Through a description of the interactions of Christian missionaries in Chhotanagpur with the Oraons, this article illustrates the different ways in which the missionaries grappled with and restructured their notions of the ‘tribe’ and the ‘Oraon’ across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Oraon, I argue, was initially recognized in terms of his heathen practices, his so-called compact with the Devil, and his world of idolatry and demonology. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, he increasingly became, in missionary language, an animistic aboriginal tribe, a ‘primitive’ within an evolutionary schema. As the missionaries searched for an authentic Oraon language, for myths, traditions and histories, an array of categories—heathen, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—seemingly jostled with one another in their narratives. Indeed, the tension between religion and race could never be resolved in missionary narratives; this was reflected in colonial ethnographic literature that drew upon and yet eventually marginalized missionary representations. I conclude by referring to a case in the 1960s filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi, which was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court, that raised the question whether religion or race determined tribal identity.

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.

The history of coal mining in Malaya is synonymous with the history of Malayan Collieries and Batu Arang town since coal was only ever economically mined in this small area in Ulu Selangor. The town of Batu Arang, the Malayan Collieries and the mines left an indelible mark on Malayan history. Previous accounts of the history of coal mining are restricted to mentions in general works on labour and the labour unrest of 1936–37 and 1946–47. This paper outlines the role of coal mining in the Malayan economy in the first half of the twentieth century. It also focuses on the history of labour at the collieries and the significant role that labour played in the development and growth of industrial activism in Malaya.

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.

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.

As early as 1613, the leadership of the Dutch East India Company [VOC] recognized the importance of direct trade with China. Attempts to gain a foothold on the Chinese coast by use of force in the early decades of the century were unsuccessful. Beginning in 1624, the Dutch used a fortified settlement on the island of Taiwan as the next best thing to a mainland base. When their position on Taiwan was threatened in the middle of the century, the VOC directors decided to try to get their mainland trading privileges through diplomacy. Although later embassies have received more extensive scholarly attention, relatively little research has been done into the expectations and strategies of the various parties involved in the first VOC embassy of 1655–1657.

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.

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 explores the political dynamics of modern Chinese cultural conservatism. It proceeds from the premise that modern Chinese conservatism, as distinct from traditionalism, was a response to modernity and, as such, a part of modernity. The article identifies the conservative with the nationalist, but not vice versa, and understands politico-cultural conservatism as politico-cultural nationalism. It will first trace the rise of modern Chinese conservative thought, revisit the ideas of two noted cultural conservatives Liang Shuming and Zhang Junmai, examine the politics of China-based cultural reconstruction, and then explore the conservative thought of the war period (1937–1945) to illustrate the interplay of war, culture and nationalism. It argues, basically, that although the conservatives did not defend the prevailing socio-political order as a whole, their understanding of politics from a cultural perspective was nuanced and that they stood in an ambiguous relationship with the existing regime and the party-state.

Historians have generally explained the consolidation of Company power in terms of the superior fiscal base which it came to acquire in north India. Bayly argues that in the eighteenth century the ‘commercialisation of royal power’, begun under the Mughals, extended to meet the needs of military organization and growing bureaucratizationof the numerous small polities that succeeded the Mughals. He argues that in this perio Indian merchant capital was redeployed in the search for greater control over labour productivity through control over revenue collections of all sorts; and the unified merchant class met in the new qasbahs and the small permanent markets (ganjs) attached to them. It was here that theinfrastructure for Europea trade in, and ultimate dominion over, India was constructed.1 The efficiency and wide scale on which the Company could exercise and extend the pre-colonial practice of military fiscalism2 has provided another explanation for the dominant position it came to occupy more specifically, in south India.3 Yang highlights the role ofthe Indian elite in facilitating the Company's revenue collection and thereby contributin to its political dominance and stability in the Saran district of Bihar. He constructs a model of'limited Raj', to explain the a free flow of revenue. He analyses the dynamics ofthis 'limited Raj' by explaining its functioning at the lowest level where the power of the colonial state tapered off and the landholders' system of control took over. Yang argues that these two control systems collectively sustained British rule in the region.4 More recently the Company's superior power in north Indian politics has been explained in terms of its exclusive right to violence. R. Mukherjee, analysing the 1857 mutiny, arguesthat 'British rule in India, as an autocracy, had meti meticulously constructed a monopoly of violence. The revolt of 1857 shatteredthat monopoly by matching an official, alien violence by an indigenous violence of the colonised

Globalization has compelled state governments to embrace economic liberalization as a means to participate purposely in an increasingly ‘borderless’ world economy. At a general level, this is seen to enable the economies in their charge to engage more effectively in the integrated international linkages of production, finance, distribution and investment being created by transnational business activities. Economic liberalization refers to an opening up of markets to greater competition, which had previously been constricted by various forms of state regulation or intervention, e.g. import tariffs. Hence, liberalization can under many circumstances lead to a general retreat of the state's position in matters of economic governance. However, it is argued here that smart approaches to economic liberalization do not necessarily require a weakening of state capacity but rather its upgrading. As such, questions about `how much' state involvement or economic liberalization is required to meet the challenges posed by globalization need to be replaced with those of ‘what kind’.

Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors. Invidious comparisons have situated Russia firmly in a context of backwardness relative to the West. The term ‘medieval’ customarily applies to Russia until the era of Peter the Great, that is, until the early eighteenth century, and even the least condemnatory scholars point out similarities between Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and early medieval tribal formations of northern Europe. Along with ‘backwardness,’ comparative history has customarily found in Russia an example of extraordinarily oppressive autocratic despotism, while at the same time, and omewhat contradictorily, decrying the incompetence and rampant corruption of the central state apparatus. These and other unflattering comparative generalizations arose in the observations of Western travellers who recorded their impressions of Russia in the early modern period and have continued in the writings of scholars and journalists to this day.

