Indonesia's heartlands, especially from Java and Madura. Fortunately, Malaysian Borneo has no need to fulfil such a role in relation to West Malaysia.

In this article I examine the similarities between colonialism and postcolonialism in Sabah, Malaysia. I argue that the strategies of rule employed by the colonial and postcolonial states can be viewed as a sustained interaction in which the power of colonial discourses, institutions, and forms of rule still operate in postcolonial Sabah, particularly in terms of control over and access to natural resources. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data I present case studies from the colonial and postcolonial period that demonstrate that whether the focus of state rule is native land management systems and property rights or the conservation of biodiversity the result is the same: both states construct images of what types of agricultural practices and uses of forest resources are appropriate, what types of property regimes can persist, and how rural people should look and act in order to appear modern.

I conclude that the colonial and postcolonial states share the following characteristics: 1) they control access to resources through legal institutions that privilege private property law over customary practices; 2) they invent discourses that justify centralized rule while obfuscating the realities of those who live on the margins and whose lives depend directly on natural resources; 3) they utilize certain ideals of protection and/or commercialization of resources that privileges elite concerns over local concerns and subsistence uses; 4) they blame rural people for resource degradation while overlooking legal, political and economic structures that influence how rural people use resources; and 5) both the colonial and postcolonial states make it difficult for marginal people to define their own interests in their own terms.

J. S. Furnivall, in his influential account of the impact of British rule in Burma 1824–1948, argues that British officials laid down a Liberal administration that exposed the colony to market forces, monetized the economy and devastated communities. However, there is little evidence that British administrators actually thought in Liberal terms: they relied heavily on institutions inherited from the Burmese monarchy, and when they introduced new administrative methods these were drawn from other parts of British India and only indirectly influenced by Liberalism. Furnivall's view of the ideological origins of British administration, in turn, distorts his reading of the impact of British rule, as illustrated by recent work on the pre-colonial economy showing that it was in fact more monetized and commercialized than he claims. If his account of the pre-modern economy is not viable, Furnivall's claims about the impact of British colonialism in Burma demand re-evaluation.

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed joy.

The late-nineteenth century in India, usually scrutinized for the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist thought and politics, witnessed broader, and potentially more radical changes in the making and re-making of political subjectivities as articulated within burgeoning vernacular public spheres. Vernacular publics coalesced around the emergence of new communicative forms, the formation of voluntary and political associations, and the restructuring of literary communities. It is within this context I place the writings of Gidugu Venkata Ramamurti (1863–1940). He proclaimed at the turn of the twentieth century that Telugu as a language had to be reformed in order for it to become an appropriate medium for the newly emergent Telugu public spheres. Through his study of linguistics, his commitment to educational reform, and his study of Telugu language and literature, Ramamurti became the spokesperson for a new Telugu that would be able to traverse the boundaries of modern genres of writing that flourished in the colonial era. Fully immersed in linguistic theories of the day, Ramamurti's concerns were primarily with language reform and its centrality in the remaking of political subjectivities.

By looking at the case of the 2011 Wukan rebellion in Guangdong Province, the following article explores the role played by foreign media in influencing the protest's ultimate outcome: an intervention from above by provincial authorities in favour of the villagers. Placing Wukan into a four-level model incorporating local, provincial, national, and international dimensions, this article considers how Wukan might serve as a model for contention that may influence future acts of popular protest in China in the digital age. It suggests that while appealing directly to foreign media can help claimants increase their leverage over local officials and prompt interventions from above, such actions are likely to modify and accelerate, but not fundamentally transform, existing patterns of localized, community-specific acts of contention seen earlier in the Reform Era.

From 1919 through 1921, a combination of poor rice harvests and speculative buying caused unprecedented rice shortages in Southeast Asia and led to imposition of government controls over the rice industry. Because there were large workforces in South and Southeast Asia entirely dependent upon imported rice, the shortages were potentially very serious. Malaya and the East Coast Residency of Sumatra, for example, exported non-edible primary products such as tobacco, rubber and tin, and imported rice from Burma and Siam. Two-thirds of the rice consumed each year in Malaya, and one-half of that used in Sumatra's East Coast Residency, was imported, and local food production fell far short of the minimum needed if imported grain could not be obtained. Tea cultivation in Ceylon, tobacco and rubber planting in British North Borneo, and sugar planting in the Philippines were conducted along much the same lines.

The massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat in February 2002 demonstrated the challenge of Hindu nationalism to India's democracy and secularism. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organisations. The Gujarat government's intervention did little to stop the carnage. The communalism that was witnessed in 2002 had its roots in the mid-1980s. Since then, militant Hindu nationalism and recurring communal violence arose in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat. This study aims to shed light on the rise and nature of communalism since the mid-1980s.

Colonial transformation of the relations of production contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices, and tastes for the Bengali Hindu middle class. These cultural values, together with the political and economic conditions of colonialism, formed the habitus of this class. This paper tries to understand this self-fashioning by the middle class through their construction of a ‘Bengali’ cuisine. A distinct enthusiasm for new gastronomic possibilities defined this cuisine, and yet, at the same time, it possessed important elements of continuity from pre-colonial times, evidenced especially in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. The resultant cuisine was cosmopolitan yet still Bengali.

In Laos—one of the few remaining ‘officially’ socialist countries—Buddhism was abolished as a state religion after the revolution in 1975. However, since the 1990s the communist government has been increasingly using its patronage of Buddhism to gain legitimacy. With reference to the divine sources of power in Theravāda Buddhism, this article explores the extent to which modern Lao state socialism is still imbued with pre-revolutionary patterns of Buddhist kingship and statecraft. The analysis will focus especially on ritual patronage of a Buddhist relic shrine and on the recent inauguration of statues of deceased kings in the Lao capital, Vientiane. With reference to the ritual animation of ‘opening the eyes’ of the statues, and with regard to theories exploring the agency of objects, I argue that the Lao palladium has to be understood as being made up of ‘living’ entities. Finally, the article explores to what extent the control, worship, and creation of statues and relics today are still essential for the legitimacy of rule in the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

In June 1930, units of the 10th Red Army, which had been formed in northeastern Jiangxi by Fang Zhimin and Shao Shiping, entered the ancient porcelain town of Jingdezhen. The capture of the town brought the modern revolutionary politics of the Chines Communits Party (CCP) into contact with the local government and trades union organizations of a conservative, traditionally-minded town. Jingdezhen remained under the influence of the Red Army from 1930 until the strategic withdrawal from the Northeast Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 which was the forerunner of the complete withdrawal from the Jiangxi base areas and the Long March. There is ample information on the organization of the N.E. Jiangxi Soviet base and its best-known leader, Fang Zhimin, but most studies concentrate on the political structure of the Soviet government, the career and personality of Fang and the peasant milieu in which the Soviet emerged.1 Jingdezhen was not a peasant society or a major city: it was an intermediate small town world with part of the population permanently resident and many seasonal workers from the rural areas who provided a link with peasant communities.

The Japanese Twenty-one Demands toward the Chinese government headed by Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1915 marked a milestone in Sino-Japanese relations as well as in the Chinese response to imperialism. Yet studies on the event, particularly on its consequence and influence in China, are still insufficient. Studies by Chinese scholars have not gone far beyond Wang Yun-sheng's publication of collected materials more than fifty years ago. The only book-length study on the event is the first volume of Li Yu-shu's study, published in Taiwan. This last does not even cover the whole period of Sino-Japanese negotiations. His second volume has not yet appeared. Li's contribution is that he has made use of more Japanese documents than Wang. In mainland China, the most current study on the event is a chapter on the Demands in the first volume of the work by Li Hsin and Li Tsung-i. This chapter is based primarily on the works of Wang and Li Yu-shu. Compared with Japanese studies on other landmarks of Sino-Japanese relations, the coverage of this episode is rather thin. There is only one book-length study, published in 1958. As for works in English, Madeleine Chi's book has a chapter dealing with the Sino-Japanese negotiations. Two general works examine the event from a broader perspective.

The eighteenth century in India has generally been described as a period of great turbulence, characterized by march and counter-march, rising and falling fortunes, and bewildering political intrigue. Many historians, focusing on this aspect, have dismissed the century as merely an unsavory hiatus between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British domination. Yet there was more to the century than the march and counter-march of armies. The other aspect of the period was the emergence of strong successor states in Gujerat, Bengal, Oudhe, Malwa, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Punjab. Recently, historians have begun exploring these successor states, looking both back towards the Mughal administrative and ideological heritage and forward towards their role as princely states in British India. There are also important issues within the century itself, such as the role of successor states in developing regional language and consciousness, and successor states as channels of economic and social mobility.

