To debate about patterns of economic and social mobility within peasant societies is hardly a new game. In particular, our modern discussions are the heirs of a Russian heritage, inevitably mirroring, in some aspect, the great arguments about agrarian change which raged there between the late nineteenth century and collectivization. Two elements ensured for the Russian literature a special cogency and the potential for widespread application. Firstly, the mass of zemstvo statistics provided a more reliable empirical base to theoretical discussions than in any other equivalent society. Secondly, the debate over the peasantry was at the very forefront of the economic and political struggle over Russia's future. Russia between 1890 and 1930 was a society uniquely torn between the advanced and the less developed worlds, bouts of extensive, feverishly quick industrial growth coexisting with an agriculture where Malthusian crisis seemed inexorably to be gathering. The economic performance of the peasantry, three-quarters of the population, clearly provided the key to Russia's developmental fate. In addition, understanding agrarian society was crucial to the political battle for the country. If a large and powerful rich peasant class existed or, as Stolypin hoped, could be created, then the countryside's loyalty could be secured for a conservative régime. Alternatively, Lenin's interpretation of an impoverished, embittered majority within the peasantry seemed to promise a much sounder basis for political revolution than the support of the tiny Russian industrial proletariat. This immediate, practical importance of the Russian peasant debate sharpened the cut and thrust of the arguments.

George Sansom once called the history of education in late nine-teenth-century Japan ‘a useful example of a reaction against foreign influence and a return to tradition in the midst of a strenuous process of “modernization”.’ Sansom and others have depicted Japanese education during the first three decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912) as follows: during the 1870s Japanese education was completely dominated by the Western philosophies and principles which were flooding a country newly opened to foreign intercourse after two and one-half centuries of isolation. This extreme Westernization led to a ‘conservative reaction’ in government and education circles during the 1880s. This, in turn, culminated in the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 and the emphasis on ‘traditional’ moral education which was the hallmark of schooling in the 1890S. This shift in educational policy on the part of the Meiji government has been seen as ‘part of the general swing during the 1880s away from unnecessarily close imitation of the West and back towards more traditional values.’

In 1980, the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu were chosen to be India's first biosphere reserve under the Man and the Environment program launched by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in an attempt to conserve for study examples of characteristic eco-systems from each of the world's natural regions. Scholastic interest from a broad spectrum of disciplines has turned, therefore, to the Nilgiris, and it has become apparent that although the Nilgiris have been studied extensively, anthropological attention has been uneven and parts of the region have been grossly understudied. The present paper intends to provide a foundation for filling this gap in the Nilgiri scholarship.

This paper explores the relationship between stress patterns of disyllabic constructions in the Peking Dialect of Modern Chinese and their grammatical structure. It suggests that the existing diverse stress patterns represent different stages of stress shift which is the mechanism employed to signal a formative grammatical process leading from loose syntactical to close morphological constructions. It finally proposes that, apart from the well-known effects of stress shift such as the loss of the tone and reduction in the segmental structure of unstressed syllables, the process ultimately results in the fusion of syllables and the appearance of relatively more complex syllabic shapes.

Malaysia's planning organization has become the institutional centrepiece of that country's development effort. Indeed, Malaysia ranks as one of the non-Communist developing countries where planning is most highly institutionalized. Malaysian planning evolved as an effective policy mechanism for directing the authoritative allocation of public resources towards declared developmental objectives. Despite this attachment to national planning, Malaysia remains a staunchly market-oriented, open, and predominantly private enterprise economy. Nevertheless, as the role of planning expanded, private sector activity became increasingly subject to policy interventions predicated upon the politically-determined goals of development planning.

Study of the economic and social history of modern mainland South Asia—covering present-day India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh over roughly the last hundred years—has been a major academic growth industry since the 1960s. The result has been a bulky and disparate corpus of work, spinning off in many directions and adopting increasingly inter-disciplinary approaches, with historians borrowing from, informing, and interacting with anthropologists, sociologists, and economists among others. The sheer volume of recent research is impressive. One survey of empirical work on the nineteenth century (N. C. Charlesworth, The Indian Economy under British Rule, 1800–1914, London, 1983) lists over 150 titles, more than half of them published in the 1970s; another discussion of conceptual material available for the study of Indian economic growth and development in an historical context has over 100 footnote references, and an appendix listing 109 further relevant works published between 1979 and 1984.

