Since 1991, India's courting of foreign investment has been accompanied by protectionist posturing in sensitive sectors like insurance and the media. The tensions in making the shift from a mixed economy to a relatively open and market-oriented economy were evident when the government considered reviewing a ban imposed by Jawaharlal Nehru's government in 1955, and allowing foreign press companies to operate in the country's ‘mind-market’ in 1991. This led to a welter of protest, forcing the government to drop the move. Since foreign media proposals periodically engage government attention and provoke reactions, this is an attempt to take a closer look at the issues involved. This paper will examine the posturing of the Indian elites, the state of the Indian press, the notion of media-cultural imperialism and the legal question of media ownership by foreign nationals. It will conclude with the suggestion that nationalist, cultural and mercantile interests were conflated to run one of the most effective campaigns by the press against the government in recent years. Large sections were animated by genuine concerns, but mercantile interests rode high, and manipulated them to telling effect.

In the 1920s and 1930s China was racked by civil strife. Although the Nationalist government was established in Nanking in 1928, it exerted its power only in a small part of China, mainly in the lower Yangtze valley. When the Nanking government endeavored to unify China by force, the local warlords, who strove to maintain their own armies and bases, directed against this central government. Political divisions and tensions persisted between Nanking and the local governments until 1936.

This article focuses on France's policy towards Socialist China in the decade preceding the spectacular and well-studied decision by President Charles de Gaulle to officially recognize the People's Republic of China (PRC). It argues that since the mid-1950s successive French governments discreetly orchestrated a process of rapprochement with the Communist authorities in Beijing. The article demonstrates that, at a time when the international situation discouraged steps towards official relations, the French government used commercial diplomacy as a means to open unofficial diplomatic channels with the Chinese and prepare the ground for future recognition. Relying mostly on French archival sources, this article brings to light evidence of the evolution of French diplomacy's thinking about Socialist China and assesses the rationales behind the French government's growing determination to normalize relations with it. It argues that the intensifying contest among European countries to reach out to Beijing, concerns about the PRC's appeal to developing countries, and an early appraisal of Sino-Soviet rivalry prompted French authorities to work for Sino-French rapprochement, while, at the same time, annoyance at the White House's obstinate refusal to revise its reading of Cold War dynamics weakened France's disposition to fall into line with American demands to maintain a harsh stance towards the PRC.

From the end of the fifteenth century, the Ming state redirected the entire flow of the Yellow River into the course of the Huai River in order the facilitate the transport of tribute grain. This shifted the major problems of water control from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to the Huaibei region. Huaibei was viewed as ‘a local interest’, as opposed to the ‘general interests’ represented by the central government, and was sacrificed for those general interests. These policies, which were continued under the Qing dynasty, created widespread and frequent flooding in the region, causing short-term famine and destruction and leading to long-term economic decline.

This paper analyses Manchuria's economic history between 1929 and 1936, as part of a larger project on the Great Depression's impact on China. Based on a new series for Manchurian GDP, 1924–1937, the paper advances four key arguments. First, early in the Depression, Manchuria's use of silver currency partially protected its economy from the global downturn, while creating serious problems for importers and Japanese-owned enterprises, resulting in a small net decline in GDP. Second, as elsewhere, the Depression's impact was deepest where cyclical effects were accompanied by structural change – here, the decline in the soybean trade. Third, output levels, especially in agriculture, declined most steeply in response to climatic and military disasters rather than economic shocks. Fourth, as in Japan, policies that were Keynesian in effect led to rapid growth of the modern sector, especially construction, and to the recovery of many sectors of Manchuria's economy from 1934–1935.

This paper analyses the trajectories of handicraft cloth production in three major sub-regions of Jiangsu Province in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to traditional focus on the bankruptcy of rural handicrafts in the face of competition from the modern industry, it argues that the fate of handicrafts depended on the specific characteristics of each sub-regional economy. Thus in Song-Tai, handicraft weaving declined as labour was drawn off into modern industry. In Tong-Hai the availability of machine-spun yarn in the market enabled the development of a commercialised handicraft weaving sector. Finally, in Xu-Huai-Hai machine-spun yarn enabled the inhabitants to substitute their own subsistence handicraft production for cloth purchased from elsewhere.

Thailand has a long, well-established practice of publishing books to commemorate events and personages. Among these are volumes commemorating deceased persons which are distributed to participants at cremation ceremonies. They contain obituaries written by the deceased's superiors, peers, and subordinates as well as relatives. Commemorative books are also published by government agencies, private companies, schools and individuals. While most are published in the Thai language, Chinese communities in Thailand also produce a large number of such books in Chinese. There has been no slackening of the practice; rather the publication of commemorative books has been gaining strength over the past decades.

