The non-cooperation movement dominated Indian politics in 1920 and 1921, and any account of the Kisan Sabhas or Cultivators Associations during those years is likely to lay less stress on their importance than on that of the wider political campaign. Linked by the name of Gandhi, the peasant movement was caught up in the whole campaign of the nationalist leaders against the government. Yet the background to the upsurge of agrarian radicalism in the United Provinces and Bihar shows that it was strongest in districts with particular tenurial and agrarian problems. Moreover, in these localities the radical leadership was independent of outside agencies, its links with wider political movements were tenuous and ambivalent, and it was little subject to external influence and control.

The issue of who constituted the workforce employed in the Java sugar industry during the late colonial era remains a controversial one. Almost thirty years ago one leading Indonesian scholar made the eminently plausible suggestion that ‘on the whole, those who sought work in the sugar industry… were those who had no land. They were for the greater part recruited from the landless… who were eager to sell their labour to anyone prepared to pay wages’ [Selosoemardjan 1962: 271]. Since that time, however, the waters of debate have become a great deal murkier. In particular, the legend that the industry's workers remained ‘peasants’ is one which dies hard [e.g. Knight 1989]. Indeed, if there can be said to be a single image illustrative of the prevailing orthodoxy concerning the relations between labour and capital in late colonial Java, it is that of the peasant-worker who ‘persisted as a community-oriented household farmer at the same time that he became an industrial wage labourer’ and who ‘had one foot in the rice terrace and the other in the [sugar] mill’ [Geertz 1963: 89]

As the British Empire extended its power across the Indian subcontinent, the military and political pressures which it could bring to bear had proved to be its most significant assets. However, both to establish and to maintain an English political paramountcy which could guarantee economic dominance came over time to be revealed as two separate tasks, demanding very distinct skills. To maintain and secure this newfound power in India, the British were forced to come to know more about India. They had to grasp the ‘rules’ of India's preexisting political ‘game’ and, more frequently, to confront their need to rewrite these rules into a form which they could comprehend, in which they could compete, and where their dominance could be virtually assured.This process suggests the ‘gathering in of the threads of legitimacy’ towhich D. A. Low has to eloquently drawn our attention.

British Malaya was a very unhealthy place in the early years of this century. Malaria, ankylostomiasis or hookworm, venereal disease, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, beri-beri, cholera and still other diseases accounted for thousands of deaths annually in the 1920s. Typically, persons suffered from two or more maladies at the same time. In the Federated Malay States (F. M. S.) probably more than half of those listed as dying from malaria also suffered from hookworm. Many pneumonia deaths were due to tuberculosis. Chronic malnutrition combined with malaria, hookworm and diarrhea in many, perhaps most, pregnant women to produce high infant and maternal mortality. The majority of the living were more or less continuously afflicted with disease. Most of the diseases were debilitating and slow to kill. Most were preventable although that was imperfectly understood.

Energy security is one of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. Intensifying competition for ever scarcer forms of conventional energy resources is causing significant tensions in the international system. East Asia will have a more profound impact on global energy security than any other region as its burgeoning demand for energy fuels, spurred principally by China, is expected to continue growing at over twice the world average in the next few decades. This paper examines the reasons why we may expect the energy diplomacies of East Asian states to become an increasingly salient feature of East Asian states’ foreign policy and international relations in the foreseeable future, and thereby significantly shape the nature of the region's international political economy. It presents a framework of energy diplomacy analysis in order to better understand how East Asian states are formulating their energy diplomacy strategies and actions. The four prime elements of this framework comprise: empirical perspectives and generic task-oriented terms; agential influences on the formation and organization of energy diplomacy practice; the energy–development nexus; and transaction mechanisms of energy diplomacy. The main conclusions are first, mercantilist approaches to energy diplomacy will persist but continue to gradually give way to market institutionalism; second, energy diplomacy will become increasingly linked to other forms of diplomacy, such as trade, environment and development assistance; third, we may expect East Asian states to afford greater priority to multilateral energy co-operation both regionally and in a wider international or global sense as energy security interdependencies deepen; and fourth, East Asia's growing reliance on sourcing energy fuels from outside the region will make it more dependent on stable international energy markets—these markets are becoming increasingly internationalized and globalized, which will broaden the future options of East Asian states developing new international energy partnerships.