This paper discusses the nature of local permutations of transnational Muslim networks in Thailand's southern Muslim-majority provinces and assesses their impact on creed, custom, and conflict in the region. More specifically, the paper interrogates the agenda and methods of idea and norm-propagation on the part of these agents and networks, and their evolving role, as well as the structures and conduits through which they operate and mobilize. In so doing, it finds a tremendously fluid and dynamic terrain in southern Thailand, where narratives, representations, and expressions of Islamic doctrine, legitimacy, and authority, are increasingly heavily contested within the Muslim community as a whole. In addition, the paper investigates the transnational dimensions of on-going violence in the southern provinces. Here, it argues that there is little by way of substantive evidence of any sustained penetration of the conflict in southern Thailand by external actors. No doubt, many have attempted to draw conclusions to the contrary, but their evidence and arguments, not to mention analytical methodology, are tenuous at best.

This paper explores and re-defines notions of nationhood as reflected in the Bengali literati's expressions of an empowered identity in tracts, pamphlets and articles in periodicals during the late colonial period. It shifts the focus from existing assumptions of the nation as an artefact of modernity by demonstrating that though ideas about nationhood acquired a coherent and articulated form in the late nineteenth century, its roots are to be traced back to the pre-modern era. By interrogating the relatively unexplored conceptual category of samaj (social collectivity) deployed by the literati, this essay demonstrates how a connection was forged between the modern nation and the historical community from whence it emerged. Ideas about nationhood articulated by the literati had indigenous origins, which were oriented to a tradition of a shared world of values and conduct. In highlighting such origins I seek to qualify existing academic models that regard colonial nationalisms as ‘borrowed’ or ‘derivative’, and stress the tremendous difficulty in transcending western paradigms. The notion of a nation in colonial Bengal was produced through a complex interaction between re-orientations of indigenous ideas of past unities and the historical circumstances of the modern period. The latter included influences emanating from the late colonial situation, specifically the development of print technologies and the emergence of a civil society in India after 1800.

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own.

This paper explores the efforts and impact of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (1834–1839), which existed during the five years before the First Opium War. It contends that the Society represented a third form of British engagement with the Chinese, alongside the diplomatic attempts of 1793 and 1816, and the military conflict of 1839–1842. The Society waged an ‘information war’ to penetrate the information barrier that the Qing had established to contain European trade and missions. The foreigners in Canton believed they were barred from further access to China because the Chinese had no information on the true character of the Europeans. Thus, they prepared ‘intellectual artillery’ in the form of Chinese language publications, especially on world geography, to distribute among the Chinese, in the hope that this effort would familiarize the Chinese with the science and art of Westerners and thereby cultivate respect and a welcoming atmosphere. The war metaphor was conceived, and the information war was waged, in the periphery of the British informal empire in Canton, but it contributed to the conceptualization of war against China, both in Canton and in Britain, in the years before actual military action. Behind the rhetoric of war and knowledge diffusion in Canton, lay a convergence of interests between merchants and missionaries, which drove both to employ information and military power to further their shared aim of opening China up for trade and proselytizing.

Although the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.

Conjunctures of globalization and education have shaped the intersection of Buddhist monasticism and international tourism in the Northern Thai city, Chiang Mai. International tourism in Chiang Mai has been popular since the 1990s, while monks from all over Thailand and South and Southeast Asia have come to Chiang Mai in large numbers to pursue higher education in English since the 2000s. Focusing on Buddhist temples that contain a Monk Chat programme, where tourists and monks engage in conversation, this article analyses the responses of Buddhist monks towards a range of international tourists. Utilizing the perspectives of Buddhist monks through interviews reveals attitudes towards Western and Asian tourists as situated within broader discourses of Thai society. Investigating these attitudes and responses within the context of wider state, regional, and transnational influences, I argue that attitudes towards religious others are inextricably connected to missionization.

In 1971 a war led to the creation of Bangladesh. Instantly three narratives sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. Today more layered interpretations are superseding these ‘first-generation narratives’. Taking the case of insurgents from neighbouring India who, against their will, became embroiled in the war, this article seeks to contribute to ‘second-generation narratives’ that challenge the historiographical apportioning of blame and the national/ethnic framing of the conflict. The article uses hitherto-unpublished photographs from private collections to demonstrate how the war for the liberation of Mizoram (India) and that for the liberation of Bangladesh became entangled. Jointly they produced a ‘war within a war’ that unsettles common assumptions about both these struggles.

