By examining the career of a woman agrarian entrepreneur in early nineteenth-century Gujarat, this article seeks to foreground the role of family firms specializing in the assessment, realization, and investment of land revenue. The article argues that such firms, which were commonly found service providers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were deemed to be alienators of the loyalties and revenues that the East India Company state considered its due. They were allowed to persist on sufferance for a few decades but were phased out by the 1830s, an obliteration that has erased their role from the history of South Asian capitalism.

Drawing on published documents and research in Russian, Uzbek, British, and Indian archives, this article explains how a hasty attempt by Russia to put pressure on the British in Central Asia unintentionally triggered the second Anglo–Afghan War of 1878–80. This conflict is usually interpreted within the framework of the so-called ‘Great Game’, which assumes that only the European ‘Great Powers’ had any agency in Central Asia, pursuing a coherent strategy with a clearly defined set of goals and mutually understood rules. The outbreak of the Second Anglo–Afghan war is usually seen as a deliberate attempt by the Russians to embroil the British disastrously in Afghan affairs, leading to the eventual installation of ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan, hosted for many years by the Russians in Samarkand, on the Afghan throne. In fact, the Russians did not foresee any of this. ‘Abd al-Rahman's ascent to the Afghan throne owed nothing to Russian support, and everything to British desperation. What at first seems like a classic ‘Great Game’ episode was a tale of blundering and unintended consequences on both sides. Central Asian rulers were not merely passive bystanders who provided a picturesque backdrop for Anglo–Russian relations, but important actors in their own right.

This article examines the religious and intellectual dynamics behind the Ottoman military reform movement, known as the New Order, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Conventionally, the New Order has been examined within the framework of the Westernization of Ottoman military and administrative institutions. The Janissary-led popular opposition to the New Order, on the other hand, has been understood as a conservative resistance, fashioned by Muslim anti-Westernization. This article challenges this assumption, based on a binary between Westernization reforms versus Islamic conservatism. It argues that the Janissary-led popular opposition, which was consolidated long before the New Order, developed as a form of resistance by antinomian elements blocking the top-down disciplinary policies of the central state throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The New Order programme, which was unleashed in 1792, was also opposed by the Janissary-led coalition, on the basis that it would wipe out vested privileges and traditions. Supporting the New Order, we see a coalition and different intellectual trends, including: (i) the Euro-Ottoman military enlightenment, led by military engineers and scientists, which developed an agenda to reorganize and discipline the social-military order with universal principles of military engineering and (ii) Islamic puritan activism, which developed an agenda to rejuvenate the Muslim order by eliminating invented traditions, and to discipline Muslim souls with the universal principles of revelation and reason. While the Euro-Ottoman military enlightenment participated in military reform movements in Europe, Islamic activism was part of a trans-Islamic Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi network originating in India. We thus witness a discursive alliance between military enlightenment and Muslim activism, both of which had trans-Ottoman connections, against a Janissary-led popular movement, which mobilized resistance to protect local conventions and traditions.

In light of the current Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, this article investigates the emergence of Islamophobia in colonial Burma. Focusing on the under-examined Islamophobic riots that broke out countrywide in 1938, my research reveals that a nascent fascist movement used Muslims as a scapegoat for political and economic crisis. The colonial agribusiness economy had collapsed during the Great Depression, while the vast contract labour system of the Indian Ocean had brought millions of low-wage Indian migrants to Burma, causing a glut in the labour market. Burmese socialism provided a popular response to these issues. To compete, Burmese fascism emerged to appeal to a rising sense of nationalism, racially scapegoating Indians and the religion of Islam as the exploiters, colonizers, and invaders behind Burma's problems. Using the racialized term kala to conflate the ideas of colonizer, Indian, and Muslim, Burmese fascists inflamed hatred against Indian Muslims, Indian Hindus, and even indigenous Muslims, such as the Rohingya. By revealing the origins of this racialization, this article both deconstructs the lasting Burmese perception of the Rohingya as ‘Bengali immigrants’ and provides a generalizable case study into how races and racisms develop from specific historical factors and political movements. It also argues that the British amplified fascist ideas in Burma by focusing repression on movements that directly challenged their material control, such as socialism and communism. Therefore, it highlights how ruling classes often prefer nationalistic movements because they redirect popular unrest from the project of overthrowing structural factors to that of eliminating scapegoated minorities.