Clio, the Muse of History, has not been kind to the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi (1835–1908). Traditional Chinese historians always have been prejudiced against feminine influence in court. Moreover, historians have long relied upon the works of men such as K'ang Yu-wei (1858–1927) and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (1873–1929), the two leaders of the radical reform movement, and other pro-Emperor radical reformers, most notably Wang Chao (1859–1935), Yün Yü-ting (1863–1918), Lo Tun-jung (d. 1923), and Li Hsi-sheng, for their information about the workings of the Ch'ing court during the period 1898 to 1900. Since these men were opposed to the power and conservatism of the Empress Dowager, their prejudice is reflected in their writings about the court at that time. Many historians also have relied upon the works of Western writers such as J. O. P. Bland, Sir Edmund Backhouse, and Hosea B. Morse for their information about this period. In fact, Bland and Backhouse's China Under the Empress Dowager is the book which has shaped many of our present-day negative images of Tz'u-hsi. Recently the reliability of Sir Edmund Backhouse has been seriously challenged by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his excellent study, Hermit of Peking. There can be no doubt that Western writers drew their facts from exchanges with the writings by the Chinese radical reformers, from unreliable eunuchs, and from highly biased newspapers, such as the North China Herald (a pro-reform Western-oriented Shanghai newspaper) and the Ch'ing-i pao [China Discussion], which was edited by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and published in Yokohama.

Even without this wonderful sixteenth-century hyperbole, forts remain an impressive feature of India's landscape. A thoughtful traveller, seeing the jagged walls high above the road, might well wonder who built them, and when, and what events took place within the gates. Scholarly writing on the subject will disappoint him. Toy, in his seminal book, noted that ‘this writer has been struck with the dearth of reliable litetature on the forts of India.’

In this paper an attempt is made to outline the basic structure of taxes on trade and commerce at the Mughal port of Surat during the seventeenth century. This is explored chiefly from documents relating to the English East India Company. By the very nature of the Company being a foreign corporate body, it did not represent a typical ‘peddling’ tax-payer. But the system in so far as the ordinary merchants were concerned, can be restored for us indirectly by considering how far the Company was favoured in taxation matters. We may also reconsider the common view that the English enjoyed ‘invidious trading privileges’ by virtue of the orders of the imperial court, and that it was their privileges that explain their ultimate success in India.

Bureaucratic capital—that is, capital accumulated through public office, or state revenue diverted by individual officials for capital investment— has had a long history in China since early Han times. This paper is concerned with the development of bureaucratic capital for ‘modern’ industry during the last forty years of the Ch'ing dynasty.

This article outlines the spread of the Bahá’í religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá’í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Bahá’í connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique ‘cosmopolitan moment’ in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce ‘cosmopolitan moments’ at specific historical junctures and locations.

When India gained independence in August 1947 the world watched with excitement as well as trepidation as to what would happen following this unique and major event. The political destiny of the world's largest democracy would lie in the hands of an infinitesimal portion of the population – the political executive. India's new institutions had new operators to act in new conditions. There were few precedents. Within this Westminster system, refounded in India with its emphasis on executive flexibility and ambiguity, the leading political figures often had conflicting opinions and interpretations as to their powers. The relationship between Nehru as Prime Minister and other leading political figures, such as Patel as deputy Prime Minister, Prasad as President, and their definitions of their roles, would forge a new India. This paper revisits those debates and ideas in the first decade following independence, which allow greater understanding of the workings and conventions of today's Indian executive.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and India, this article explores the life-world and practices of small-scale Indian export agents based in Yiwu, China, the world centre for the export of small commodities. It shows that in a market overdetermined by fast-moving goods, short-term gains, and low margins, export agents have to steer their way between acting with extreme caution or taking risks with their clients and suppliers. These apparently contradictory dispositions or orientations are negotiated by the judicious exercise of mistrust and suspicion. The article suggests not only that mistrust is valued and cultivated as an indispensable practical resource for success in Yiwu's export trade, but that contingent relations of trust between market players emerge at the interstices of a generalized mutual mistrust, via the mobilization of practices of hospitality, commensality, and masculine conviviality. Indeed, feelings of amity and mutuality elicited by the performance of modalities of social intimacy become the affective terrain upon which divergent economic interests might be reconciled and taken forward. That is, mistrust might not lead to generalized distrust, instead a situational or contingent trust might actually emerge through the judicious exercise of mistrust.

