One interesting aspect of the Revolution of 1911 in China was the role of the new-style army. The new-style troops, as one category of revolutionary activists distinct from the civilian radical intellectuals, determined the opening phase of the revolution, initiating the Wuchang uprising and bringing pressure to bear on most of the provincial leaders. Their contribution was the physical strength which the revolutionary intellectuals, who provided the ideology, lacked. The army played its vital role, not in the beginning of the revolutionary movement, but at a later stage when the prevailing order had been discredited and the imperial government had lost the allegiance of the people. Indeed, the success of the revolution reflected the interaction between revolutionary ideas and military power.

In his final minute in March 1856, just on the eve of his departure from India, Lord Dalhousie, while reviewing the last eight years of his administration, describes the railways, electric telegraph and uniform postage which he introduced into India as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’. Posterity certainly knows how correct Dalhousie's description was, but under this prophetic utterance of Dalhousie flows a subtle current of philosophy which few scholars working on the Dalhousie era have been able to detect and interpret. That philosophy was the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his faithful and able lieutenant, James Mill. In his History of British India, which Mill undertook before 1808 and published in London in 1817, Mill had questioned the values of Indian society and suggested its reform on Benthamite principles. The key to progress in India, Mill also pointed out, lay in the introduction of Western science and knowledge. It is surprising that Daihousie, though a staunch Tory, subscribed to this view of Bentham and Mill about India and as a result ‘the natural alliance of the Scientific Benthamite administrator and the authoritative Tory gentlemen’ which ‘was never fully achieved in England’ was ‘achieved only in India’.

Economic nationalism may seem rather too grand a term for the contents of this paper. And indeed, I have not attempted any analysis of the economics of economic nationalism. My concern is with the nationalist element in the equation, in particular the basic perceptions of nationalists inside Korea who responded to the plight of their colonially oppressed nation. The question, ‘Is economic nationalism viable under colonial occupation?’ may be answered negatively in Korea's case. But one may equally assert that all nationalist movements and all economic action, of left or right, were not viable in Korea at this time. Even if a certain theory of the determinative role of economic superstructures is employed, I suspect this question of viability may generate only fruitless dispute over whether we strictly mean non-viability or simply failure. Hence I willingly leave the theoretical aspects of the case to those equipped to deal with them.

All historians would agree that one decisive factor in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the alignment against it in 1867 of several of the great domains (han), and the failure of the Shōgun to rally any comparable support among the rest. In the wider sense the reasons for this are complex, as well as being a matter of some controversy. Nevertheless, the proximate causes are obvious enough. In the anti-Bakufu domains, notably Satsuma and Chōshū, power had fallen into the hands of samurai groups which sought the destruction of the régime. In a number of others, similar groups wielded sufficient influence to prevent the daimyō or his senior officials from giving whole-hearted backing to the Tokugawa. Clearly, therefore, the study of how this came about, that is, of the nature and processes of domain politics, is important to an understanding of the Meiji Restoration.

Tablighi Jama’at is one of the most popular Islamic purist movements in the world. Although it has a growing presence in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, little research has thus far been done on its activities in that country. To gain access to Indonesian society, the Tablighi Jama’at has been particularly original in choosing a uniquely Indonesian institution as its entry point: the pesantren (Islamic boarding schools). The role of pesantren for the Tablighis in Indonesia is not confined to spreading Islamic knowledge, they also serve as a hub of Tablighi activities. This paper focuses on examining the role of the Tablighi pesantren in shaping and transmitting religious knowledge to its Indonesian followers, and in particular to female followers, as there is to date no scholarship on this topic. It analyses the life experiences of female Tablighis inside and outside the pesantren and their passion to belong to a global imagined Tablighi community. Transnational travel of female Tablighis from diverse neighbouring countries is a central part of the pesantren experience. For Indonesian Tablighi women, the presence of these female guests and foreign students who are enrolled in the pesantren play a significant role in strengthening their passionate desire to be part of the global Tablighi Jama’at umma.