Similar to the romanticized images that Manchuria would evoke with Japanese citizens looking for a better life in the 1930s, but on a larger geographical scale and over a longer chronological period, the Nan'yô, or South Seas, conjured up a multiple of idyllic visions within the imaginations of many Japanese. In Japanese perception over the course of the Meiji and Taishô periods, the Nan'yô became a region as diverse and as expansive as the interests and energies of those who directed their attention toward it. To disenfranchised ex-samurai, it was a warm tropical paradise, a territory in which to gain personal achievements and fulfill a sense of adventure. Politicians, journalists, and patriots hoping to plant the Japanese flag for national glory mistakenly viewed the South Seas as the one area untouched by Western imperialists and thus the optimal place for the new nation of Japan to acquire territories. On the other hand, certain entrepreneurs came to view the South Seas as a resource-rich economic treasure house, an area waiting to be exploited through commerce and industry.

Kinnaird College alumnae who did not work often expressed regret for having been ‘just’ wives and mothers, and a feeling of not having lived up to expectations. In some cases, these women's parents planned for them to have professional careers, but more often, such women mentioned the expectations of their college teachers that alumnae would contribute to their society in some concrete way.Educated women, in short, left Kinnaird with a sense that their education implied obligations to society. Women with careers, whether or not they had married, were satisfied that they had ‘used’ their educations fittingly. Women without careers often expressed dissatisfaction, at least to a foreign observer, butat the same time, they justified their education by pointing with pride to the way they had reared their own children, recognizing that mothers are active transmitters of social identities within the family. Alumnae who remained in primarily domestic roles as wives and mothers frequently expanded their world to include non-domestic social work and other activities beyond their immediate kin group.

The First World War changed the pattern of international relations in East Asia. What had previously been another arena for the European power struggle became the cockpit for two regional forces, Japanese expansionism and incipient Chinese nationalism. The confrontation between the two, which was to last for a quarter of a century, began as a most unequal contest. Great power rivalry had enabled China to balance off her enemies and to maintain her status as a sovereign entity. But with Europe distracted, China was helpless, and Japan had a unique opportunity to pursue an independent expansionist policy. Instead of cooperating with England and the other powers in order to get a fair share of the China spoils, after 1914 Japan could make her bid for the grand prize, exclusive access to China's resources. Thus the European powers’ pre-occupation with mutual slaughter exposed China to extreme danger, greater than that which she had faced during the heyday of classical imperialism.1 But Japan was not alone in welcoming the European retreat. Japan’s opportunity was also Sun Yat-sen's opportunity.

The historical literature on Indian Ocean trade has now come to recognize the importance of food-grains as an ingredient of that trade. In the western part of the Ocean (the Arabian Sea), its eastern part (Bay of Bengal) and within the Southeast Asian mainland and islands, there is every evidence of a substantial movement of food-grains from surplus areas to deficit areas. Though the scale and frequency of this trade may not be relatively as important in the regional economy as Braudel has outlined for the Mediterranean (with the assistance, it must be admitted, of superior quantitative evidence), it was nevertheless one of the commodities that entered into the commercial processes of different regions of the Ocean. The evidence for the study of the grain trade is, as with all Asian trade in the early modern period, fragmentary and episodic. As intrinsic to the sector of trade embracing Asian merchant shippers and consumers, it shares the disadvantages of paucityof evidence of that whole sector. Again, as with Asian trade as a whole, the grain trade comes into view only when Europeans have entered into that trade and have left glimpses of it in their records.The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased ,enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade

While China's response to Western imperialism during the closing years of the Ch'ing dynasty has been the subject of thoughtful and imaginative research, the history of China's frontiers during that period, by contrast, has received relatively little attention. This article attempts to survey briefly the impact which the transformation of Chinese politics, economics and society had on the frontier, Outer Mongolia in particular, and to examine the changes wrought by foreign imperialism and Chinese nationalism on the frontier policies of the Ch'ing government.