Since the early twentieth century, reforms of the social institution of marriage in China have profoundly curtailed the power of the senior generation to influence the marriage decisions of their offspring. Yet the marriage considerations of graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in China's northwestern Gansu Province reveal a definite impact of feelings of social obligation towards the family as well as of a local understanding of marriage market stratification which (also) reflects these obligations. In this rural region, higher education mainly aims at long-term upward mobility into the formal urban sector of the economy. After all, the basic ‘citizenship divide’ between rural and urban residence rights established by the socialist hukou (household registration) system continues to determine rural families’ structural exclusion from access to various urban resources. Feelings of indebtedness for financial and other support received from parents and family members during years of higher education entangle graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in webs of social relations that oblige them to also consider the interests of others when deciding on whom to marry. When choosing a marriage partner they thus often face dilemmas of negotiating material versus emotional interests, as well as collective versus individual ones. While higher education empowers them to reject others’ interference in their marriage decisions, if they do so, they have to cope with feelings of having disappointed all the hopes their supporters invested in them.

This paper examines the public debate that happened among Delhi's Sikh community following the formation of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh. The detail of this debate was expressed in the early eighteenth century Sikh text, Sri Gur Sobha. The Sri Gur Sobha explains how Delhi's Sikhs became divided into pro-Khalsa and anti-Khalsa factions, and how this conflict resulted in a campaign of persecution against Delhi's Khalsa Sikhs. In this paper I endeavour to analyse exactly why this dispute occurred and how it reflects wider political and socio-economic processes in early modern India and Sikh society. In addition, the paper will explore how the elite Khatri community consequently became an object of hatred in eighteenth century Khalsa Sikh literature.

Much of the literature on India's nuclear programme assumes that China's nuclear capability drove New Delhi, the strategically weaker actor, to pursue a nuclear weapons capability. China's nuclear tests not only rendered New Delhi militarily insecure and dented its claim for the leadership of the Third World but they also polarized the domestic debate over the utility of the bomb. In the global scheme of nuclear proliferation, therefore, India was just another fallen nuclear domino. Marshalling recently declassified documents, this article revisits India's nuclear behaviour during the crucial decade between 1964 and 1974. By focusing on threat assessments made at the highest levels and internal deliberations of the Indian Government, this article shows how, contrary to the claims made in the literature, Indian decision-makers did not make much of the Chinese nuclear threat. This conviction emanated out of their distinct reading of the purpose of nuclear weapons in China's foreign and military policy; their perceptions of how India could achieve nuclear deterrence against China by using the bipolar international politics of the Cold War; and, finally, their understanding of the political costs of developing an indigenous nuclear response to China's nuclear threat. New Delhi's nuclear restraint resulted from its perceptions of Chinese nuclear intentions and its beliefs about the purpose of the bomb in Sino-Indian relations. India's perceptions of China as a nuclear adversary and its decision-makers’ views on the purpose of nuclear weapons in this rivalry were fundamentally different from the expectations set out by the domino theory of nuclear proliferation.

Kerala is a well-recognized ‘model’ of human development in the world. In this article, I look at a crucial aspect of this development, which is often approached in a positivist fashion of statistical aggregation alone: consumption. Instead, there is a need to study the meanings that surround it. I delineate the many forces, particularly the new material infrastructure, that have driven consumption in the last three decades, especially the last one. With increasing integration into global market forces through migration and investment, and cultural imaginations, I show that there is a tectonic change in consciousness about consumption, marked by fantasies, desires, and, contrarily, feelings of excess and ambivalence. I argue that the non-market sector has also played an important role in consumption. There is an increasing generalization of certain ideas about consumption as well as disenchantments across classes. But critically, I contend, there are caste, class, and gender disparities in consumption as well as differences in the meanings attributed to it. Thus, consumption is a socially meaningful, but discrepant, space. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in a town in central Kerala, supplemented with quantitative data.

This review article examines three monographs that make conspicuous contributions to our understanding of major earthquake disasters in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century through to 2011. They focus on different events and different time periods, and ask different questions, but raise a host of shared issues relating to the on-going importance of disaster in Japan's history over the long term. They cause us to consider how seismic disaster is explained, understood, interpreted, and actualized in people's lives, how the risks are factored in, and how people respond to both immediate crisis and longer term consequences. One recurrent issue in these volumes is the extent to which these large natural disasters have the capacity to change—and actually do change—the ways in which societies organize themselves. In some cases disaster may be perceived as opportunity, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that a desire to return to the previous ‘normality’ is a powerful impulse in people's responses to major natural disasters. The review also argues that the issue of trust lies at the core of both individual and collective responses. A lack of trust may be most conspicuous in attitudes to government and elites, but is also inherent in more everyday personal interactions and market transactions in the immediate aftermath of disaster.