After the Taiping Rebellion, Governors-General and Governors had access to resources and performed functions which were formerly outside their purview. These resources were mainly the new provincial armies which had defeated the Taipings, and the likin taxes which had been invented to sustain the armies. Leading provincial officials such as Li Hung-chang also found themselves initiating and implementing, on a local basis, ‘self-strengthening’ economic projects ranging from arsenals to mines. They tended to be stationed longer in the same posts, and to have a certain amount of say in the appointment of their subordinates.

This article explores the politics of civic engagement during India's long decolonization between 1938 and 1952 for communities—the erstwhile ‘criminal tribes’—whose lifestyles were complicated by controls on their movement before and shortly following India's independence. It argues that their varied and contingent strategies of mobilization increasingly identified community particularities—notably, their marking as ‘criminals’ and a history of movement—as a basis for negotiating their problematic inclusion within the evolving citizenship frameworks of the late colonial, then post-colonial, state. These early forms of civic consciousness set the parameters for later strategies that sought to mobilize communities by engaging with ‘universal’, ‘differentiated’, and indigenized conceptions of civic responsibility and rights. The most surprising finding of this research is that these strategies (via anti-colonialism) often embraced and celebrated forms of illegality and criminality. The romanticism of the dacoit (bandit)-cum-freedom fighter charged Dhaku Sultan-like figures with political heroism. In the context of independence and the founding of the Constitution, strategies turned to the (un)realized promises of freedom and citizenship rights. The final part of the article turns to the implications of ‘denotification’ for the so-called criminal tribes in the early 1950s, which provided both obstacles and avenues to strategies of mobilization after independence.

Accessing the day-to-day, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis in the early 1950s can be difficult as a result of the relative paucity of relevant primary material. One set of sources, however, are the letters written to the editors of contemporary newspapers during this period, in which correspondents outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and aired their frustrations with, the everyday state in the years following independence and Pakistan's creation. This paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (Karachi) during 1950–1953 in order to explore the views of ordinary citizens as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortage, and corruption.

Japanese images of China have much to tell us about the way Japan sees its own modernisation and its place in the international system. Contrary to popular belief, Japan did not turn unabashedly toward the USA after 1945. During the first decade after World War II, a number of important Japanese radical historians and thinkers decided that modernisation could be accomplished without the help of the West. Just when many in Japan were looking to America and Europe as exemplars of modernisation, others looked instead to revolutionary China and its past struggles against Japanese colonialism in the construction of a very different historical position from that ordinarily associated with the early post-war years. Certain Japanese historians, inspired by the push toward decolonisation in Asia, set about writing the history of the present in ways that aligned Japan with modern Chinese history. Even though China had just been liberated from Japanese colonial rule, Japanese Marxists saw their own position—under American imperialism—as historically and politically congruous with China's past war of resistance against Japan (1937–45). Through campaigns to develop a kind of cultural Marxism on the margins of Japanese society, they sought to bring about post-war Japanese ‘national liberation’ from American hegemony in ways that consciously simulated past Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan. Replacing Japan's own cultural Marxist traditions from the pre-war era with the more palpable and acceptable example of China, they also hoped a new form of Asian internationalism could remedy the problem of Japan's wartime past. The historical irony associated with this discursive twist deferred to future generations the problem of how the Left* would come to terms with the past.

Based on fieldwork in Bibiyana, northeast Bangladesh, this article compares the transnational charity offered to known individuals by migrant, UK-based families with the philanthropic efforts of the multinational company Chevron, which operate a large gas field in the neighbourhood. Applying Fassin's notion of the ‘politics of suffering’ to both types of exchange, the article argues that the two types of giving are underlain by incommensurate moral economies. While in instances of transnational charity, social inequality and the compassion felt towards the suffering of known people, or ‘our own poor’, underscore the exchanges, in the philanthropic efforts of ‘community engagement’ the inequality of giver and receiver is repressed and the exchange is animated by a moral economy. The latter is rooted in Christianity, in which compassion guides actions towards the suffering of unknown, anonymous strangers.

