Elsewhere in this number, Sushil Chaudhury has provided a critique of a part of Chapter VIII of my book The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630–1720 (Princeton University Press, 1985). An earlier version of this part of the chapter had appeared as ‘Bullion for Goods: European Trade and the Economy of Early Eighteenth Century Bengal’ in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1976. Chaudhury is worried about the bad influence I have had on fellow researchers such as Michael Twomey who have found it useful to follow in their own work the methodology that I had developed. Chaudhury is even more concerned about the use of my work and of the conclusions I had arrived at by fellow scholars such as Peter Marshall, Niels Steensgaard and John Richards.

Given the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-1970s a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reason able explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of 1977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system ? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load.

In the aftermath of the Korean War, the People's Republic of China was effectively an international pariah. Accounts of this period in Chinese textbooks emphasize how the Chinese turned this around, either during the Geneva Conference or the Bandung Conference, through deft planning and enterprise. Yet few pay any attention to how such manipulation of world opinion became increasingly difficult for Beijing after that initial success. One outcome of China's public relations campaign meant friendly Afro-Asia leaders voiced their opinions, in alarming numbers, to their Chinese counterparts regarding issues such as Asian security, mainland China's economic development, and the Taiwan problem. Indeed, recently declassified Chinese Foreign Affairs archive documents demonstrate that China tried to marshal such non-Soviet bloc opinions to its advantage during the first Taiwan Strait crisis (1955). Chinese efforts were successful in that there was no lack of volunteers to air dissent with American foreign policy. But these new allies also wished to mediate between the United States and the Republic of China, on the one side, and mainland China on the other. Moreover, such efforts were often at variance with China's domestic and strategic outlook in the region. China thus had to embark upon an active ‘management’ of disparate world opinions, which was an entirely new endeavour. Although China tried to provide a sanitized ‘script’ for its new friends, most had their own ideas. By the time of the second Taiwan Strait crisis (1958), the volume of third party interference had grown. Overwhelmed by such international attention, China responded by openly rejecting unwelcome mediation efforts and demanded outright condemnation of the United States. Thus, ironically, with its growing prominence on the international stage, China found itself unbearably weighted down by the burden of world opinion, a position previously occupied by the United States.

Lord Curzon was the imperial gatekeeper who opened the way to parliamentary government in India by composing Edwin Montagu's declaration of 20 August 1917. He defined British policy as ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. Curzon himself acknowledged his authorship in an endorsement on his own printed copy of the declaration. On the eve of the War Cabinet's agreement to the declaration he included his proposed key words in a letter to Montagu, a document strangely overlooked in all of the many accounts of the matter. The only Cabinet departure from Curzon's key words was the substitution of ‘progressive’ for ‘fuller’. Montagu questioned the latter term and Curzon proposed the former. There was nothing impromptu about the drafting. For months variations on it had been floated in correspondence between the authorities in India and London. The use and meaning of ‘self-government’ had been widely canvassed. It is generally understood that ‘responsible government’ went beyond ‘self-government’, for in constitutional parlance it must mean a parliamentary system (with a responsible executive), whereas ‘self-government’ might be achievable in non-Westminster forms. The justification for dyarchy, the essence of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, lay in its apparent satisfaction of the declaration's espousal of the principle of responsiblity.

A Feature which has long characterized the study of Indian administrative history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the tendency of scholars to identify the British Raj with the Government of India, or more narrowly still, with the Governor-General in Council. Certainly one would not write a general history of British India and ignore the pronouncements of Calcutta. Yet by the same token one should not overlook the actions and attitudes of the several provincial governments, and especially of the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras, which, though under the general suzerainty of Calcutta, enjoyed substantial freedom of action within the limits of their own jurisdiction.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, electric tramways made their appearance in the cities of Asia, but despite being a universal technology, and despite the considerable impact they had upon life in these cities, the history of tramways in Asia has hardly ever been studied. Trams, wherever they ran, mobilized the urban population to a degree unseen before—their track network could restructure the urban topography and re-evaluate its segments, as independent villages became suburbs and residential quarters rose or fell in status, and add to the segregation of workplaces and residential areas. The two cities of Singapore and Rangoon, which have been selected because of their comparability, provide two contrasting examples of how trams functioned and eventually failed in an Asian urban environment.

Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), youth exchanges came to be a major part of the Chinese campaign to reach out and influence the people of other nations. Despite the growing scholarly discussion regarding the role of people-to-people diplomacy and external propaganda in China's foreign policy, so far no direct attention has been paid to the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to institutionalize youth exchanges and use them as a tool to promote the new Chinese government's foreign relations. This article locates the position of young people within the PRC's people-to-people diplomacy. It attempts to explore youth exchanges with the West in the early years of the Cold War by focusing on relations between Italian and Chinese youth groups in the 1950s. Relying mainly on unexplored archival material and memoirs, this article documents contacts and exchanges between adult-led youth organizations and their members, and shows how Italian left-wing party-affiliated youth groups and Soviet-dominated transnational organizations provided important channels for Sino-Italian encounters and for building long-lasting contacts among potential future leaders of these countries.

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India.

Mishima Yukio killed himself on 25 November 1970 at the age of forty-five in the traditional Japanese warrior manner of seppuku after a vain attempt to incite a unit of the Self-Defence Forces to a coup d'état. The event shocked and alarmed not only the Japanese but also people abroad. Many were reminded of the 1936 coup by young army officers, and some, especially abroad, became worried about a possible revival of Japanese militarism. But the jeering by the rank and file troops whom Mishima tried to rouse to action proves that such a possibility is very slight. The Japanese Government, including Mr Nakasone, the Minister of Defence, positively disapproved of Mishima's action. The Prime Minister, Mr Sato, was anxious lest such scandalous behaviour on the part of an eminent writer might tarnish the reputation of the country founded on economic prosperity. Nevertheless, nothing seems farther from the truth than the Prime Minister's statement that Mishima had ‘gone mad’. In every detail Mishima's suicide was an act calculated well in advance. In its political implications it was a challenge to the kind of stability and prosperity of present-day Japan of which the Prime Minister himself is the representative. Mishima detested the progressive or left-wing Japanese intellectuals, but he did not align himself with the Liberal Democratic Party either. Nor was he prepared at all to link with the right-wing organizations, in spite of the ultra-nationalism of his own Shield Society. Ironically enough, Mishima could have agreed with the dissident students of the New Left who played the leading role in the 1968–69 university upheavals.

In contrast to India, where communal affrays were ordinary incidents of life, there was little inter-communal hostility in Ceylon throughout British rule. The clash between the Sinhalese and the Muslims that occurred in May–June 1915 was the major exception to this general trend of peace and tranquillity2. Not only did the disturbance take the Ceylon government by surprise, it placed the Colonial Office in a quandary. In this paper it is proposed to examine the reactions of the Ceylon government and the Colonial Office to what was an unprecedented disturbance in the ‘senior colony of the new empire’3.

This paper sheds light on the long-distance politics of a small and rather young diaspora—the Acehnese overseas—which proved to be very influential on homeland politics despite its relatively small size, especially with regard to the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia. Special attention is therefore given to the close connections between the politicized migrant population overseas and their involvement back home. Born out of the suffering of people in Aceh and in Malaysia—the main destiny for refugees—the Acehnese overseas started to organize informal associations and networks to foster mutual support. During the almost 30-year-long conflict, material, financial, and other forms of support were directed not only to members of the diaspora, but also to people in Aceh, as well as the separatists, which enabled them to continue their struggle for Aceh's independence from Indonesia. Unlike larger conflict-generated diasporas that can afford to send home large sums of money, the Acehnese diaspora's greatest strength was the ideological and moral support they provided to people back in Aceh. The evolution of the diaspora and its activities were closely linked to developments in the homeland. By emphasizing the dependence of diasporas on homeland developments, which dictates the level of their political engagement, this paper draws attention to the diaspora's support for both the perpetuation of conflict and conflict resolution. After the end of the conflict in 2005, the diaspora lost its prominent role, and became involved in rudimentary forms of long-distance engagement.

The vital importance of the Indian Army as the guardian of the imperial order in India was never more evident than during the interwar years. The period from 1919 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 was a testing time for the Raj; state authority was being challenged by a mounting nationalist movement, and public order was frequently disrupted by civil disobedience campaigns, as well as recurrent outbreaks of communal violence. In maintaining public order the colonial state had always been prepared to rely on that ultimate guarantee of its authority and power–the Indian Army. However, in frequent discussions of the deployment of the military in 'aid of civil power', the continued loyalty of the bulk of the army the Indian soldiers and officers, was never questioned, and seemed to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the Army Headquarters were well awar that the 'loyalty' of the Army could never be guaranteed, and that it was conditional upon a stable and pacified recruiting base; if that base were to be 'subverted', then the Indian Army, or portions of it, would not only cease to be of use as an instrument of state power, but could ultimately pose a threat to the Raj itself

The economy of eighteenth-century Bengal was closely tied to the political, with the indigenous state, the Nizamat, maintaining a stake in the success of commercial circuits. The Nizamat played a positive role in keeping the structure operative through its patronage and regulating activities. Besides its direct involvement in trade, the article examines the indirect facilitating and co-ordinating role it played, the elaboration of a distinct court culture and the policies it pursued which had a bearing on the health of the economy. The conditions necessary for the functioning of marketing networks—protection of property and enforcement of contract—were maintained. It was a mutually beneficial system with the state with its seat in Murshidabad, the landed élite of the region, and the commercial sector symbiotically tied together.