Studies on Salafism tend to put the spotlight on the Middle East, rendering all other movements as secondary offshoots. In the British context, research typically focuses on British Salafi groups and their close relationship with Arab Salafis; it usually locates the origins of the British Salafi movement in the 1980s with the rise of cohorts among second-generation Muslims and converts to Islam, with fleeting remarks on the South Asian Ahl-e-Hadith who migrated to Britain from the 1960s onwards. This article recentres the South Asian Ahl-e-Hadith movement within the narrative of British Salafism. Tracing its trajectory from its origins in British India to Britain, this article argues that in the 1970s the Ahl-e-Hadith played a significant role in laying the foundations for British Salafism. Furthermore, far from being eclipsed by newer cohorts, it highlights the hitherto continuous presence of the Ahl-e-Hadith in the British Muslim landscape and emphasizes its overlapping, yet distinct, position in relation to the spectrum of Arab-inspired British Salafism.

The historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan.

From November 1963 to July 1965, the militant Buddhist movement was the primary cause of political instability in South Vietnam. While the militant Buddhists maintained that they represented the Buddhist masses and were fighting merely for religious freedom, they actually constituted a small and unrepresentative minority that was attempting to gain political dominance. Relying extensively on Byzantine intrigue and mob violence to manipulate the government, the militant Buddhists practiced a form of political activism that was inconsistent with traditional Vietnamese Buddhism. The evidence also suggests that some of the militant Buddhist leaders were agents of the Vietnamese Communists.

Environment and sustainable development have been accorded great emphasis since the last quarter of the twentieth century. In India, the environmental protection is enshrined in the Constitution of India (42nd Amendment) under the Directive Principles of State Policy in 1977. According to Article 48A, ‘State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife in the country’. Article 51A(g) enjoins upon the citizens ‘to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes and rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for the living creatures’.

Over the length of its current tenure, Punjab's Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has sought to become more a socially inclusive party, more responsive to popular demands, and even to improve service delivery and eradicate corruption. However, despite these lofty goals, it has also presided over what people refer to as ‘goonda raj’—a rule of thugs—and has managed to alienate large sections of the population and, in the process, fuelled the rise of the anti-corruption Aam Admi Party in the state. In this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Malwa, I attempt to shed light on the roots of this contradiction. Is it simply the case, as ordinary people allege, that the SAD's claims are empty and that its members are merely interested in looting the state? Or, alternatively, is it the case that the party merely operates in accordance with Punjab's allegedly time-honoured tradition of rival factions competing to appropriate the spoils of power? I suggest instead that much of the corruption and violence observable at the village level in Punjab has its roots in the antagonistic relationship between the Congress Party and the Shiromani Akali Dal. It is this antagonism that appears to fuel the SAD's highly partisan form of government, and it is partisan government that appears to fuel the corruption and the village-level factional conflict that is documented in this article.

Meenakshipuram is a small, dusty village in Tamilnadu's Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, very close to the south Kerala border. In 1981 this inconspicuous place, and several other villages in its immediate vicinity, made big headlines in the Indian daily papers when thousands of harijans or ex-untouchables decided to leave Hinduism and to embrace Islam. This spectacular case of mass conversion created a terrible shock among caste Hindus and threatened to upset the always precarious communal balance. Rumours circulated about Arabian sheikhs who had come to give tangible expression to the immense richness of Islamic belief by handsome distributions of oildollars. More serious investigation, however, showed that the harijans in this region had been suffering from oppression by aggressive landlords, harassment by police authorities and acute prejudices by caste Hindus for a very long time. A growing awareness of this social degradation has led many of these harijans to convert to Islam.