When, more than ten years ago, Professor Harry Benda urged Southeast Asian historians to consider the significance of peasant movements, he wrote with singular perspicacity. The attention that had been paid to the peasantry as a political force in the literature published up to the middle 1960s was limited. Nevertheless, on the basis of his own research into the Samin movement in Java and a shrewd estimation that much available evidence had been neglected, he argued for both the possibility and the worth of studying peasant movements throughout colonial Southeast Asia. Like many other students, I was struck by the force of Harry Benda's arguments, and the following essay owes much to his scholarly inspiration.

‘I am of course opposed to the driving out of the Malay, but would rather have the land occupied and planted with rubber than lying absolutely uncultivated as it had been’. J. S. Mason, British Adviser Kelantan, 21.7.1911.

Recent historiography of India has focused much needed attention on rural economy and society. The literature has dealt with a number of issues, such as merchants, credit, impact of communications, land-tenure (revenue), rural politics, rich peasants and general essays on the ‘agrarian structure’ of various regions of the sub-continent. In many of the studies a common theme emerges. It is suggested that with the establishment of an integrated market economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rural wealth and power tended to concentrate in the hands of relatively few rich peasants or a rural elite. In the case of south India, the contention of increased rural stratification on these lines is most convincingly put forth by David Washbrook and Christopher Baker in a series of articles and books. The present analysis will concentrate on Washbrooks' writings in reference to the agrarian structure of the ‘dry’ districts. His works provide the most comprehensive and coherent statement of the ‘rural magnate’ interpretation of agrarian organization.

The exchanges that comprised the formal meetings between Indian Rulers and the British Residents attached to their courts both reflected and, in some measure, determined the changing political relationships between the Indian states and the English East India Company. As the Resident and his staff introduced new symbols and meanings into his ritual intercourse with an Indian Ruler, these new elements affected the attitudes and actions taken by the audiences of these exchanges, in both India and Britain. As the military and political power of the Company flowed over or around the regional states of India during the period 1764–1858, the Company's Residents proved able to assert increasing influence over the shape of these rituals in the Indian courts.

A Substantial body of literature argues persuasively that Indian towns were often founded by local political-military rulers to serve as fortress-headquarters. In order to enhance their personal prestige, improve the efficiency of their administration, and provide market facilities for their small kingdoms, the rulers later invited merchants, artisans, administrators, and professionals to the fortress capitals. These invited, non-landed groups then formed courts, markets, and temple establishments which were dependent on the ruler for protection in an often violent atmosphere. The headquarters towns have been seen as the geographical locus and political nexus, or hinge, at which village levels of polity were linked with regional or state levels of government in a predominantly agrarian society. The most explicit and sophisticated presentation of this ‘hinge’ view is in Richard Fox's ‘Rajput “Clans” and Rurban Settlements in Northern India.'

This essay explores labor politics in Bengal in the period between 1890 and 1939. It investigates numerous supposed paradoxes in labor politics such as the coexistence of intense industrial action marked by workers’ solidarity and communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims, labor militancy and weak formal trade union organization. In existing historiography, these paradoxes are explained through a catch all phrase ‘peasant worker’—a concept that perceives Indian workers as not fully divorced from rural society and thus were susceptible to fragmentary pulls of natal ties that acted as a break on the emergence of class consciousness. In contradistinction to such historiography this paper argues that religion, language and region did not always act as a break on workers’ ability to unite. It demonstrates that workers’ politics was informed and influenced by notions of customary rights based on mutuality of shared interests at workplaces. When workers perceived that management violated such customary rights, they formed alliances among themselves and engaged in militant industrial action. In such circumstances, workers’ natal ties assisted in producing solidarities. By drawing upon Chandavarkar's works, this essay accords importance to the contingency of politics in the making and unmaking of alliances among workers and thus argues that in different political circumstances religious or other forms of natal ties acquired different meanings to different groups of workers.

