The management of public affairs in northeast India has been in focus in the regional, national and world press in recent years. Much of the attention has been confined to insurgency, the ‘foreign nationals’ issue, tribal ‘uprisings’, ‘brutalities’ committed by the security forces, ‘involvement’ of foreign agencies in the area, political ‘horse-trading’ and floods. There has been no analysis of the economic, cultural and demographic factors which have acquired different nuances in the wake of the rapid modernization taking place in the region since the 1950s and which have a decisive say on the formulation of policies and the efficacy of institutions of governance in northeast India. This paper proposes to offer some facts and reflections on these aspects.

This article analyses the evolving nature and dynamics of the relationship between the centre and the periphery by examining how semi-democratic reforms have shaped and influenced the peace negotiation process between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) since 2011. We demonstrate that while the 2008 constitution has reduced restrictions on political, economic, and cultural activities in Myanmar, it has also inevitably produced a ‘two-headed government’ after the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), took charge in 2016 and was forced to share power with the military. This ‘two-headed’ government is the result of the historical distrust between the NLD and the army, combined with the NLD's lack of a clear strategy in dealing with EAOs. This has enabled the army to assert its well-articulated and hardline approach—without itself having an effective strategy or the capacity to end the country's armed insurgencies or bring the peace process forward. We show that the split at the centre has produced inertia and weakened the ability of the central government to formulate and implement effective policy, and further undermined the prospects for national reconciliation. Situating this case study within the wider literature of centre–periphery relationships and democratic transition, this article offers a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of how specific institutional arrangements at the centre in semi-democratic settings affect relations in both the centre and the periphery, as well as centre–periphery relationships.

A Member of Parliament, representing Orissa State, once said in the course of a debate: ‘My first ambition is the glory of Mother India. I know it in my heart of hearts that I am an Indian first and an Indian last. But when you say you are a Bihari, I say I am an Oriya. When you say you are a Bengali, I say I am an Oriya. Otherwise I am an Indian’ (cited in Harrison, 1960). The same words could plausibly be spoken by a Ceylonese or Burmese with other labels substituted. If we succeed in unravelling the meaning of this statement we shall understand a major aspect of South Asian politics.

While a number of in-depth studies have been carried out on the role of the formal financial market (Gurley and Shaw, 1955; Patrick, 1966; Porter, 1966; Goldsmith, 1969; McKinnon, 1973; Shaw, 1973, to mention a few), the informal or unorganized financial sector has largely been neglected. While discussions about the operations of the informal market were popular about 20 years ago (Geertz, 1962; Ardener, 1964; Anderson, 1966; Kurtz, 1973) they have gradually been relegated to the side-lines and this is despite the fact that the said market is neverthel ess of significant size and importance (as will be illustrated elsewhere in the paper).

One of the principal concerns of China's ‘self-strengthening movement’ in the T'ung-chih period (1862–1874) was the question of military reform. Organizational change was not a central issue, for the Ch'ing dynasty had already found in the innovative armies known as yung-ying (lit., ‘brave battalions’) a comparatively effective military system compatible with existing economic and administrative institutions. But changes in training methods—especially officer training—and weapons came to be viewed as essential to the self-strengthening effort. Experience in the huge and devastating Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), together with the repeated humiliations suffered by China at the hands of foreigners in the two decades following the Opium War of 1839–1842, had brought the Ch'ing government to a greater awareness of the need for introducing Western-style weapons and training in Chinese armies. Particularly convincing was the effective use of foreign troops and foreign-officered contingents (such as the vaunted Ever-Victorious Army) against the Taipings in the area of Shanghai during 1862. But in Chinese eyes, the employment of foreign troops and officers could never be anything more than a temporary expedient. Ch'ing policy-makers aimed at eliminating dependence on foreigners as soon as possible, while building China's own military capabilities in order to contend with both internal and external challenges. These twin goals lay at the heart of self-strengthening.

The consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

An organizing principle of Britain's pre-war empire was collaboration with indigenous monarchies. Secure on their thrones, they legitimated British rule as well as assisting it in practical ways. While friendly princes were assets, however, uncooperative ones could be liabilities; they might obstruct attempts to exploit their resources or to modernize their governments. After the Second World War, British priorities and strategies changed. With their backs to the wall they switched from supporting princes to accommodating politicians. There was no obvious role for them in new nation-states and in many dependencies indigenous monarchies were swept aside by the onrush of nationalism. Yet in Malaya and Brunei they survived: the rulers of the peninsular Malay states did so by adjusting to political change, whereas the Sultan of Brunei flourished by preventing it.

The publisher is the bride's parents, the readers are the bridegroom, and the kashihonya is the go-between.

