Edo culture, in spite of its continuing presence, was not highly valued in the Meiji period. In the Taishō period, when Westernization was again at a high tide, the cult of Edo developed among minorities. In the war years of Shōwa, 1931–1945, when the cult of Japan was widely subscribed to, the cult of Edo was at its lowest ebb. The same unpopularity continued during the Occupating period, 1945–1952. After 1952, in parallel to economic recovery and accelerated industrialization, the cult of Edo emerged in the field of young people's fashion as an expression of their yearning for simple living.

One of the interesting questions concerning the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is the degree to which the Western-oriented intellectuals of Japan compromised their scholarly curiosity about European civilization by serving the pre-Restoration Tokugawa government and its successor, the Meiji oligarchy. In what ways might their duties as civil servants colour their objectivity in studying the newly found academic disciplines of the West? What tensions did late Tokugawa and early Meiji scholar-bureaucrats perceive between their investigations of European knowledge and their service in a partisan regime? An examination of the career of Nishi Amane (1829–1897), who was an important scholar of Western philosophy as well as a bureaucrat in both the Tokugawa and Meiji governments, casts some light on the problem of the intellectual as public servant in early modern Japan. This study will concentrate on three important events in Nishi's life: his decision to flee his feudal clan in order to study the West in 1854; his refusal to join the Restoration movement in 1868; and his defence of the idea that scholars could serve the new state without compromising their objectivity in 1874.

Between 1920 and his death in 1948 Gandhi was the dominant personality in Indian affairs and the most admired of the great world figures of the time. Twenty years later it is customary, and justified, to lament that in India, at least, little is now apparent of the enormous impression he created. His eclipse is of course due in large part to Nehru, but it is possible to assign more general causes.

On 14 April 1923, in the dead of night, an English girl was kidnapped from her bedroom in a military bungalow in the Kohat Cantonment on India's North-West Frontier. The kidnapping is a notorious incident that has been told and retold in multiple languages, disciplines, and media for almost a century. From the colonial perspective, the kidnapping was seen as an ‘outrage’ that demonstrated the lawless savagery of the tribes who inhabited this strategically significant Indo-Afghan borderland. From the local perspective, the kidnappers led by Ajab Khan Afridi were valiant heroes who boldly challenged an alien and oppressive regime. This article adopts a gendered lens of historical analysis to argue that the case offers important conceptual insights about the colonial preoccupation with frontier security. In the British empire, the idea of the frontier signified a racial line dividing civilization from savagery. The colonial frontier was also a zone of hyper-masculinity where challenges to state power were met with brutal violence in a muscular performance of masculine authority. In this space where ‘no signs of weakness’ could be shown, the abduction of Molly Ellis represented an assault on the fictive image of white, male invincibility and the race–gender hierarchy that defined the colonial system.

Mao's Great Famine in Wuwei County, Anhui Province, between the years of 1958 and 1960, resulted in the deaths of about 245,000 people, a quarter of the local population. By focusing on grain production and consumption, this article adopts a local perspective to examine the county's official archives and analyse the background, rationale, and processes of local authorities that led to one of the highest death rates in the country. A local perspective provides an empirical microanalysis of the Great Famine; illustrates the complexity of this catastrophe; argues for local factors such as factional struggles, central-local interactions, and the political atmosphere created by the series of pre-1958 campaigns as key to local variations of the disaster; and delivers national implications for viewing Mao's China. Official archives explored in this article reveal that an over-reporting of grain output might have resulted in the Great Famine, but did not necessarily lead to the massive death toll, and that local politics, particularly intra-party factional struggles, intertwined with central-local political interactions, were crucial for the terrible tragedy that ensued in Wuwei, and that the end of this famine resulted not from peasants’ resistance, nor the change of radical polices to moderate ones, but from the decreased demand for grain caused by the massive number of deaths.