This article inquires into the cultural and political nexus of secular (stage) magic, modernity, and Orientalism at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that these three arenas interacted in important and special ways to both shape and reflect the politics of knowledge of the period. In doing so, it draws attention to the ways in which secular magic has been overlooked as a historical phenomenon and highlights its utility in furthering our understanding of the great problematics of modernity and Orientalism; in particular, it suggests that magic actually provides an unusually vibrant and clear lens through which to view the politics of the Other and through which to explore issues of tradition and the modern.

Focusing on two historical cases—the ‘Indian Rope Trick’ challenge issued by the Magic Circle in the 1930s and the astonishing ‘duel’ between the ‘Chinese’ magicians Chung Ling Soo and Ching Ling Foo in 1905—this article considers the ways in which discourses of origination, popular ideas about esotericism and the ‘mystic East’, and questions of technical competence interacted and competed in the culture politics of the early twentieth century.

The contributions in this collection, with one exception, are revised versions of papers prepared for a workshop on ‘The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800,’ which was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, 22–24 June, 1995. This gathering was organized thanks to the imagination and infectious enthusiasm of Dr Ian Brown, then Director of the Centre of South East Asian Studies at SOAS, and was funded with grants from SOAS, Modern Asian Studies and Cambridge University Press, and the British Academy.

The movement to create a phonetic script for the Chinese language was arguably one of the most arresting and exciting engagements in modern China. While generations of Chinese intellectuals tirelessly applied themselves to sorting out the linguistic technicalities in devising a Chinese phonetic system, what made language reform—or, depending on the perspective taken, revolution—historically so intriguing was that it had been a fiercely contested domain where a fascinating array of ideological positions was staked and contended. As John de Francis has observed, there had always been ‘a significant correlation between attitudes toward social change and attitudes toward linguistic reform in China’. Indeed, Qian Xuantong insisted at the height of the May Fourth New Culture Movement that to destroy Confucianism, one must ‘first dispose of the Chinese language’, whereas the Communist-led latinization movement of the 1930s, for its part, was meant to create a medium for the emergence of a true proletarian culture.

This paper uses a study of strikes of railway workers in Bihar and Bengal from 1918 to 1922 to set out and examine the complexities of workers' politics. Three broad themes related with workers' politics, viz. racial ideology, actual ‘event’ of striking and the related activities of workers, and techniques of mobilization have been covered in this paper. In each of these cases, it has been argued that rigid categories like racialism or nationalism are of little help in unravelling the complexities of workers' choices and their politics. Their politics were more flexible than what meets the eye, and their choices were created through dialogue, if not determined by the various factors surrounding them. However such choices were also being limited by the larger context provided by the ideologies and institutions of racialism, nationalism, and colonialism.

Economists and economic historians have not devoted much time or effort to the analysis of premodern economies. Most scholars have tended to concentrate on the United States and Western Europe during the twentieth century. While a few persons have examined the economic development of premodern Europe (1000–1700 a.d.), almost no one has chosen to write about economic organization in the countries of Asia and Africa before 1800.

During the late nineteenth-century colonial era in India, the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat (Finality of the Prophethood) assumed remarkable salience as a theme for religious debate among Muslim sects. The controversies around the establishment of the Ahmadiya sect in 1889 brought the issue of Khatam-e-Nubuwwat to the centre stage of religious polemic or munazara. Tense relations continued between Ahmadiya and Sunnis, in particular, though the tension remained confined to the domain of religious polemic. However, immediately after Pakistan's creation, the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat squeezed itself out of the epistemic confines of the ‘theological’ and entered the realm of the ‘political’. Majlis-Tahafuz-i-Khatam-e-Nubuwwat (the Association for the Safety of the Finality of the Prophethood) grew out of the almost-defunct Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam on 13 January 1949, with the principal objective of excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the Islamic fold.1 This article seeks to reveal how the Khatam-e-Nubuwwat has impinged upon the course of Pakistani politics from 1949 onwards as an instrument of religious exclusion, peaking in 1953. The pre-history of religious exclusion, which had 1889 as a watershed—the year when the Ahmadiya sect took a definitive shape—thus forms the initial part of the article.

In this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted a new segmentation of publics. This has occurred along lines of caste and community, defined by social experience and symbols, rather than language as such. The concomitant routinization of violence in public life—whether as physical destruction of public property, attacks on other communities, or as symbolic elevations of victims of violence to the status of martyrs—indicate that today valorization and experiences of violence, however incommensurable, have emerged as a universal medium, or general equivalent, in public and political life in India.