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.

In a recent and thought-provoking article, Dr Lakshmi Subramanian has forcefully made the case that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the history of the West Coast of India in general and the history of the city of Surat in particular are explained by the rise of what she terms the ‘Anglo-Bania order’, namely ‘a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay’.More specifically, Dr Subramanian claims that the rise of the Anglo-Bania order is at the roots of the first Hindu—Muslim communal clash about which a reasonably good documentation has survived, namely the ‘great tumult’ of August 1795, when ‘the lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books’.

However surprising Russell's combination of mathematical logic and pacifist anti-capitalist ethics may appear, it becomes understandable if one looks for its psychological roots. He who is ready to overthrow the oldest traditions in logic and to uncover the illusory nature of ancient ideals will also look with more freedom at the ideals of bourgeois ethics and not be afraid to give up values which those who are tradition-bound are unable to renounce.

UNESCO's founding in 1946 coincided with the resumption of hostilities between China's ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) and their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rivals for power. The new international organization's officials in Paris and its representatives on the ground in China were thus forced to navigate a fractious and fluid set of national circumstances that would result in an ambiguous outcome in 1949, with regimes on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan both claiming to represent ‘China’. Although the KMT-led Republic of China continued to claim membership in UNESCO until the 1970s, the international organization nevertheless continued to operate within the People's Republic of China (PRC) for a number of years. Exploring the relationship between the issue of Chinese representation in UNESCO and the organization's on-the-ground presence from the mid-1940s through to the early 1950s, this article argues that domestic and international factors were inescapably intertwined in shaping the trajectory of Chinese relations with international organizations during this period. While CCP officials demonstrated a mixture of ideology and pragmatism, similar to their handling of foreign entities and groups present in the PRC after its founding, engagement with UNESCO was significantly shaped by the complexity and depth of the KMT's engagement with the international organization from its inception onwards. The CCP's relations with UNESCO underscore the extent to which the emerging Cold War—and China's place within it—was ultimately characterized by complexity and contingency.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article contributes to debates on married women's relations with their natal kin. It compares women in ‘regional’ marriages (which conform to caste and community norms with a relatively small marriage distance) with women in ‘cross-regional’ marriages (those that cross caste, linguistic, and state boundaries, and entail long-distance migration). A focus on cross-regional marriage demonstrates how geographic distance cuts women off from vital structures of support. At the same time, even for regional brides, natal kin support is complicated and relative proximity does not guarantee support. Factors such as caste, class, poverty, the gender of children, notions of honour and shame, and stage in the life-course work together in complex ways to determine the duration and kind of support available. By focusing on marital violence, marital breakdown, and widowhood, the article demonstrates both the presence and the limits of natal kin support. The opportunities to draw on natal kin support vary for women, but its significance must not be understated as it alone provides women with the possibility of leaving their marriages, even if only temporarily. The article focuses on one form of women's agency, one that is constrained and highly dependent on relationships with others (mainly male kin). In such a context of economic and social dependency, natal kin support is an important—and perhaps the only—resource available in situations of marital crisis, and its absence leaves women in a particularly vulnerable position.

A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultural Revolution. Hyer and Heaton are concerned primarily with the power struggles within the political apparatus, and they include no first-hand or eyewitness accounts. The paper gives no indication of the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon the great bulk of the population of the I.M.A.R., either Mongolian or Han Chinese. However, the article does carefully document the rapidly changing tide of Inner Mongolian government policy and the emergence of populist groups which challenged the political establishment, over the period 1965 to 1968.

This paper adds to a relatively new line of research investigating inadvertent transformations of urban colonial space generated by collective trauma. To the now classic iterative, and racial dynamics of Neild's ‘accommodation’ in the development of Madras,1 and of Yeoh's ‘contesting’ of the built environment in Singapore2—specifically in the tugging and pulling between local and colonial influences within the spatial discourse of colonial port cities—needs to be added that of single or multiple-event collective trauma. Such trauma, perceived as brought upon by unexpected external causes, might consolidate, perhaps accelerate, or even sever a previous sequence of spatial negotiation, particularly if that sequence was politically vulnerable or immature. The paper is a focused account of such an occurrence: the small-scale yet intensely traumatic events of Hong Kong Island while still in its colonial infancy in 1843, the year of the ‘Hongkong Fever’. It argues that a new conception of malaria—considered then a miasma—now linked both to location and construction, led to the first reactive, yet decisive, reconfiguring of a previously improvised urban colonization process, consequently salvaging Hong Kong's position within a wider imperial context.

This article explores the relationship between Chinese officials and Western European industrialists, revealing that in the second half of the 1950s, there already was a specific Western European interest in China's market potential, and that this was met with favour on the Chinese side. In order to become a strong and independent country, the People's Republic of China was especially interested in evaluating a wide range of offers in the chemical and energy sectors. By looking at the early achievements of the Italian company, National Hydrocarbon Holding (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI), this article will show how its offer in terms of technology and engineering met with the favour of the Chinese at the beginning of the 1960s. This was just when the local petroleum industry was moving towards self-reliance, which China ultimately achieved, albeit for a short time. Sources show that, despite economic and political constraints, PRC decision-makers were perfectly aware of prices and commercial strategies, as well as of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. Furthermore, China's commercial cooperation with Western European companies in the 1950s–1960s meant that early on Chinese leaders had an opportunity to evaluate market alternatives to their tightly constraining alliance with the Socialist bloc.