In the middle of the twentieth century, statistician P. C. Mahalanobis strove to haul India into the computer age. Convinced that these machines were integral to the future of economic planning in India, he and the Indian Statistical Institute mounted a campaign to bring India its first computers. In the years following independence, Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute acquired significant influence in the Indian planning process—culminating in them effectively authoring India's Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61). The tale of the computer's journey to India demonstrates that the decision to centrally plan independent India's economy, and the resultant explosion of official statistics, provided the justification for the pursuit of computers. They potentially solved what was considered centralized planning's greatest puzzle: big data. Mahalanobis persuaded the Indian government of the need to import computers for the purposes of development, and then negotiated the import of these exorbitantly expensive machines during visits to Europe, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the question of which country would provide India its first computers would ruffle Cold War feathers. This article brings together and identifies a link between the research activities of the Indian Statistical Institute, its deepening association with economic planning and the installation of India's earliest computers.

The profound influence of American management thought on Japanese industrial practice has generally been considered a postwar phenomenon. Stressing the contributions of Deming, Drucker and other American experts, both popular wisdom and scholarly opinion have embraced the notion that ‘the managerial revolution that occurred in Japan after World War II was made in the United States’. Prewar Japanese management, however, has seldom been figured in terms of American inspiration. Historians have commonly conceived prewar Japanese practice as somehow impervious to American theories and techniques, emphasizing instead the importance of indigenous patterns of familialism, German influences, or a capital-labor dynamic largely detached from external stimuli. Thus, in industrial management—as in so many facets of modern Japanese history—the prewar narrative and the postwar narrative have remained separate and unreconciled. Despite recent interest in establishing a fuller genealogy of Japanese management, the question of how American models could thrive in postwar Japan without a prewar legacy of integration has yet to be answered or even seriously addressed.

This special issue of Modern Asian Studies explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in India and Pakistan, with the aim of unravelling the explicit meanings and relevance of ‘independence’ for the new citizens of India and Pakistan during the two decades after 1947. While the study of postcolonial South Asia has blossomed in recent years, this volume addresses a number of imbalances in this dynamic and highly popular field. Firstly, the histories of India and Pakistan after 1947 have come to be conceived separately, with many scholars assuming that the two states developed along divergent paths after independence. Thus, the dominant historical paradigm has been to examine either India or Pakistan in relative isolation from one another. While a handful of very recent books on the partition of the subcontinent have begun to study the two states simultaneously, very few of these new histories reach beyond the immediate concerns of partition. Of course, both countries developed out of much the same set of historical experiences. Viewing the two states in the same frame not only allows the contributors to this issue to explore common themes, it also facilitates an exploration of the powerful continuities between the pre- and post-independence periods.

Islamic socialism was a major intellectual and political movement in Indonesia in the twentieth century, with ongoing influences until today. However, this movement did not follow the most common narratives of Indonesian intellectual history, which trace religious influences to the Middle East and political movements to anti-colonial reaction in terms framed by the Dutch. Rather, the first major Indonesian proponent of Islamic socialism, H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto, took his thinking on Islamic socialism directly from the English-language work of a South Asian itinerant scholar, Mushir Hosein Kidwai, in a process that most likely had the minority Ahmadiyyah community as intermediaries. Future Islamic socialist thought, much of it influenced by Tjokroaminoto, continued to echo through Indonesian secular nationalism, political Islam, and even Islamism. Studying the intellectual origins of Islamic socialism in Indonesia, then, shows not only the roots of an important strand of Southeast Asian politics in the last century, but also the importance of alternative currents of thought (South Asian, outside the mainstream, Anglophone) in Southeast Asian Islam.

This article examines the implications of the growing presence of the Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram, a Muslim-majority village in rural West Bengal, India, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013. The analysis of reformist Islam as a moral regeneration movement embedded in dharma and catalysing an alternative modernity contributes to the scholarship on lived experiences of Islam, modernity, and ethics. The Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram gains popularity in a political economic context of moral degradation and marginalization, which inspires engagements with globally resonant modern and anti-modern models of the self enveloped in the practice, discourse, and performance of Islamic reformism. These models mutually interact and conflict with locally particular practices and exclusionary categorizations. On the village level, the drive towards modernity ensues in conflicts over moral personhood and social exchanges. On the societal level, the modern aspirations of Joygrami Tablighis go beyond piety to ‘good culture’ and respected citizenship, and are embedded in anti-modern critiques of the hegemonic categorizations of the secular nation-state by which they are nevertheless confined. It is suggested that reformist Islam should not be misunderstood as pre-modern, anti-secular, or secular, but might better be called ‘post-secular’ because it encompasses those ideologies in vernacularized forms on the basis of a different ideal conception of society. Islamic reformism in Joygram may resonate with moral regeneration and reactionary movements elsewhere. This analysis of the Tablighi Jamaat demonstrates the potential challenges social movements face in the transition to alternative modernities.

