This paper examines the resistance of pingtan storytellers to Communist political domination and economic exploitation on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In the early and mid-1960s, storytellers rarely mounted resistance through direct confrontations with the political authorities, but often in ‘everyday forms’ such as by libelling cadres, asking for sick-leave, refusing to conform to the dress code during performances, and threatening to withdraw from troupes. In order to vent their disappointment at the economic hardships following the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), storytellers resorted to the flexible ways of narrating and performing pingtan stories to manipulate the storylines and characterizations in their stage performances. Hence storytellers engaged in counter-propaganda by telling ribald jokes and distorting stories that were originally designed to praise Communist revolutions. This investigation of the resistance of storytellers, both on and off stage, is intended not merely to raise a long overlooked history of the 1960s from oblivion, but also to highlight the Party-state's inability to ideologically transform Chinese artists prior to the Cultural Revolution.

What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-à-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement across Chinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese. Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations to refer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we can learn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about the wartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic of territorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concerned with the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iteration and practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic with respect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding how the work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic is important because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundational to the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War world order.

This article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium-distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens, and knowledge from China. The colonial state's experimental tea plantations were directly connected to the devastation of the opium trade. The multiple uses of Jardine Matheson's drug-distribution networks and skilled employees becomes evident upon examination of their role in facilitating Chinese migration. The recruitment of tea cultivators from China in the 1830s also impacted on colonial concepts of racial hierarchy and the perceived contrast between savagery and civilization. Ultimately, Jardine Matheson's extraction of skilled labour from the China coast informs our understanding of the evolving private networks that became crucial to British imperialism in Asia, and through which labour, capital, people, information, and ideas could be exchanged.

Why should we care about giving in modern South Asia, and why now? These are among the questions at the forefront of this special issue whose contributors explore charitable practices and philanthropic transformations in diverse historical and cultural contexts across the colonial/post-colonial divide at a time when trade liberalization, the transformation of state welfare-ism, and the consolidation of a global economy has led to a deepening of neo-liberal regimes across the region as well as political and religious fundamentalisms. We also write at a time when non-governmental organizations have proliferated across the region, as has the discourse regarding humanitarian aid for a diverse range of development projects. This special issue, then, seeks to throw light on what is new and different, and what persists in the context of the region's long and well-established traditions of giving. Who gives and toward what purposes and with what stated intentions? How have acts of giving changed over time and across cultural, religious, and regional complexes? What are the institutional frameworks within which specifically local, national and regional mechanisms and instruments of giving intersect with global practices? How do the economic and financial incentives interact with ethical and affective imperatives to give?

Pakistan is today moving toward a population crisis with two dimensions. The source of this crisis is both internal and external. Internally the country is experiencing one of the greatest population growths in the world, externally the conflict in Afghanistan has resulted in the world's greatest refugee migration. Together these two dimensions of population pressure have generated a potentially explosive condition.

This article considers the relationship between poverty in Rangoon and the ways in which both an imperial and a post-imperial urbanism helped ‘improve’, develop, and reclaim Rangoon's urban environment. Examining the actions of the Rangoon Development Trust before and after the Second World War in the context of actions taken by the Bombay Improvement Trust, Bombay Development Directorate, Singapore Improvement Trust, and Hong Kong Housing Authority, it both analyses measures taken in Rangoon and constructs a connective history of urban development in relation to other Asian port cities. Incorporating documents released only in 2014 by the National Archives of Myanmar, this analysis for the first time considers interventions made in Rangoon's post-war built environment of poverty, connecting these actions to policies constructed over the preceding decades.

Being the concluding part of the study on the Chinese in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements, the inquiry has a twofold aim: to construct a social alignment pattern of the Chinese in Penang, and to compare the pattern with those in Singapore and Malacca. Altogether 14,500 names of donors from epigraphic sources were processed.

The Penang Chinese exhibited a rather unique social alignment pattern in that the Hokkiens had been very active in a number of community oriented associations. Cases of cross-dialect-group participation were few, as compared to the other two settlements, for the various dialect groups in Penang, particularly the Hokkiens, were largely attracted to the inter-provincial associations. This was a unique social alignment pattern.

The findings from Penang, together with those in Singapore and Malacca were used to reconstruct an unidimensional scale for measuring the system rigidity of Chinese voluntary associations.

From 1939 to 1941, Mei Niang (b. 1920) penned three of her most famous novellas, Bang (Clam)(1939), Yu (Fish)(1941), and Xie (Crabs)(1941). Each of these works sheds light on the struggle of Chinese feminists in Japanese-occupied north China to realize ideals that stood in stark contrast to the conservative constructs of ‘good wives, wise mothers’ (xianqi liangmu) favoured by colonial officials. The contemporary appeal of Mei Niang's work is attested to by a catch-phrase, coined in 1942, that linked her with one of the most celebrated Chinese women writers of the twentieth century, Zhang Ailing (1920–1995): ‘the south has Zhang Ailing, the north has Mei Niang’ (Nan Ling, Bei Mei). Both women attained great fame in Japanese-occupied territories, only to have their achievements tempered by condemnation of the environments in which they forged their early careers. The Chinese civil war that followed the collapse of the Japanese empire propelled the two writers along divergent trajectories: Zhang Ailing moved to Hong Kong and the United States, where she achieved iconic status, while Mei Niang remained in the People's Republic of China, to be vilified. As one of the pre-eminent ‘writers of the enemy occupation’ (lunxian zuojia), Mei Niang was persecuted by a Maoist regime (1949–1976) dedicated to the refutation of the Japanese colonial order in its entirety.