This paper examines the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ as an ideal-typical pair and shows how they are typically misused as descriptive terms. It discusses the transformation of these terms' use from one of description to one of prescription as they are adopted by ‘developing’ nations. Focussing on Thailand, the paper shows how the term ‘tradition’, which formely stood alone, shifts in meaning as it is put into opposition to ‘modernity’, and how the pair serve as legitimating terms in a political context, tied to ‘nation-building’ and the interests of different political groups. This process and its ambiguities are explored through an examination of ritual, public monuments, and semantic changes.

This paper aims to challenge the disparagement of non-state Islamic systems of law that has established firm roots in contemporary rule of law ideology and practice around the world, from India to Ontario. In this respect, rule of law ideology has tended to ignore actual mechanics and procedures of law, not only in legal venues outside the state's direct control, but also in the state's courts themselves. With respect to non-state legal venues—and especially non-state Islamic legal venues—such ideology understands and describes the practices and procedures that it finds in these non-state venues as crude and underdeveloped at best, and illiberal and in violation of the rule of law at worst. While other scholarly work has vividly demonstrated the various transformations and mutations that any state's ‘ideal legal procedure’ experiences as it is put into real-world practice by a state's courts and judges, this paper makes a converse move. Using a case-study focused on the circumstances and experiences of an Indian Muslim woman, ‘Ayesha’, who recently used a Delhi dar ul qaza to exercise her Islamic divorce rights in India, this paper demonstrates how a non-state Islamic legal venue behaves in ways which are highly evocative of rule of law ideology's idealization of state courts and how they (should) operate procedurally. In doing so, this paper provides evidence for Partha Chatterjee's thesis as to how elite and subaltern domains—understood here to be embodied in both state and non-state legal venues, respectively—are products of ‘mutually conditioned historicities’. In this case, the focus is on the state's conditioning of the non-state. As a result, rule of law ideology's state-oriented critique of the (Islamic) non-state is mistaken because, as this paper demonstrates, the non-state is produced in conversation with the state; one cannot critique the one (non-state) domain without realizing how that critique implicates the other (state) domain.

As they increasingly embrace neo-liberal economic policies (especially since the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis), the Northeast Asian NICs of South Korea and Taiwan are now said to be losing their uniqueness as alternative capitalist models. Central to the neo-liberal project is labour flexibility. This entails the reform of employment legislation and of the wider social settlement between state, business and labour. This article will argue against the ‘homogenization’ thesis by revealing the distinctive political, economic and ideological characteristics that distinguish the recent market-oriented labour reforms in South Korea and Taiwan from neo-liberal transitions elsewhere. The sources of variation in the pathways of labour market reform within the Northeast Asian NICs will also be explained.

The Punjab Boundary Force, which represented the last incarnation of the old British Indian Army, had an operational existence of thirty-two days, from 1 August to 1 September 1947, inclusive. That it failed in its assignment ‘to safeguard the peace in the Punjab’ during the partition of India is evident from the transfer of populations and tens of thousands of deaths. However, the actions of the Force and the circumstances of its failure are of interest to those concerned with the partition process, and have not, it appears, been discussed in any detail.

My concern is public representations of individuals and how these were affected by British East India Company courts, judicial proceedings, and the law in Madras city during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that this was a period of dramatic transformation in self-representation, just as it also was in Company rule. My purpose is to trace the transformation of the manner in which individuals represented themselves and others and what this process reveals about the constitution of Madras society and Company rule before and after the establishment of an independent judiciary at the end of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this paper I seek to demonstrate how the transformation of East India Company courts of judicature from interested courts, strictly controlled by the Company, to independent courts is associated with changes that greatly affected the manner in which individuals—both British and Indian—thought of themselves and others in Madras city public life. This transformation was of a piece with the establishment of independent judiciaries in England and North America at the time and indicates how Madras too was influenced by these political developments.

Around 1930, at a time of rising nationalisms in China and India, English-educated Chinese and Indians in the British colony of Singapore debated with great intensity the issue of national identity. They sought to clarify their own position as members of ethnic communities of immigrant origin, while remaining individuals who identified the territory of British Malaya as their home. Readers' letters published in the Malaya Tribune, an English-medium newspaper founded to serve the interests of Anglophone Asians, questioned prevailing assumptions of how to define a nation from the perspectives of territory, political loyalty, race, and language. Lived circumstances in Malaya proved that being Chinese or Indian could encompass a range of political, cultural, and linguistic characteristics, rather than a homogenous identity as promoted by nationalist movements of the time. Through these debates, Chinese and Indians in Malaya found ways to simultaneously reaffirm their ethnic pride as well as their sense of being ‘Malayan’.