In 1961 the seventh global cholera pandemic, El Tor cholera, broke out in Indonesia. Between 1962 and 1964, El Tor infected the southeast coastal areas of China. This pandemic occurred at a time of significant reorganization for both the rural medical and health systems and the people's communes following the failures of the Great Leap Forward. This paper explores how local governments led rural medical practitioners, health care workers, and villagers to participate in the campaign against the spread of El Tor cholera despite the readjustment and retrenchment of the people's communes as social, administrative, and political units. I argue that, during this period of flux, the local government strengthened its control over rural medical practitioners by institutionalizing their daily work practices and reducing their freedom of movement, whilst simultaneously providing incentives for health care workers to join the vaccination campaign. The people's communes and the household-registration system after 1961 put further restrictions on population mobility. This cellularization of village society greatly facilitated the vaccination, quarantine, and epidemic-reporting processes, and contributed to the formation of an epidemic-prevention system and eventually a response scheme for managing public health emergencies in rural China. This process reflected the complexity of the mutual interactions between the political and medical systems under socialism.

This paper compares the definitions, practices, and legal constraints on labour in Britain, France, Mauritius, and Reunion Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that the way in which indentured labour was defined and practised in the colonies was linked to the definition and practice of wage labour in Europe and that their development was interconnected. The types of bondage that existed in the colonies were extreme forms of the notion, practices, and rules of labour in Europe. It would have been impossible to develop the indenture contract in the British and French empires if wage earners in Britain and France had not been servants. The conceptions and practices of labour in Europe and its main colonies influenced each other and were part of a global dynamic.

The English East India Company established a factory on the island of Condore, off the coast of southern Vietnam, in 1702 as part of its plan to maintain a settlement to direct shipping activities between trading ports in China and Southeast Asia and India. For three years, the settlement thrived and was an important part of the China trade network, especially as a stopping point for ships plying the China route. The island settlement also carried out trading activities with neighbouring ports along the Indochina coast and the Malay Archipelago. The setting up of the factory, however, coincided with the emergence of the new entity of southern Vietnam under the Nguyễn family who were expanding their power-base to the south. In the process, the Nguyễn had already subdued the Chams and were coming face-to-face with the Khmers when the English factory was established. This paper will trace the English venture on Condore Island and the reaction of the Nguyễn ruler towards this venture which culminated with the destruction of the factory in 1705. This paper will attempt to explore the following questions: the shifting importance of the islands in the Nguyễn's security and foreign relations vis-à-vis the English factory, and will also investigate the circumstances that brought about the massacre and destruction of the English factory on Pulo Condore—a historical event that has not been properly explained thus far.

The Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills in the North East Frontier of British India were subject to shifting and differentiated forms of colonial governance. Defying notions of coexistence with or autonomy from colonial rule, the colonial history of this region was bound up with specific spatio-temporal constructions. By examining the nature of jurisdictional and political encounters in the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills, this article addresses the interruptions to imperial sovereignty in the Frontier. Imperial sovereignty moved in juridical forms, affecting and being affected by classificatory challenges such as hills and plains, hill tribal, and settler. The relationship between jurisdictional boundaries, plural authority, and imperial sovereignty appears in judicial and revenue files of different levels of the English East India Company government and the British government. Recurrent boundary disputes between the spatio-temporal units of hills and plains during the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries point towards contingent strategies of governance. The unfolding of these disputes over the course of the nineteenth century also show that law and jurisdiction as carriers of imperial sovereignty were spatially and temporally uneven. The historical processes highlighted in this article concern the sub-region of Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills and parts of the Sylhet district of British Bengal, which, at present, constitute the Indian state of Meghalaya and parts of northern Bangladesh, respectively.

In the aftermath of independence, obtained in 1948, the Burmese government launched a project to valorize and promote traditional medicine which comprised the institutionalization and standardization of the teaching, practice, and production of medicines. The government justified this project by asserting the importance of protecting and improving—in terms of both quality and accessibility—this precious national heritage. Having contributed to the maintenance of people's health for centuries, it was nevertheless under threat of vanishing because of the dominance of biomedicine and because traditionally it had been passed down through a plurality of lineages using an esoteric language. Although recognizing the official motivation behind this project, this article suggests that it was also motivated by the need to unify and ‘Burmanize’ the country in the name of nation-building. Indeed, constructing a medicine that could compete with biomedicine, if not overtake it, would help in marking the country's distance and autonomy vis-a-vis the West. Spreading a standardized medicine, largely based on the Burman tradition, across the country would help eliminate inter-ethnic differences as well as the esoteric elements inherent in traditional medicine that were perceived as a potential threat to the state's authority. While claiming to protect a national heritage, the state was in fact crafting a new heritage that complied with a specific image of the nation—a unified modern Buddhist nation—in order to help it attain its political goals. The article also discusses to what extent this project has been successful by examining the limits of its implementations and the response of healers and manufacturers.