Wellington's first independent command has been seen as a short, but intense, ‘baptism of fire’ in which the young Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Wellesley commanded a small force against the insurgent, or ‘freebooter’, Dhoondiah Vagh. New evidence presented here, however, demonstrates that the three-month military campaign was preceded by several months of political negotiation and intelligence gathering designed to isolate Dhoondiah and starve him of sanctuary, support and sustenance. As a result, the campaign was much more complex than previously thought, and demonstrates important lessons about British imperial expansion in the region at the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the nature of British authority in India, and on the opening stages of the military career of the future Duke of Wellington.

Since the end of World War II, the ever-increasing role of government in advanced democratic nations has resulted in a massive organizational growth in the public sector. The impact of the welfare state provides an explanation for changes in traditional patterns of central–local government relations. The era of the welfare state has witnessed the rapid emergence of an intermeshed system of making and implementing policies, which necessitates integration between central and local government.

Compared to missionaries like Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay is a name almost unknown in the annals of Christian evangelism in China. The personnel roster of the London Missionary Society, to which he initially belonged, did boast of such luminaries as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneering Protestant preacher in early nineteenth-century China and James Legge (1815–1897), a missionary turned Sinologist and Oxford don. But Mackay, as one of the Mission's numerous field workers, is not likely to be found in such distinguished company. In fact, his sojourn in China, in comparison, was relatively brief. It lasted not quite six years, from January 1891 to September 1896, when he died of cholera and was buried in China. In many ways, he was merely another missionary, one of the many men and women, Catholic and Protestant, who had toiled in China, then faded into oblivion, and have since eluded the eye of the historical researcher.

To what extent did legal notions of identity conceal more porous and dynamic social relationships experienced outside of court? This article reconstructs events surrounding a famous court case, Abraham v. Abraham (1863), involving a property dispute within a mixed race family from Bellary, South India. Using the case's original documents it presents a narrative about the Abraham family, highlighting their negotiations of identity within the domains of family, market and law. The narrative shows how Indians, even under colonialism, could experience far more dynamic and flexible boundaries than what is often portrayed in the literature on communalism. At the same time, it demonstrates the very real impact of personal law categories upon the choices and litigation strategies of Indians. Indians had real agency in crafting their identities, but only as they adopted the conceptual tools of the colonial judiciary to pursue their interests.

This article investigates Japanese imperialism in northeast China through its road construction infrastructure projects within its railway auxiliary zone (1906–1932) and Manchuria at large (1932–1945). The materiality of roads unveils a history of how Japanese engineers adapted to local practices and absorbed local knowledge in building physical infrastructure and developing their technical expertise. These engineers engaged with local practices rooted in pre-existing social and natural environments to facilitate road construction. At the same time, in Manchuria their technical expertise in construction was built on the absorption and subsequent erasure of local workers’ vernacular craft. Rather than the physical realization of an imperialist, top-down vision of modernization, imperial infrastructure projects were in fact hybrid productions of technical expertise, and local vernacular knowledge and skills. By constructing roads, engineers helped to expand Japan’s political and economic influence in northeast China, assert domination over Chinese residential areas and business interests, and coerce Chinese subjects into complying with policies and rules issued by Japanese administrations. The materials of roads—gravel, granite flagstone, and concrete—illustrate a complex relationship between Japanese imperial agents and local environments.

Japanese imperialism was one of the most important driving forces in the history of modern East Asia. One influential group of actors at the grassroots level were the so-called ‘continental adventurers’ (tairiku rōnin)—Japanese nationals who travelled in Korea and China on the lookout for adventures and employment opportunities. Some of them worked part time for the army as spies, translators, and agents for special operations. These adventurers have been studied before as agents of Japanese imperialism, but existing accounts fail to present a convincing model of the mechanism that made their activities effective. The goal of this article is to fill this gap.

This mechanism, which I shall hereafter call ‘the military-adventurous complex’, was a lobby of officers, continental adventurers, businessmen, politicians, criminal elements as well as Chinese, Manchurian, and Mongolian revolutionaries. The interests of these contingents were unique but nevertheless intertwining. Despite its decentralized character, the military-adventurous complex had a significant impact on Japanese foreign policy over an extended period. In this article, we shall explore the contours, structure, and modus operandi of that complex, its ambivalent relationship with the Japanese state, as well as several examples of its operations in the early twentieth century. Finally, we shall dwell on the ramifications of the complex on the development of Japanese imperialism.

Most historians agree that the Mongolian revolution of 1921 was initiated by Soviet Russia and was imposed on the Mongols, who were nothing more than their passive tools. This must be at least partly due to the fact that so far, works on this subject have almost exclusively been based on materials of Russian and Chinese origin. Materials published in the Mongolian People's Republic, however, provide ample evidence that the Mongolian revolution originated in a purely Mongolian situation, though the Mongols could never have succeeded in their revolution without Soviet support.

‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.