This article considers Ambedkar's ideas about the implementation of democracy in India, in the context of the linguistic reorganization of provincial administrative boundaries. In doing so, it looks to emphasize the importance of territorial configurations to Dalit politics during this period and, in particular, the consequences of ‘provincialization’, which has received little attention within the existing literature. Rethinking space by redrawing administrative territory provided Ambedkar with one potential avenue through which to escape the strictures of Dalits’ minority status. In this vision, linguistic reorganization (and partition) were harbingers of greater democratization and potential palliatives to the threat of Hindu majority rule at the centre. In turn, however, Ambedkar simultaneously came to perceive the creation of these new administrative spaces as marking a new form of provincial majoritarianism, despite his best efforts to form alliances with those making such demands. In this sense, the article also seeks to address some of the shared processes behind linguistic reorganization and partition as two related forms of territorial redrawing. In the face of these demands, and the failures of both commensuration and coalition politics, Ambedkar turned to the idea of separate settlements for Dalits, whereby they might themselves come to constitute a majority. Whilst such a novel attempt at separation and resettlement was not ultimately realized, its emergence within Ambedkar's thought at this time points towards its significance in any history of caste and untouchability in twentieth-century South Asia.

The weakest hold of the Indian National Congress in the colonial period was in the province of Punjab. The strength and domination of the National Unionist Party and the limited support and response afforded to the various nationalist movements highlight the weakness of the Congress especially in its southeast region, now known, after being carved out as a separate state on the 1st of November 1966, as Haryana.

In recent decades, as part of the efforts of the Chinese government first to integrate and, more recently, to forcibly assimilate the Uyghur population into China’s mainstream culture and society, the Uyghur language has been marginalized and repressed to an unprecedented extent. The academic literature on Xinjiang’s language policy has repeatedly acknowledged that this repression is a major source of concern and discontent among many Uyghurs. However, to date, little has been written about the public response of Uyghurs to this policy and their open efforts to challenge it. In particular, with very few exceptions, little is known about the public response of Uyghur writers and artists. In this article I analyse a large corpus of Uyghur poems and songs that engaged openly with the Uyghur language crisis and were published and disseminated in the Uyghur public sphere between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. Unlike some studies that try to assess the condition of certain languages at a certain point in time through objective methodologies, these literary and artistic works provide an insider view on how the Uyghur cultural elite and many other Uyghurs experienced the repression and loss of their native language, and also, how they struggled against this repression. In the article I examine the diverse sentiments, perceptions, and discourses that these literary and artistic expressions communicate, and the different strategies that the Uyghurs used to struggle against the language policy and its consequences. I also explore what these works tell us about the development of Xinjiang’s language policy over time, the linguistic reality in the region, and the impact that the language policy has had on Uyghur society. Finally, the article also investigates the broad political meanings of these works and speculates on the link between them and the efforts of the Chinese government to further marginalize the Uyghur language.

The Kailuan Mining Administration (Kailuan or the KMA) ran one of the two largest colliery combines in pre-Communist China. Because it was a Sino-British company, most previous studies have concentrated on the important role it played in China's political history before 1949, but its equally important role in China's economy has been little studied. This paper contributesto remedying that deficiency.

The Great Qing Imperial Post Office was set up in 1896, soon after the First Sino-Japanese War. It provided the first national postal service for the general public in the whole of Chinese history, and was a symbol of China's increasing engagement with the rest of the globe. Much of the preparation for the launch was carried out by the high-ranking foreign staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an influential institution established after the first Opium War.

With a mission to promote modernization and project Qing power, the Imperial Post Office was established with a centrally controlled set of unified methods and procedures, and its success was rooted in integration with the new railway network, a strategy at the heart of its ambitious plans for expansion. This article explores the history of this postal expansion through railways, the use of which allowed its creators to plan networks in an integrated way—from urban centres on the coasts and great rivers through to China's interior.

Historians of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) have concentrated on rural China to explain how the Communists mobilized the peasantry as a revolutionary force. Although clarifying the CCP's ascension to power in 1949, this focus has impeded our understanding of social change and conflict in the Nationalist controlled territories, especially the wartime capital of Chongqing. Thus, it is difficult to understand how the Nationalists exacerbated the alienation of urban social groups during the 1940s or how the CCP began to find consensus in the cities after 1946. Even standard explanations for the Nationalist collapse—government factionalism, hyperinflation, military blunders, and malfeasance—with their focus on government elites and institutions have rendered invisible the role of social classes as agents of historical change. The few studies of wartime labor have instead emphasized the patriotic contributions of workers and their relative passivity under the four-class bloc envisioned by the united front.