Using different archives, I show how indigeneity was constructed by the Santal themselves during the second half of the nineteenth century, through various figures such as rebels and prophets. This has produced a Santal indigenous knowledge at the interface of orality and writing, revolving around two dimensions—an emergent historical consciousness and a feeling of shared identity, which still informs Adivasi resistance today, enabling them to voice assertion over natural resources. The sacralization of the landscape through pilgrimages and ritual commemorations entails the liberation of formerly encompassed identities, allowing the subaltern communities a certain visibility in the public sphere. Providing a new imagining against dispossession and memory loss, indigenous knowledge, which combines multi-scripturality and ritual innovations, becomes a resource for politics of representation as well as of a common Santal identity.

Given their sheer numbers, it is hardly surprising that the fate of peasants during British Rule in India should have become a principal index for evaluating its successes and failures. Since the Raj was much more than another effete political superimposition on supposedly timeless villages, the question of agrarian growth or stagnation during its currency is intertwined with more general issues. In so far as colonialism meant a sizable expansion of trade to and from the rural areas, its impact on village social structure in India bears comparison with that of a modern market on peasantries in other parts of the world. Perhaps, the classic case of a peasantry coming face to face with a growing market happened in Russia between 1860 and 1930. The history of that period has generated conceptual discussion about the dynamics of peasant society. The possibility of some of those ideas shedding light on the situation in India has prompted Indo-Russian contrasts and comparisons in agrarian history on more than one occasion (Charlesworth: 1979; Stein: 1984). As a sequel to these writings the Russian debate is considered here briefly in order to suggest some ways in which it might be useful in the Indian context.

An anthropologist has recently remarked on an ‘orthodoxy’ of economic development that has grown up among some economists. The same writer continues with the observation that

there is also, among some economists, an orthodoxy of the relevant background factors in development. When the tools of economic analysis appear inadequate fully to deal with specific instances of economic change or economic stagnation, the psychology and attitudes of the people concerned are invoked, as is the inertia of indigenous institutions.

Historians have attached a great deal of importance to Wei Yüan's geopolitical work, the Hai-kuo t'u-chih (The illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms), because of its use of Western source materials and its treatment of the West. While its importance as the first major Chinese study of the West should not be minimized, this should not obscure the fact that the Treatise was primarily a reassessment of the history of China's relations with the Asian maritime world, particularly South-east Asia and India.It was as much a rediscovery of China'spast involvement in this tributary sphere as it was a discovery of the West. This paper will attempt to describe the way in which Wei Yuan became involved in the problem of the West and to analyze and describe his view of the traditional Asian maritime world and the implications of Western expansion into this sphere.

From 1919 to 1922 the Indian National Congress carried out its first country-wide programme of mass agitations against the British. For the next six or seven years the party concentrated on the electoral arena. By fits and starts, it also carried on a programme of so-called ‘constructive’ work among the mass of the people. This helped to maintain some of the popular contacts earlier established. Elections, and the bitter communal conflicts that were a feature of the mid-1920s, at least in the United Provinces (U.P.), forged other links.

The former rulers of Princely India present to many people a simple stereotype. Surrounded by pomp and luxury, they are thought to have headed autocratic and tradition-based regimes in which their word was law and their desires untrammeled, since they were considered to be in some way divine because of their descent from such deities as the sun and moon. Moreover this view, by implication, contrasts with the democratic regime which followed the accession and merging of their States into the Indian Union in 1948.

Flood protection in the Brahmaputra's floodplains began rather late and was implemented precisely to protect the important commercial crop of jute. To begin with, in the early twentieth century, after a long wait and much speculation, action was finally taken to make the Brahmaputra's floodplains more productive to the British Empire. Soon the commercial production of jute began in the floodplains. This article explains how the Brahmaputra's floodplains were converted into the British empire's eastern-most jute frontier. The article also explains the political economy of flood management in Assam in the second half of the twentieth century. Further, explaining the shifting relations between state, capital, and floodplain, the article shows how these schemes achieved only partial success and at the cost irreversible ecological damage.