This article explores the thoughts and ideas associated with magic-lantern technology in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan. Its primary focus is on trends in Japanese thought from the 1770s until the 1820s, with specific reference to the Rangaku (‘Dutch Studies’) movement. The article examines connections between the magic lantern and a wider discourse within Japan on epistemology, knowledge about nature, and the study of the human body, centring upon the device's vital role in the endeavour to understand the workings of the human eye. Through this lens, a fresh perspective is offered on the role of critical analysis in the translation and interpretation of European texts in Tokugawa Japan, as well as on the shifting prominence of empiricism and deductive reasoning in Japanese epistemology. In this way, the history of the magic lantern is used to look beyond the prevailing West-centred narrative of global technological and intellectual development.

This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history.

The once-unified indigenous northeast Asian people known as the Hezhe in China and the Nanai in Russia are little-discussed in any discipline, but their long experiences of cross-border division and, more recently, renewed inter-community contact, offer us a new framework for understanding both Chinese and Russian states in the region. As I show here ethnographically, today's Hezhe in northern Heilongjiang province (China) and Nanai in Khabarovsk territory (Russia) live amid the physical furniture of very different polities. But rather than merely reflecting their separation, I argue, these distinct surroundings in fact invite us to consider how the incorporation of Nanai/Hezhe into China and Russia have been constituted in important ways by the uses and flows of material objects. In support of this argument, which draws on recent anthropological insights concerning materiality to push back against existing identity-, landscape-, or production-focused theories of Chinese and Russian power, I examine sources in several languages to develop a longue durée account of materially mediated interactions between Nanai/Hezhe and China and Russia. From early imperial tribute through to socialist command economies to postsocialist cross-border trade, I show how—with notable continuity—states have been embodied in flows and usage of goods, bringing about the incorporation of Hezhe and Nanai into separate realms with immanent material existences.

Mumbādevī is the patron Goddess of the city of Mumbai, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities of Asia. Local traditions say that Mumbādevī was a Koḷī Goddess and worshipped by the indigenous Koḷī fisher community for centuries. However, since the turn of the twentieth century the temple of Mumbādevī and the rituals surrounding the Goddess have gradually been Sanskritised. Today, Mumbādevī is more closely associated with the Gujarati community. This paper examines this transformation and in doing so reflects on the survival of Mumbādevī, the ongoing popularity of Goddess worship in Mumbai and the failure of Hindu fundamentalists to subordinate the Mother Goddesses of Mumbai to a more limited range of Hindu Gods.

This article asks why the victims of the 1944–45 famine in Indonesia’s main island of Java are largely missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography. It surveys relevant studies, to conclude that there is no consensus on the human toll of the famine. The article then traces the origins of an initial estimate of four million mentioned by Indonesia’s authorities to data on mortality and births uncovered in late 1945. It discusses the outcomes of a recent study that analysed these data to re-estimate excess deaths of, respectively, 0.7 and 1.2 million during 1944 and 1945. The difference with the initial estimate is that it also included unborn children and an unsubstantiated approximation of victims in 1946. The article analyses the likely reasons why the millions of victims of the famine went missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography during the 1950s and 1960s.

This article argues that the genealogy of modern anti-caste critique is incomplete without a contextualized and close reading of Jatibhed Viveksar, a nineteenth-century Marathi-language text written under the pseudonym Ek Hindu (‘One Hindu’ or ‘A Hindu’). One of the first lower-caste commentaries in the Marathi print-world, the treatise clearly departed from the earlier iterations of non-Brahman caste politics in western India and laid the groundwork for what later came to be known as the ‘anti-caste movement’. I demonstrate how Jatibhed Viveksar engaged with preceding expressions of caste politics in western India by disputing two commonly deployed concepts in early modern caste controversies: first, the received proscriptions against varna sankara (or the intermixing of castes) and, second, the idea that the Shudras were the progeny of the ‘moral failure’ of varna sankara. Ek Hindu argued that not just the Shudras, but the Brahmans too have mixed-caste ancestors and thus cannot claim purity of lineage. Moreover, the author wrested the Shudras from a constellation of negative meanings by deploying the ‘Aryan invasion narrative’; he represented them as indigenous heroes who were vanquished by the Aryan-Brahmans. The conceptual innovations, intellectual sources, and frames of thought mobilized by Jatibhed Viveksar have significantly shaped the common sense of the ensuing articulations of anti-caste politics.