The memory of the foreign involvement in the Taiping war lasted long after the fall of the Taiping capital at Nanjing in 1864. The events were commemorated by various actors, Chinese and foreign, from the end of the war until the end of the treaty-port century in 1943 when the right to extraterritoriality was abrogated. This article explores the commemorations of the foreign role through three media: the issuing of medals to foreign fighters, the building of memorials to the foreign dead, and the writing of histories of the events. Across these media, different interest groups used the foreign interventions as a proxy for continuing debates about the role of foreigners in China and about China's place in the world. More broadly, the commemorations of the role of foreign fighters in the Taiping war is a case study in the transnational politics of memory. The memories of the war were contested or commemorated not just by states, but also by individuals and groups whose views often diverged from those of their government. By tracing how memories of the war were remembered and forgotten, we can trace the insecurities of different interest groups over time and their perceived power relative to each other.

While establishing a framework for colonial governance in the Philippines, American policymakers had to confront the issue of opium smoking, which was especially popular among the Philippine Chinese community. In 1903, the Philippine Commission proposed a return to the Spanish-era policy of controlling the opium trade through tax farming, igniting outrage among American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines and their supporters in the United States. Their actions revived a faltering global anti-opium movement, leading to a series of international agreements and domestic restrictions on opium and other drugs. Focusing mostly on American policy in the Philippines, this paper also examines the international ramifications of a changing drug control regime. It seeks to incorporate the debate over opium policy into broader narratives of imperial ideology, international cooperation, and local responses to colonial rule, demonstrating how a variety of actors shaped the new drug-control regimes both in the Philippines and internationally.

This article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom’s long-standing cult of the ‘Father-King’, the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people’s democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today’s youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of ‘equal friendship’ and ‘hierarchical siblinghood’ substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of ‘filial insubordination’ to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, ‘friendship-based’ polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand’s Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter’s ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances.

The role of skills has been eclipsed in the transition from an agrarian-craft economy rooted in hand-labour in small households to a modern political economy where productive work takes place outside the household, in offices and factories. Yet the ideological erasure of skilled work should not be confused with its actual disappearance. Precisely because such work was typically construed as private and unimportant, the embedded hierarchies and skills that shaped the handloom weaving industry in the North Indian province of United Provinces under colonial rule could escape systematic conversion to capitalist structures. Skill as human capital constituted the capitalist labour processes in the modern handloom industry, not as an abstract act, but as a historical experience. Handloom workers were reproduced, generationally, socially, and hierarchically, through the passing on of skilled labour within the unorganized informal sector of handloom weaving. Thus the stuff of community skills should move beyond its projection as either ‘endangered’ or ‘regressive’ to explore its access to capitalist structures and the exploitative networks that contain, transmit, and enable the production of skills.

Recently we have seen an increasing number of publications, mostly of an ethnographic nature, describing and discussing the significant religious roles and achievements of Thai Buddhist women, not only in the field of Buddhist education, and with regard to their monastic roles, but also in terms of their roles as accomplished Buddhist practitioners. This paper examines the changes occurring in the status and position of women in Thai Buddhist practice. In this regard I focus on the analysis of one of the first widely acknowledged female saints of modern Thai Buddhism: Khun Mae Bunruean Tongbuntoem (1895–1964). Khun Mae Bunruean has obtained her increasing reputation through the advanced meditative achievements which her followers believe she possessed. I use hagiographical accounts of her as a focal point to unravel and examine Thai beliefs in relation to female sainthood in present-day Thai Buddhism. This is done by discussing gendered hagiographical writing against the background of relevant canonical and post-canonical Pali texts that have exerted authority in religious discourses on gender by informing and nurturing Thai religious value systems. This textual research is complemented by the ethnographic examination of Thai Buddhist beliefs and venerational practices which cannot be found in authoritative Pali texts but which still play a significant role in the understanding of the particularities of female saints in modern Thai Buddhism. I do not confine myself to hagiographical accounts and venerational practices directly linked to gender, but also devote some attention to other conspicuous aspects, elements, and expressions of Mae Bunruean's sainthood and her veneration.

This article examines the relationship between language shift and identity among diaspora Sindhis in India and Southeast Asia. It focuses on questions concerning how members of this community reproduce identity through language shift. The first part of the article describes identity and language shift among diaspora Sindhis in post-partition India. It argues that language shift facilitates the reproduction of core cultural modalities among diaspora Sindhis. The second part describes the history of diaspora Sindhis in Southeast Asia and analyses language shift. It contends that language shift enables diaspora Sindhis to suspend a connection between mother-tongue proficiency and identity. The article concludes by discussing how the diaspora Sindhi experience retunes the interval that conventionally connects language shift to cultural change.