Writing for Premchand (1880–1936) was a mission. In the course of a literary career that spanned over three decades he passionately clung to the belief that no writer in a subject country could afford the luxury of writing without a social purpose. India, so long as it was ‘under the yoke of alien subjection’, could not ‘scale the highest peaks of art’. Her writers were obliged by their political and social conditions to educate the people wherever it was possible for them to do so. The more intensely they felt, the more effectively educative became their work. Aware of the inevitable price, in terms of literary quality, that the colonial writer had willy-nilly to pay, Premchand had the insight to see the identity between the demands of society and the demands of literature. And precisely because he could perceive this identity, he succeeded increasingly in creating works that combined social purpose and artistic excellence.

With increasing income disparity between the developed and the developing nations of the world, there is an increasing tendency on the part of various governments of the Third World countries to export labour power among other commodities, with the hope of getting overseas remittances to improve their unfavourable balance of payment vis-à-vis the developed nations and/or to improve the economic well-being of the country as a whole. As well, some individual families and communities in dire straits are eager to send their members overseas not only to reduce the number of mouths to be fed but also to earn extra income to keep themselves from sinking too far below the poverty line.

The only really unique feature of the Mappilla outbreaks which occurred in Malabar District during the period of British rule was that each attack was conducted as a kind of suicidal jihād, in which the Mappillas involved intentionally sought to become shahīds or martyrs for the faith. No other South Asian Muslims who took part in protest movements to achieve goals similar to those which underlay the Mappilla attacks resorted to suicidal jihāds as a means of coercion. Yet no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to account for the Mappillas' peculiar militancy. Modern scholars have generally ignored the question, while the few British officials who tried to answer it usually argued, or implicitly suggested, that the attacks represented the inherent fanaticism of Islam. This explanation is, of course, vitiated by the very uniqueness of the Mappillas' suicidal ritual.

Contemporary critics argued that counter-insurgency in Malaya represented more than the defeat of militant communism. Britain's campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was seen as resulting from British government collaboration with British capitalists to maintain profits at the expense of the legitimate aspirations of Malayan workers. More recently, it has been argued that the declaration of the emergency in June 1948 was a pre-emptive strike intended to ‘resolve the problem of political control’ and prevent the ‘radical nationalist forces organized around the MCP’ from gaining a nation-wide following. According to this view, government strategy was to ‘manage nationalism’ and ‘control’ decolonization so as to preserve the position of British capital in Malaya. For marxists, the emergency is seen as part of the process of establishing ‘neo-colonialism’. Even for less determinist models, the general complicity between British government and British business in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns is apparently clear. In primary-producing territories like Malaya, the harmony of interests between ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ officials and unofficials (centred on the City of London) ensured that after 1945 ‘coercion tended to be the first resort of policy’. The majority of scholarly output on the emergency has focused on official and guerrilla strategies leaving aside the role of business interests. As a result, the relationship between British business and British government has not been explored in depth. The present article seeks to fill this historiographical gap by reassessing official and commercial interaction in politically disturbed Malaya.

Thich Tri Quang has long been one of the most controversial actors in the history of the Vietnam War. Scholars on the right have argued that Tri Quang was in all likelihood a communist agent operating at the behest of Hanoi. Scholars on the left have argued that Tri Quang was a peaceful religious leader devoted to democracy and a rapid end to the war. This article argues that neither of these interpretations is persuasive. As American officials rightly concluded throughout the war, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Tri Quang was a communist agent or in any way sympathetic to the goals of Hanoi or the NLF. Drawing on the extensive archival evidence of Tri Quang's conversations with American officials, it is apparent that Tri Quang was in fact strongly anti-communist and quite receptive to the use of American military power against North Vietnam and China. The main factor that led to conflict between the Buddhist movement and the Johnson administration was Tri Quang's insistence that the military regimes that followed Ngo Dinh Diem were hostile to Buddhism and incapable of leading the struggle against Communism to a successful conclusion.