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.

The Maithil Brahmans of Bihar and the Bengali Brahmans of Bengal, two of the five great North Indian Brahman castes, had, as of the early nineteenth century, closely similar systems of ranked grades and hypergamously marrying lineages. In addition, fundamental concepts—of purity and pollution, of coded substance, of sattva, rajas, and tamas (Dumont 1970; Inden 1976; Davis 1983)—form a shared construction of reality for both groups of Hindus. Yet despite a common ideation and similar patterns of organization up to that point, the ‘Kulin system’ of Bengal virtually disappeared in the middle of the last century, while among the Brahmans to the east in Bihar, the system faltered during the same period, then corrected itself, grew more complex with greater refinements of rank than at any time in the past, and has survived into the present.

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.

The city of Melaka, owing to her occupation by the Portuguese, has the privilege of being the most thoroughly described sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Southeast Asian urban centre, both in textual and iconographic sources. There are some ten to twelve known Portuguese sketches depicting various aspects of the city; ground plans of the fortress, plans of the whole city, maps of the city and its surroundings, or else panoramic views representing specific events in Melaka's history, such as the sieges by Aceh in 1568 or in 1629.

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.

Ceylon is one of the few non-European members of the Commonwealth which has been reasonably successful in adapting the Westminster-style government to suit its own requirements. There are difficulties in operating the system—a heterogeneous population comprising religious, cultural, linguistic and caste groups whose differences are not seldom accentuated by the island's slow rate of economic growth—but despite these, it could be said from the experience of nearly twenty years of Parliament's working, that the willingness of parties and groups to differ on a constitutional plane with all the necessary corollaries of elections, political meetings, a legally established government and a recognized opposition is the generally accepted norm of political behaviour in Ceylon today.

Already between 40 and 50 percent of the military contribution is derived from the sale of opium. I say nothing about the Imperial Government thus drawing any revenue from what it is committed to regard as a tainted source.

In the late 1970s, a modest scholarly clash took place between James C. Scott and Michael Adas over the extent to which, if at all, the British administration in Burma had granted tax remissions to the rural population of the province during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This formed an important part of their wider debate on the causes of the major rebellion—the Hsaya San rebellion—which erupted in Lower Burma in the closing days of 1930. First into the arena was Scott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, published in 1976. On this issue, Scott's starting point was the observation that the colonial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a very marked increase in the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues from rural populations. The decisive strength of colonial administrations in this respect lay in paperwork, in ‘the inexorable progress of cadastral surveys, settlement reports for land revenue, censuses, the issuance of land titles and licences, identity cards, tax rolls and receipts . . .’, in other words, in the creation of ‘nets of finer and finer official weave’ that trapped rural taxpayers with increasing thoroughness.

An incidental aside in one of my books has become the focal point of a small controversy. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947 was a brief work which attempted to give a more precise and particular account of the events which led up to the transfer of power. Most attention has been paid to my interpretation of the celebrated episode at Simla in May 1947 when Nehru reacted violently to Mountbatten's plans for transferring power. I suggested that the crisis was not an external confrontation between British and Indian views over whether India should remain united, or be divided, or split into fractions, but was essentially an internal crisis in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru. To try to explain why Nehru was so upset by a plan which he had, in all essentials, previously (however reluctantly) accepted, I made a comparison with his later reaction to Chinese activities on the Indian border. Nobody adopted the slogan Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are Brothers’) more ardently than Nehru and so the revelation that they were enemies came as a profound personal shock. Speaking on the morrow of the Chinese invasion, Nehru said that he now realized that they had been ‘out of touch with reality’, in an ‘artificial atmosphere of our own creation’. The Times printed this observation under the sardonic heading ‘The Dreamers’ (26 October 1962). I suggested that at Simla Nehru exhibited ‘much the same apparent amnesia’.

The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time. Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view. One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877. In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context.

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.

It has been said that if completely known and understood, a historical phenomenon is therefore dead. Yet how perverse, so it might seem, that the scholarly revelation of the complex history of a powerful concept might therefore be taken as an argument that it should therefore be entirely abandoned. This is, of course, not Sanjay Subrahmanyam's conclusion about the notion of Asia. The choice he poses is not between one Asia or none, but between a singular and overarching universal and an unevenly connected plurality. However, further complementary questions might pose themselves. Under what conditions can this plurality and these connections become anything like objects of knowledge? And of whose knowledge? These are, perhaps, issues where historians of the sciences might contribute. It is a distressingly familiar theme among those historians that it has too often been supposed that a demonstration of the historical construction and variable functions of an object is to be understood somehow as a denial of that object's existence or value.

This article is about one of the most depressing fieldwork situations I have ever encountered in China. Tiaoxi, basically, is dead. Some of the old artists are still alive, but the plays themselves were performed for the last time in 1987. There is video footage, taken by a professional team from the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, but the quality can only be described as execrable. There are abundant surviving libretti in manuscript, collected by field workers during the 1950s and again during the surveys of the 1980s, but they are almost all held in the Provincial Arts Research Institute in Xi'an, and no one is allowed to see them, not even the ‘old artists’ who donated them in the first place; not even photocopies are held by the county Cultural Bureau or by the artists themselves.