An underlying premise of much of the comment on developing countries' agricultural research organizations and capabilities, has been that they are weak, and have been unsuccessful in generating new technologies and meeting farmers' needs. Indeed, one of the very justifications for the setting up of the series of international research institutes, such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was that national research programmes were seen to lack sufficient strength and organization to be able to respond to the urgent needs of food production that were identified in the 1960s. It was argued that a primary role of the International Centres would be to support and develop such national research programmes both through training and the provision of new plant varieties and technologies, and that the building up of local research capability in developing countries would come only after the International Research Centres had developed and transferred the new technologies.

It has been assumed that the politicians and political organizations of late colonial Burma were mere shams behind which the real affairs of government were conducted by British governors and civil servants. It also has been assumed that what mass politics there was among the Burmese in the 1930s was dominated by nationalist youth, especially the Thakins, and monks who were untainted by contact and collaboration with the British and those Burmese who associated with them. Those members of the Burmese political élite who attempted to work in government and party politics during the last pre-war years, therefore, have been seen at best as mere reformers and at worst as callous opportunists.

In 1857 Delhi ceased to be the seat of the Mughal kingdom, and in 1912 it became the capital of the British Empire in India. The city had always had strategic and, therefore, economic and political significance. In the half-century between 1857 and 1912 Delhi's increasing economic and commercial activity prevented the city from sinking, as some historic Indian cities did, into the obscurity of just another provincial town. Curzon described it in 1899 ‘a capital city, now of commerce as once of power’. It acted as the commercial entrepôt for all north India, after becoming the junction of a huge railway network connecting north India to the ports. Commercial expansion in turn led to a steady growth in the city's population. This physical and economic expansion was, however, affected by the government's concern for security in Delhi. The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of urban development in Britain, but when urban government was taking root in India in this same period, it was cramped not only by apathy and financial stringency, as in Britain, but also by strategic considerations. This is an aspect of Indian local government which has not been studied at all. As for Delhi itself, the city has yet to find its urban historian. In this paper I shall examine how far official considerations of military security affected the city's development.

It isan axiom of India's economic history that government financial resources during the last half-century of the British period were inadequate. ‘The poverty of India was matched by the poverty of its government’ writes Dharma Kumar in The Cambridge Economic History and she estimates that ‘except during the two wars of the twentieth century, the tax revenues amounted to a mere 5 to 7 per cent of the national income'. Raymond Goldsmith's assessment is of an even lower proportion realized by taxation and he further believes that the scanty share of government expenditure in national product declined after the first world war. In most of the historiography, this situation is seen as a notable shortcoming created by imperial rule, the inevitable product of the passivity of the ‘night-watchman state’. Reviewing financial policy in 1939, P. J. Thomas described its predominant characteristic as ‘conservatism’, marked by ‘extreme reluctance to venture on new experiments in raising revenue’, ‘the low burden of public debt’ and ‘inadequate expenditure on social services’.3 These features could have played an important role in constricting India's economic and social development, particularly in the inter-war period of the twentieth century. Financial weaknesses then may have undermined the 'new industrial policy' of the post-first world war era4 and in the 1930s superficially present a crucial contrast with Asia's other major industrializing power, Japan, where government appeared to stimulate the economy impressively by massive borrowing and expenditure.5

This paper examines how local and transnational developments converged in 1857 to transform European attitudes towards Indian inhabitants in Singapore. Recognized in preceding years as useful to the security and the development of the colony, by late 1857, Indians in Singapore had come to be viewed by Europeans as a ‘menace’. That change in disposition was largely the product of factors extraneous to the actions of the local Indian inhabitants themselves. Besieged by news of multiple challenges to the British Empire, European nerves were rattled by perceived threats emanating from sections of the Asian populace in Singapore. In early 1857, a dispute between Tamil-Muslims and Europeans brought to the fore the latter's anxieties and prejudices. That episode was followed, in May, by news of the massive rebellion of native troops in India. The emerging distrust for Indians was exacerbated by public rumours and fanned by editorials and reports published in the local press. Perceptions of immediate danger from the colony of transported convicts, and the fear of an Indian conspiracy during Muharram, sparked a panic that would have ramifications on the position of Indians in Singapore and leave an imprint on the long term political development of the Straits Settlements.1

The pre-colonial Javanese kingdom was an unstatistical sort of state. Naturally it counted soldiers, taxes, wives, concubines and children, but it rarely kept detailed social and economic statistics. Nevertheless, some statistical records survive, largely through being preserved in Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Comparison and analysis of these, plus one or two leaps of imagination, enable one to build some historical hypotheses upon these materials and thereby to illuminate something of Javanese social history after the mid-seventeenth century and particularly in the eighteenth century. For the period from the mid-eighteenth century to 1812, important demographic and economic data relating to the kingdom of Yogyakarta alone will be made available in a forthcoming volume edited by Dr P. B. R. Carey and to be published by the British Academy.