According to the view current among most Japanese today, the samurai lost their last hope of surviving as a distinct social or political group when Saigō Takamori died in the autumn of 1877. In fact, the fate of the samurai class had been sealed as early as 1866, when Satsuma and Chōshū joined forces to destroy the only institutional order in which the samurai had any functional meaning. Their disappearance from the Japanese stage was brought about by forces that Saigō helped to set in motion, but over which neither he nor any other individual could possibly have exerted much control. In the end he had no significant effect on the fate of the samurai.

In 1609, Satsuma, at the southern tip of Kyūshū, conquered Okinawa (then called the Ryūkyū Kingdom). Throughout the subsequent Tokugawa period, Satsuma was said to have kept the Ryūkyūans in a state of virtual slavery by plundering the profits of the lucrative Sino-Ryūkyūan trade and imposing an excessively heavy tribute-tax on the native products. This exploitation of Ryūkyū's trade and native resources was reported to have been one of the important financial resources for Satsuma; and one that made possible Satsuma's vigorous political and military activities in the middle nineteenth century leading to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In spite of such claims, no study of this topic has been made except those that have been strongly colored by the sympathies of the writer.

Although the Foreign Office was theoretically the department of state responsible for British relations with the Kingdom of Siam, it has for some time been recognized that the strategic interests of both the Indian Empire and the Straits Settlements and Protectorates in the Malay Peninsula necessitated the active participation of the India and Colonial Offices in policy making. The role of the Calcutta authorities and their superiors in Whitehall in the formulation of British official attitudes towards Siam in the latter part of the nineteenth century has yet to be made known. But much has been done, including several recent attempts, to evaluate the extent of Colonial Office interference in the Siamese Malay States before 1909. To some extent, the renewed interest in the broader metropolitan implications of the subject is characterized by a desire to investigate the character of British imperialism itself.

Since the war, some changes are discernible in Japanese attitudes towards the Emperor and the Imperial institution. When asked, those expressing support for the maintenance of the institution still comprise a stable and vast majority of the people (84 percent in 1973), but there has clearly been an increase in indifference, especially among the young. The other change is the recent emergence, after a long period of relative dormancy, of an emotional reaction on the part of a small minority against both the institution and the Emperor for their involvement in the per-1945 establishment. in the pre-1945 establishment. Bitter criticisms and attacks have dominated the intellectual journals and have spilled over into the mass media. There are strong emotional currents on both sides of the issue. One emotion, becoming more vocal, is iconoclastic; the other, not much represented in the mass media, is protective. In the immediate postwar period, the Emperor and the Imperial institution were associated in the minds of many Japanese, especially among those of left-wing persuasion, with repression, war and defeat. The problem of the ‘Emperor system,’ as the Communists called it, not yet decided by a new Constitution, became a political issue for a short period when Communists released from prison in 1945 mounted an attack on the Emperor as well as on the ‘Emperor system.’ But between 1946 and 1971, it was not of great importance as a political issue.

The European Community is distinctive among the donors of international development assistance. Although it is categorized officially as a multilateral aid institution, the Community differs in structure, purpose and role compared to other, more familiar organizations of that genre. Like other multilaterals, the European Community derives its aid budget, as well as its other financial resources, from the fiscal contributions of its Member states (each of which provides its own bilateral assistance to developing countries). Yet, to be sure, the Community represents more than just a multilateral economic union, since it also constitutes a supra-European governmental authority in the making. Indeed, the European Community has begun to evolve a common foreign policy, which is reflected in its role in Official Development Assistance (ODA). Its aid effort, in giving expression to the Community's common international purpose, has taken on most of the attributes of government-to-government assistance. It is this combination of multilateral and quasi-bilateral characteristics that sets the European Economic Community (EEC, as the Community is styled in its ODA role) apart as a uniquely meta-national participant in international development cooperation.

The Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

In April of 1868, the Restoration government issued an anti-Christian proscription—‘a fixed law for all ages’ it was styled. Christianity was declared a pernicious sect; rewards were offered for information leading to the discovery of Christians. In the name of the proscription, the government carried out a persecution which, in the first four years of the new era, resulted in the deaths of as many as 500 native Christians. These men, women and children died from torture, starvation or from sickness induced by the conditions in which they were kept. The native Christians were, of course, from the recently discovered hidden Christian communities around Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Christian affair is a fascinating one to which I shall return, but I mention it at the outset since it serves usefully to stress the climate of the times as far as Christianity was concerned. Given this climate, it is remarkable that there emerged by 1871, or thereabouts, a small number of enlightened intellectuals who criticized government policy on Christianity and went so far as to advocate religious freedom. The most famous of the few were Mori Arinori, Nakamura Keiu, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nishi Amane—names known to anyone familiar with early Meiji intellectual history. There is, however, one other name that needs to be added to this short list. That is Fukuba Bisei. The little known Fukuba Bisei was, perhaps, the most remarkable of these men since he was an early Meiji Shintoist.