Until 1971, when Alexander Woodside published his ground- breaking study, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, western scholarship on late traditional Vietnam was still locked within the narrow confines of French colonial understanding. Woodside's work, which drew extensively on Vietnamese historical sources, became an instant classic. So thoroughly did it dominate the field that two decades later it remains today the sole detailed discussion in English of the first half of the nineteenth century. Such is its stature that no-one has ever seriously questioned its findings, or challenged the author's vision of early nineteenth-century Vietnam. However, such a critique is long overdue. Despite the breadth of Woodside's scholarship, his conceptual framework assumes a continuity in Vietnamese history, culture, and politics from the Le to the early Nguyen that distorts the historical dynamic of the nineteenth cen tury, as well as contradicting some of his own evidence. His image of the nineteenth-century political elite provides a case in point. Like every scholar before or since, Woodside's conclusions about elite composition are extrapolated from the Sinic structures of its mandarinal organization, buttressed by anecdotal evidence and generalized impressions. But these are poor substitutes for quantification when enough readily-available biographical data exist to profile elite composition statistically. This article presents such an analysis. Its results contradict venerable French colonial views and Woodside's ideas alike; and do so in a way that suggests our present historical understanding of the late pre-colonial Vietnam needs serious revision.

Malayan labor and trade union policy at the eve of Merdeka (Independence) bore the indelible imprints of past crises and uneven development. Prior to the Second World War trade unions were outlawed in British Malaya, where labor policy limited itself to protecting workers from the more blatant social and economic evils as a means of encouraging immigration of needed manpower.1 By the end of the war and Japanese occupation, however, the hitherto transient Chinese and Indians had become transformed into a domiciled labor force, conscious of their organizational power and prepared to defend their interests.

Bengal textiles enjoyed a unique place and an indisputable supremacy in the world market for centuries before the invasion of the machinmade fabrics in the early nineteenth century following the industrial revolution of the West and Political control of the Indian sub-continent by the English East India Company. It need not be emphasized that the products of the Bengal handloom industry reigned supreme all over the accessible Asian and North African markets in the middle ages, and later became one of the major staples of the export trade of the European Companies. Most travellers from Europe starting with Tomé Pires, Varthema and Barbosa in the sixteenth century to Bernier, Tavernier and others in the seventeenth singled out especially textiles of Bengal for comments on their extraordinary quality and exquisite beauty. But it was not only in the field of high qulity cloth that Bengal had a predominant position; it was also the main Production centre of ordinary and medium quality textiles. Long before the advent of the Europeans, the Asian merchants from different parts of the continent and Indian merchants from various regions of the country derived a lucrative trade in Bengal textiles.

Understanding how unequal relations are reproduced over time is as significant as comprehending inequality itself. For unequal relations exist only in human practices that reproduce them. More than a play on words, the coupling of production with reproduction in recent anthropological studies highlights processes that provide the basis for production. The necessity of reconstructing practices that reproduce social relations is perhaps nowhere more neglected than in the study of South Asian history. When it comes to explaining how unequal relations between social groups were maintained, the caste system is the perennial favorite. This is particularly so where relations between landlords and landless laborers are concerned. Thus, even Jan Breman's sophisticated and rich study of dependent laborers in South Gujarat points to the jajmani system, the institutional form of caste relations in the agrarian context, as the basis for relations between laborers and landlords in the past. While his study illuminates how bonded labor relations can be understood in the light of the jajmani model, it fails to explain how these relations were reproduced. Are we to assume that the transactional norms of the caste system, once in place, simply drove laborers and landlords into actions that reproduced bondage?