Seavoyage was a social reform issue of some concern to the Hindus of Upper India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Clearly there were compelling incentives for seavoyage; equally clearly there was a convention which prohibited such travel in the belief that it contravened the law laid down in ancient texts. But social conflict is seldom as one-dimensional as these statements imply.

David Washbrook's original treatment of the question of law and society, to which the title of the present paper refers, has not yet stimulated the response which might have been expected. It is a wideranging study; only part of it will be taken up in this paper, namely its arguments about landed property rights in the nineteenth century. Washbrook states that in the first half of the century private property in land remained a ‘pure farce’ in India because of continued state involvement in the economy, excessive revenue demands, the persistence of personal law (as codified), and the weakness of the system of courts. He emphasizes the political implications of the co-option of dominant groups for revenue collection and other purposes of British administration. For the second half of the century, Washbrook proposes an improvement in the position of landed and powerful interests, as the law at last ‘beat back the frontier’ of personal law and disentangled private property rights from family and communal fetters.

The Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal administered the largest province in India. In addition to the Bengali-speaking area, it included parts of Orissa and virtually all of Bihar. Nearly two-thirds of the population were Hindus, and just over one third were Muslims. However, the Hindus predominated mainly in Bihar, Orissa and west Bengal, while the Muslims lived mainly in the east. In Bengal Proper there were, by 1901, more Muslims than Hindus. The province was ruled from Calcutta, the only large city in the region. Until 1912 Calcutta was also the capital of India itself. The city was a great economic, political, administrative and educational centre, and few other towns exercised such an influence over their surrounding districts as Calcutta did over Bengal.

On 3 May 1945, British—Indian forces landed in Rangoon. The Japanese had pulled out. The city was liberated. On 16 June there was a victory parade, though the final victory over Japan was still distant and most of their conquests were intact. Admiral Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, took the salute while detachments representing the one million men under his command passed by in massed array. Famous regiments from Britain, India and Nepal; the Royal Navy; the Royal Air Force; men from the United States Air Force. It was an impressive sight, though the ceremony took place in pouring rain. Amongst them all was a somewhat ragged band representing the Burma National Army which, having been raised by the Japanese, had fought for three months alongside the British. Watching the parade from the central dais was a young man dressed in the uniform of a Japanese Major-General, though he also wore an arm-band with a conspicuous red star. The outfit was incongruously crowned by a pith sun-helmet—a topi. Probably most foreigners present assumed he was a Chinese officer. He was actually Bogyoke Aung San, commander of the BNA.

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s.

My book Leveling Crowds was published in 1996, and around the same time and in succeeding years there was a spate of books on much the same topic, but primarily focused on India. This essay discusses the implications of some of these studies for my chief submissions, and also responds to the comments of some reviews of my book. It is hoped that this postscript will amplify and enrich our investigation of the dynamics of ethnonationalist conflicts in South Asia.

By the final decade of the twentieth century, rates of suicide in Sri Lanka ranked among the highest in the world. However, in 1996 the suicide rate began to fall and was soon at its lowest level in almost 30 years. This decline poses problems for classic sociological theories of suicide and forces us to question some fundamental assumptions underlying social scientific approaches to the suicide rate. Drawing from sociological, medical epidemiological, historical, and anthropological secondary sources as well as 21 months of original ethnographic research into suicide in Sri Lanka, I argue that there are four possible readings of the country's suicide rate. While the first three readings provide windows onto parts of the story, the fourth—a composite view—provides a new way of thinking about suicide, not just in Sri Lanka but also cross-culturally. In so doing the paper poses questions for how the relationship between suicide and society might be imagined.

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement, which, he argued, ‘foreshadowed the eventual compromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart's Customs Service was its mediator.

The relations between James Brooke and the various peoples of northwest Borneo have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Nineteenth-century Iban experiences have been analysed extensively and continue to provide the basis for a healthy industry in historical anthropology. Daniel Chew and Craig Lockard examined the development of the Sarawak Chinese community. Sabihah Osman explored Malay political activity during the Brooke period. In contrast, although Bidayuh were the subject of a detailed anthropological survey in the 1950s, political relations between Bidayuh and Rajah Brooke's regime have been largely ignored by scholars.

In the last century the French presented their race-neutral policies as evidence of their colour blindness. Yet they were among the foremost proponents of race theory and racial hierarchy, which propelled the colonial machine of the nineteenth century. This article examines the role of French academics in creating a position for India in the racial imagination for the first time in history. It examines the motivations behind such a focus on India and the resulting response from Britain, the colonial ruler. The works of Paul Topinard, Louis Rousselet, Arthur Gobineau, and Gustave le Bon are situated in the colonial and political context of the mid-nineteenth century to demonstrate not only that it was the French, and not the Germans, who placed India on an Aryan pedestal, but that this move was propelled by the dream of an unfulfilled French empire in India.

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.

The village S lies in the plain that is known as the rice store of West Java. Surrounded by fields on which paddy is cultivated for a large part of the year, the visitor sees S as the prototype of the agrarian settlements that fill the landscape: a small-scale concentration of houses hidden amongst trees and farmyard crops, whose inhabitants have for centuries lived in the shelter of their community and depend for their living largely or even entirely on cultivating the land in the locality. This is the classical image of peasant society as laid down in the literature, but one that is in need of revision also in this particular case.

The Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the pressing challenge of ‘reconstructing’ China's industrial economy when it came to power in 1949. Drawing on recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry archives, this article argues that the Party met this challenge by drawing on the expertise of Japanese technicians left behind in Northeast China at the end of the Second World War. Between 1949 and 1953, when they were eventually repatriated, thousands of Japanese technicians were used by the Chinese Communist Party to develop new technology and industrial techniques, train less skilled Chinese workers, and rebuild factories, mines, railways, and other industrial sites in the Northeast. These first four years of the People's Republic of China represent an important moment of both continuity and change in China's history. Like the Chinese Nationalist government before them, the Chinese Communist Party continued to draw on the technological and industrial legacy of the Japanese empire in Asia to rebuild China's war-torn economy. But this four-year period was also a moment of profound change. As the Cold War erupted in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party began a long-term reconceptualization of how national power was intimately connected to technology and industrial capability, and viewed Japanese technicians as a vital element in the transformation of China into a modern and powerful nation.

If a scholar were to search for water-marks in the development of historical writing on medieval India, the contribution of the ‘Aligarh school’ could very justifiably lay claim to such a distinction. While the work of the Aligarh scholars covers a wide spectrum of historical processes of the Mughal period, it is bound quite closely by their basic understanding that has acquired the status of an almost undisputed assumption among a large number of historians today. The Mughal state, in brief, is perceived as a systematically centralized one, both theoretically and in reality. It is seen as one that had acquired the power to enforce uniformity of government in all parts of the empire and was sustained by its ability to appropriate a large portion of the economic surplus generated within its frontiers. The administrative machinery (both official and quasi-official) involved in the maintenance of this ‘Mughal system’ presents a picture of truly gigantic proportions, yet one that is portrayed as almost uniformly conforming to elaborately formulated methods of functioning. The works of Irfan Habib, S. Nurul Hasan, M. Athar Ali and N. A. Siddiqi apart from a host of others, are among the more impressive contributions in this context.

As had been the case throughout much of Chinese history, government during the Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was largely in the hands of a civil bureaucracy staffed by the Confucian literati. Prevailing political thought held that moral suasion and commonly held ideals were in a large way responsible for keeping both the society and the body politic running smoothly. For this and other reasons, the court assigned a rather small number of bureaucrats to manage a truly vast population. In addition, it was commonly assumed by rulers and the ruled that China's was and should be primarily an agrarian society of self-sufficient peasants. The only orthodox avenue of social, even spatial, mobility was the Confucian examination system which led successful candidates into the bureaucracy. This view denigrated the importance of commerce, of technological advancement, of learning outside the Confucian classics; and it acted as a brake on social, political, and economic development.

This paper discusses the commercial history of the Java sugar industry in the interwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Java's late colonial industry had a uniquely exogenous character, in that, amongst the world's major producers of cane sugar in the late colonial era, it was singularly devoid of metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan markets. Instead, it sought its markets pre-eminently on the Asian ‘mainland’ to its north and northwest. The Indian subcontinent formed one such market, but East Asia formed the second, and it is the Java industry's fortunes in China and Japan that provide the focus of the present paper. This focus highlights the extent to which the partial collapse of the industry in the mid-1930s related to factors altogether more complex than a simple fall in consumption and drop in prices associated with the interwar Depression. Fundamentally, it was evolving economic autarchy throughout east Asia, encouraged by Depression conditions, which lay at the heart of the Java sugar industry's problems in this sector of its market. Key factors were Java's ambivalent relationship with an expanding but crisis-ridden Japanese sugar ‘empire,’ and the effect on its long-standing links with British sugar refineries in Hong Kong because of the latter's increasing difficulties in the China market. In tandem, they underscored the commercial hazards inherent in Java sugar's exogenous situation.

Located along Pakistan's central Asian margins, the high mountain region of Gilgit-Baltistan borders Afghanistan and India, and since 1969 has connected Pakistan to China. In this article, I argue that over the last 50 years, expanding forms of connectivity between Pakistan and China were localized in Gilgit-Baltistan through three processes: (1) from 1969, overland connectivity between Gilgit-Baltistan and western China has enabled Pakistan to imagine and project expansive ties—and geopolitical aspirations—that transcend the border areas where the cross-border trade was initially localized; (2) unfolding ties between the two countries were accompanied by new material exchanges: initially barter trade and regulated caravans, followed by private commerce in the mid-1980s and, finally, economic corridor development under the Belt and Road Initiative; and (3) Chinese investments in Pakistan were part of a new cycle of global accumulation. Concurrently, in the wake of transnational investments, local governance in Gilgit-Baltistan adopted neoliberal administrative measures: the prioritizing of investment capitalism, the privatization of public goods and services, and securitization.

This article examines intersections between sexuality, migration, and citizenship in the context of cross-border and cross-region marriage migration in Kutch, Gujarat, to underscore that women's mobility across borders is one site on which national cultural and political anxieties unfold. It argues that contemporary cross-region marriage migration must be located within the larger political economy of such marriages, and should take into account the historical trajectories of marriage migration in particular regions. To this end, it examines three instances of marriage migration in Kutch: the princely state's marriages with Sindh, nineteenth-century marriages between merchants from Kutch and women from Africa, and contemporary marriage migration into Kutch from Bengal. The article asks whether the relative evaluation of these marriages by the state can be viewed in relation to the settlement policies undertaken after partition, where borderlands were to be settled with those who were deemed loyal citizens. Finally, by historicizing marriage—as structure, but also aspirational category—it seeks to move away from the singularity of marriage as framed in the dominant sociological discourse on marriage in South Asia.