Focusing on Chinese elite women who gravitated towards national affairs in the pre-war urban sites of eastern China and who migrated to Wuhan after the outbreak of the War of Resistance (1937–1945), this article analyses the emergence, development, and integration of their sociopolitical networks for the purpose of promoting women's participation in national salvation, against a backdrop of the deepening national crisis in the 1930s. I argue that two years before the Second Kuomintang-Chinese Communist Party (KMT-CCP) United Front was officially formed, these elite women, hailing from diverse social and political backgrounds and different professions, had already established their own leadership during the national salvation movement and called for a women's united front. Therefore, rather than being simply political rhetoric enhanced under the auspices of the KMT-CCP alliance, the women's united front served as an important institution with which Chinese elite women identified and through which they empowered themselves at a local and then national level, across and beyond geopolitical boundaries. I conclude that the birth and evolution of this women's united front, which have been neglected in the historiography of China's War of Resistance, are crucial to an understanding of unsettling negotiations, communication, and cooperation between the various forces signed up to the cause of national salvation in the 1930s, and to the interpretation of popular resistance before the war.

In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.

This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ci) as a site of contention over national sovereignty and belonging. The shrine originated in Sun Yat-sen's aspiration to commemorate the anti-imperial martyrs of the 1911 Republic and in the Nationalist government's attempt to marshal political allegiance in the 1920s–1940s. Upon fleeing from the mainland to Taiwan after losing to the Communist forces in 1949, the Nationalist leadership renovated the Japanese-built National Protection Shrine in Taipei, transforming it into the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine to house the displaced spirits of the national dead. Throughout the Cold War era, the spring and autumn sacrifices performed by heads of state and visits to the shrine by foreign dignities served to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China vis-à-vis the People's Republic of China. Even though the end of martial law in 1987 opened a new era marked by the Nationalist Party's loss of political hegemony, the shrine continued to adhere to the Nationalist Party's ideology and version of history. Far from embodying a place of remembrance and mourning for war victims, the palace-style compound is a site of contested sovereignty exaggerated by China's extraordinary growth and Taiwan's transforming identity. The enshrined dead have found a new role as both an assertion of the island's autonomy and a reflection of its dynamism. The departed, albeit silent, hold power in the malleability of their memories, and each permutation of how the past is remembered hosts its own tension.

Revisiting the debate on how Islam's ‘learned men’ (‘ulama) have sustained their religious authority through changing historical circumstances, this article offers a longue durée account of the so-called ‘Khandan-i-Ijtihad’: a family of renowned scholars and jurists who have held scholarly and popular precedence within South Asia's Shi‘i clerical networks for some 250 years. Instead of analysing the ‘ulama as a corporate group or a class of religious professionals, this article examines the ‘ulama as members of households (khandan, khanwadah) and emphasizes the important role of family lineage and inherited social influence as conduits of clerical leadership. Tracing both the genealogical succession and the vocational enterprises of this family over several generations, the article proposes a framework for understanding an individual scholar's relationship with the collective household, arguing that a cleric's own reputation (hasab-va-nasab) rests on a mingling of ancestral pedigree and personal achievement, with the stature of individual and household perpetually affirming and reinforcing each other in the making of Islamic clerical authority. Furthermore, the article establishes the importance of the ‘ulama-biography (tazkirah) as itself a mechanism for actively sustaining the relevance of contemporary ‘ulama, by perpetually memorializing their ancestors.

Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India.