Though local and international trade is a main point on the agenda of any government and though economists build elaborate models around trade statistics, the social consequences of trade have hardly ever been explored in full by social scientists. This is particularly the case in Thailand where only a few studies of limited scope exist on traders, businessmen and markets. There is a reason for this lack of attention to trade. The series of post-war village studies, carried out mainly by anthropologists in isolated villages, stressed intra-village relations and neglected as a consequence larger networks of trade. The most important study on trade during that time was probably the work of Skinner (1962, 1967) on the Bangkok Chinese in which, however, ethnic relations rather than trade and business constituted the main theme of the study.

The Indian court system is by all accounts unusual. The proceedings are extraordinarily dilatory and comparatively expensive; a single issue is often fragmented into a multitude of court actions; execution of judgements is haphazard; the lawyers frequently seem both incompetent and unethical; false witness is commonplace; and the probity of judges is habitually suspect. Above all, the courts are often unable to bring about a settlement of the disputes that give rise to litigation. So great are these failings that the Indian judicial process can reasonably be seen as a ‘pathology’of a legal system.

Under the terms of a Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the author was given study-leave for the academic year 1967–68 to go to Pakistan and India in order to improve his knowledge of Urdu and Punjabi. Having chosen Lahore as the most suitable place to pursue the concurrent study of these two languages, he lived there from September 1967 until April 1968, during which time he became increasingly conscious of, and interested in, the rather peculiar socio-linguistic position of Punjabi in the city's life. This article is a sunnary of the observations he was able to make about this, and of the thoughts to which he was led.

Although 1949 is not a magical year in Chinese history in the sense of marking a total break with the centuries-old traditions and culture, it is appropriate to say that 1949 is the year which symbolizes the end of Chinese sociology. In this paper we attempt to give a socio-historical account of the genesis, development, struggle and then death of sociology in China, covering a period of more than half a century. The first part of the paper will deal with the institutionalization of sociology as a transplanted Western flower in Chinese soil; the second part describes and analyses how Chinese sociology struggled for its legitimacy for survival under Chinese Communism and how the battle was lost.

A valedictory lecture is usually an anodyne statement—at its best a summing up of one's life-work, rich in wisdom and scholarship. The present exercise does not belong to that category, not merely because the speaker lays no claim to wisdom or scholarship, but because the present moment is unsuited to anodyne statements on India. Besides, the concern of this lecture has only peripheral links with my areas of professional expertise. It is addressed to a political-cum-cultural phenomenon in contemporary India which, in the opinion of many, portends a grieveous threat to the cherished values on which Indian democracy is based. We also believe that this threat, if not neutralized in time, may yet destroy the structure of polity and society which the Indian nation-state has sought to nurture; and done so, despite its many failures, with at least a modicum of success. A struggle is on for the hearts and minds of the Indian people. The present exercise is meant to be a modest contribution to the debate which is at the very heart of that struggle.

The time appears due for a reappraisal of the economic argument in the imperialism debate. For decades the standard procedure has been first to refute Hobson and Lenin on empirical grounds and then to present a non-economic explanation for the European overseas expansion during the era of modern imperialism (1870–1914). Presently a new paradigm is gaining acceptance. It is an approach which puts the emphasis solidly back on the economic side but without its Marxist connotations. Cain and Hopkins took the lead with their theory of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’; they link the landed South and City finance with Imperial policy thus explaining overseas expansion by referring to macroeconomic changes at home. Davis and Huttenback associate the profitability of Empire investments with their ‘two-England hypothesis’ for British business: London investors stood apart, profited more and exerted a greater influence. It is my intention to show that a similar type of non-Marxist economic argument applies also to the case of Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago at the time of modern imperialism.

This essays deals with a neglected and significant strand of Indian political thought by describing and analysing the corpus known as nīti in the context of medieval and early modern South India (in particular with reference to the Telugu-speaking region). Works of nīti are presented here within a larger context, as they evolve from the medieval Andhra of the Kakatiyas into the Vijayanagara period, the Nayakas, and beyond. They are also opposed and contrasted to other texts written within the broad category of dharmashāstra, which seem to deal with a far more conservative project for the management of society and politics within a caste-based framework. Authors and compilers dealt with include Baddena and Madiki Singana, but also the celebrated emperor-poet Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29). An argument is made for the continued relevance of these texts for the conduct of politics in South Asia, into and beyond the colonial period.