The slow growth of railways is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing features of the history of modernization in China. The Chinese government often gave as its reasons for opposition to railway development the fact that improved communications would facilitate foreign military expansion, that railways obstructed the feng-shui, that mandarin and peasant alike were opposed to the railway, and that railways destroyed the livelihood of the common people. But, until recently, these explanations have never been given serious consideration, despite the fact that Ch'ing officials discussed railway-policy in these terms in a major debate in 1866–67. This is partly because historians have found it difficult to accept Chinese objections to railway development at their face-value, and partly because Chinese officials themselves, seeing that foreigners were unimpressed by Chinese arguments against railway construction, offered others which they thought would be more acceptable to the Western mind. This essay, however, tries to analyse Chinese objections as a coherent body of thought that might be said to xpress 'Confucian Patriotism'. It considers in detail the events surround-ing the destruction of the Woosung railway.

Gandhi's passive resistance campaigns in South Africa and his satyagraha agitation against the Rowlatt Bills in 1919 were conceived in wholly different circumstances; and the non-cooperation programme of 1920 was designed to meet conditions which were different again. To regard the non-cooperation movement simply as the logical consequence of the 1919 satyagraha and as the political application of Gandhi's ideology is to fail to appreciate just how experimental and uncertain Gandhi's politics were during this period.

Some people would no doubt be surprised to learn of a man like Kaiseki Sata who in the early days of Meiji zealously asserted that ‘every expedience is an evil and every inexpedience a benefit’, and that umbrellas, lamps, railways, steamships and other similar innovations could only be harmful. But others whose personal knowledge and experience of such things as the noise and polluted air of big cities, the growing toll of road accidents and the horrors of the atomic bomb have convinced them that too much so-called civilization does not secure human happiness might be more inclined to sympathize with him. In fact, Sata merely represented the feelings of men in the street, by no means small in number, who, accustomed to the traditional way of life under the Shogunate, were either implicitly or explicitly opposed to the new government or at least unable to adapt themselves to the new way of life which made its appearance so suddenly. To Sata anything brought in from abroad seemed harmful, for he feared that innovations might lead to the impoverishment of those who lived by traditional trades and so land the whole nation in misery. He never ceased to write and lecture on this topic, and even went as far as to petition the government to stop the importation, and discourage the use, of any foreign commodity whatsoever. However, because his influence was extremely small compared with that of the notorious motto 'Civilization and Culture', and because his attitude was seen as a mere feudal reaction to what was inevitable, his was after all a voice crying in the wilderness1.

The real issue at stake is the following: Since 1595 merchants from Holland and Zeeland have sent ships for trading purposes to several islands of the Indies that are not dependent upon Portugal. Now when the crews of these ships as well as the natives that were friendly to them had suffered great losses of lives and possessions due to the mischief of the Portuguese and their henchmen—unreliable and violent people who did not shrink from openly attacking the Dutch with force of arms—only then did the Dutch at long last fit themselves out to take revenge. After several hostilities from both sides Jakob van Heemskerck received command over an Amsterdam fleet of eight sails and with it he forced into submission on February 25th 1603 in the Strait of Singapore (that is, one of the two straits that separate Sumatra and Malacca) a Portuguese vessel, a so-called caracca, named Catarina and loaded with merchandise. merchandise. He released the crew and carried off the ship as a prize. Others have performe such exploits before and afterwards, yet because this feat of arms has caused the greatest stir, have decided to emphasize it in my enquiry so that one can easily judge the other events on basis of it.

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.