The image of the apex of the Japanese legal system, as portrayed by file video clips on NHK evening news, has remained amazingly consistent over the years: poker-faced judges sit motionless in high-backed chairs, as if waiting to be taken to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. With such a stodgy and foreboding appearance, it is hard for us to imagine that exciting events might transpire within those solemn chambers. And yet occasionally a specific case does demand our attention, especially when the controversy at hand is thought to embody, represent, or challenge some of the most fundamental principles ordering the way society goes about its business.

When he wrote his oft-cited work, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (Freedman 1958), Maurice Freedman could say little about the nature of Chinese martial arts societies. ‘The boxing and music clubs were, as their names imply, groupings of recreation. The structural significance of these associations is not altogether clear’ (Freedman 1958:93). This paper aspires to make that situation somewhat less opaque. Chinese martial arts students under the same teacher are brothers. I don't mean this in a metaphorical sense, that they are ‘like’ brothers. They, at least in some Chinese martial arts groups, consider themselves to be kin.

The Narmada valley and adjoining districts of Madhya Pradesh came under British administration following the defeat of Sagar and Nagpur in 1818. Known from 1820 as the Saugor and Nerbudda (Sagar and Narmada) Territories (map 1), the area was administered, variously, as an agency of the governor general or as a commissioner's division of the North Western Provinces. As officials made the area part of the British imperial and capitalist system, they met with increasing resitance from notables, smaller chiefs and malguzars. A first round of protests occurred between 1818 and 1826, though these proved no much for the new administration or the troops still in central India. A more determined agitation took place in 1842–43, to meet the same fate. In 1857–58 the traditional landowners launched a third and more coordinated revolt against British rele, but were again unable to dislodge it from the region. This essay explores the origins and nature of that revolt and it does so against the background of colonial beginnings in Madhaya Pradesh.

Although it is under the rule and administration of the British, Hong Kong is geographically, socially, economically and politically linked with China. The part played by Hong Kong in the 1911 Revolution has been noted in a number of works, published or unpublished. This paper, however, proposes to examine the role of the Hong Kong educated Chinese in the modernization of China, limiting the study to those who had attended schools in Hong Kong before 1911 and their activities in China during the late Ch'ing and early republican years. During these decades, the English education afforded in the Anglo-Chinese schools in Hong Kong succeeded not only in turning out people who later became leading citizens of the local community but also in producing Western-educated young men who went to China to be engaged in the imperial service, participating directly or indirectly in the various reform programmes in China; while still a greater number, having received some English education in Hong Kong, were recruited into the various modern schools in China to receive training for new careers—modern diplomacy, warfare, engineering, medicine, as well as modern communication and transportation. A number, however, played leading roles in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and in the establishment of the Republic of China—among them Dr Sun Yat-sen , father of the Republic and its first President, and Wang Ch'ung-hui , its first Foreign Minister.

From the fourteenth century CE onwards, South Indian states ruled by Hindu kings were strongly influenced by politico-cultural conventions from Muslim-governed areas. This development was, for instance, manifest in the dress and titles of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire. As has been argued, they bore the title of sultan and on public occasions they appeared in garments fashioned on Persian and Arab clothing. Both adaptations exemplified efforts to connect to the dominant Indo-Islamic world. From Vijayanagara's fragmentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Hindu-ruled kingdoms arose. We may wonder to what extent those succeeding polities continued practices adopted from Islamic courts. With that question in mind, this article discusses royal dress at court audiences in four Vijayanagara successor states, chiefly on the basis of embassy reports of the Dutch East India Company and South Indian works of art. It appears that kings could wear a variety of clothing styles at audiences and that influences on these styles now came from multiple backgrounds, comprising diverse Islamic and other elements. Further, not all successor states followed the same dress codes, as their dynasties modified earlier conventions in different ways, depending on varying political developments.

This article argues that the Mongol empire's famous religious tolerance cannot be explained solely through its adoption of Inner Asian imperial political traditions of ruling over ethnically and religiously diverse subjects. Instead, this pluralism can be ascribed to a wider religious pattern of the Mongols. The first part argues that the analytical category of immanentist religions explains not only the inter-cultic transparency exhibited by the Mongol courts, but also the few explicit instances where the Chinggisid rulers reacted with ‘religious’ violence. The article further explores the strategies employed by the religious vectors, mainly Buddhists and Muslims, to address, accommodate, and subvert the Chinggisids’ patterns of religiosity and primarily their pluralism, and the Mongols’ deified mode of sacralizing kingship. Focusing on the Mongol-Ilkhanid court in Iran, the article examines how religious representatives used conceptual affinities and equivalences between the Mongol traditions and certain principles of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favour, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to the new religious affiliation. Employing this assimilative approach, they manoeuvred within the religious, immanentist paradigm of their nomadic patrons while moulding and manipulating it to their own religious, transcendentalist ends. The article further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Chinggisid patterns became an arena of Buddhist–Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization.