Everyday technologies of the nineteenth century—mass-produced items that were small, sturdy, and affordable—transformed the daily lives of working people in Asian colonies. There is already a large literature on colonial technology transfer and a specialist literature on the sewing-machine, which draws on Singer archives, production figures, sales techniques, and advertising to establish uptake by households from North America to the Philippines, India, China, and Egypt. Still, documentation of how and why imported objects such as the sewing-machine were appropriated is difficult to find because, unlike elites, ordinary people left few records of their own. Here a visual archive is investigated to complement existing studies. Photographs and early moving pictures from the former Dutch East Indies show that ordinary Indonesians sought and appropriated imported goods such as the sewing-machine. The colonial camera's visual record of sewing-machine operators displaces attention from the more impersonal trade and productivity statistics. It brings the silent user into the history of technological uptake and allows us to consider the repercussions across a wide social band and period. Indigenous tailors and seamstresses expanded their own work options. Through the Singer they fitted out and launched their compatriots into modern jobs and lifestyles in the Dutch colony. The sewing-machine changed habits, manners, and expectations; machine operators influenced senses of propriety, fashion, and status. Appropriation of mundane technology demonstrates that modernization was not only a process trickling down to the masses from Westernizing elites; it also bubbled up from below.

Intimate interactions across ethnic and cultural lines were integral to the archive of memory within Eurasian families in colonial Penang. Through histories of their European and Asian ancestors, Eurasian families inherited a sense of travel and geographical mobility, and complex forms of cultural exchange often shaped their everyday lives. Eurasian family histories provide access to the messy, lived interactions which formed their social and domestic worlds, but they also hint at their limits. The idea of ‘Eurasian’ in colonial Malaya was a contentious one, a site for debate, as it was experienced by different people in different ways. During the interwar period, members of Penang's Eurasian elite attempted to define and discipline the divided Eurasian communities of Malaya, by purifying Eurasian family histories of their unruly diversity. In exploring the Eurasian social world of colonial Penang, this paper aims to delineate the fragility of such processes of interaction and exchange.

This paper investigates the evidence on living standards in colonial economies, with particular reference to South East Asia in the decades from 1900 to 1942. Various measures are investigated, including availability of basic needs, demographic indicators, especially mortality rates, anthropometric measures and wage data. The paper concludes that in spite of the growth in GDP which occurred in most parts of the region between 1900 and 1940, improvements in living standards were modest, and by the late 1930s most colonies had low educational enrolments and high mortality rates. The Philippines had probably the highest living standards in the region, using educational indicators, mortality rates and per capita GDP estimates. But even in the Philippines rice availability per capita was low, and nutritional levels among some segments of the population were also below acceptable standards.

Covering one hundred years, this paper recounts the life stories of three generations of middle-class women of the New Delhi-based Kapoor family. By taking the methodological view that individuals born approximately at the same time, within the same class segment, and at the same cultural place will be shaped by the same historical structures so that their lives to some extent are synchronized into a gendered, generational experience, these three life stories are viewed as voices that reflect their respective generational class segments. In view of this, the paper uses the three life stories to discuss changes in women's agency within the urban, educated, upper middle-class. Agency is here understood as control over resources, and it is argued that in order to understand changes in women's agency, one should take into account the impact of both social, economic structures and cultural ideologies. When analysing the three life stories, the overall finding is that the granddaughter has had more control over her own life than her mother and grandmother. However, by acknowledging that cultural ideologies and social economic structures are not always synchronized, a nuanced and many-dimensional picture of twists and turns in these middle-class women's degree and type of agency over time emerges.

The short history of the Taiwanese Communist Party (Taiwan gongchandang 台 灣 共 產 黨) (1928–1931) offers a window into the negotiative polity of international communism during the Third Period (1928–1934). The Party was established during the time when the Comintern intensified its operations in colonies and promoted the organization of communist parties there. Its demise was the result of government suppression that occurred as a reaction to their increased public activity in 1931, allegedly at the direction of the Comintern. This paper examines the Comintern's role in the Taiwanese communist movement and shows that the Taiwanese communists were active agents (rather than passive tools) in their relationship with the Comintern.

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of ‘citation sites’ in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, electric tramways made their appearance in the cities of Asia, but despite being a universal technology, and despite the considerable impact they had upon life in these cities, the history of tramways in Asia has hardly ever been studied. Trams, wherever they ran, mobilized the urban population to a degree unseen before—their track network could restructure the urban topography and re-evaluate its segments, as independent villages became suburbs and residential quarters rose or fell in status, and add to the segregation of workplaces and residential areas. The two cities of Singapore and Rangoon, which have been selected because of their comparability, provide two contrasting examples of how trams functioned and eventually failed in an Asian urban environment.

This paper examines the relationship between ethnic configuration and state social policy in a Chinese context. Why did the Chinese communist government have to implement a preferential policy towards ethnic minorities, and to what extent has this policy come to reshape peoples’ consciousness of their group membership? As well as analysing the reasons and intents of the Chinese Communist Party when dealing with the minority issue before and after it attained power, this paper argues that categorizing of the population served to establish the state apparatus. Why the project of ethnic identification was first initiated in Fujian (a province best known for its overwhelming Han culture) is also discussed. By unfolding the process of searching for ethnic representation in Fujian in the early 1950s, this paper further argues that the major concern of the party-state regarding ethnic minorities is to hold onto its power. Finally, this paper documents how government agents, when investigating ethnicity, interacted with the local population. The Fujian case implies as well as exemplifies how ethnicity can be invented, constructed or reconstructed as a particular representation in relation to state formation.

This paper explores the part that the redistribution of evacuee property—the property abandoned by departing Hindus and Sikhs during the mass migrations after Partition—played in the institutionalization of corruption in Pakistan. By drawing on hitherto unexplored sources, including Pakistan's Rehabilitation Department papers, local police files and court records, it highlights the schemes of illegal appropriation, misappropriation, and paints a wholly convincing portrait of the scramble for millions of rupees worth of abandoned property in the towns and countryside of West Punjab. It shows how politicians, bureaucrats, powerful local notables and enterprising refugee groups grabbed properties, mainly by bribing officers charged with allocating them to incoming refugees, or by utilizing their personal contacts. The paper argues that the fierce competition for resources and temptations for evacuee property encouraged the emergence of a ‘corruption’ discourse which not only contributed to an atmosphere that was detrimental to democratic consolidation in the early years of Pakistan's history, but also justified later military intervention. This not only adds to the empirical knowledge of Partition and its legacies, but also makes a significant contribution towards our understanding of the transitional state in Pakistan.

Given different socio-economic structures, and acute landlessness among the Dalits of East Punjab, the agendas of conversion to neo-Buddhism and sanskritisation, the two most popular Dalit social mobility models in India, have failed to strike a cord among the Dalits in this border state of northwest India. But that does not imply that Dalits of Punjab have failed in improving their social status. On the contrary, they have been very vocal in their assertions for social justice and dignity, and pressing for a due share in the local structures of power; a clear indication of a significant surge of Dalit social mobility in Punjab. The question that still remains largely unexplored, however, relates to the patterns of Dalit social mobility in Punjab that have emerged independently of the agendas of conversion to neo-Buddhism and sanskritisation. The study aims to map out the contours of an emerging alternative Dalit agenda in Punjab, which is conspicuous by its absence in existing Dalit studies, and examines its catalytic role in enhancing the legitimacy and effectiveness of increasingly visible Dalit social mobility in the state. The paper concludes by visualising the possibility of an articulation and assertion of a similar alternative Dalit agenda through highly contentious democratic politics in other parts of India, where the archetypical agendas of conversion and sanskritisation have either failed to deliver social justice and dignity or could not simply appeal to the local Dalit population.

In India in the early twentieth century the modern socio-technological phenomenon of traffic brought together many visible and accessible forms of everyday technology. However, in India modern motorized transport had to operate alongside earlier, seemingly ‘pre-modern’, modes of street-life. The emergence of traffic helped foster the expansion of late-colonial policing and the growth of the ‘everyday state’. It stimulated a new sense of a middle class identity and the proper ordering and disciplining of those who used the modern highway. But the technology of traffic was also contested—by those who evaded traffic rules as well as by those who were critical of technological modernity or the rising human cost of traffic accidents. The street at times became a site of open opposition to state authority or, through the deliberate disruption of traffic, a significant location for the exercise of political defiance and control.

Keramat is the Malay word for the graves of notable figures which are popular sites of prayer and dot the social and physical landscapes of much of Muslim Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region as a whole. The term refers to both people as well as their burial sites. Historically, keramat drew people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. While the venerated dead also came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, histories, and faiths, they were usually Muslim and frequently Hadrami (from the Hadramaut region in Yemen). In this paper, I view keramat as a significant site of social and cultural diversity. The study of keramat, and the transoceanic movement of the people and faith to which it is linked, may shed further light on the cultural interaction that has historically characterized the region. At the same time, the permissibility of the veneration of graves constitutes a terrain that has long been contested by Muslim scholars. As a result, the fate of this popular practice may offer insights into the complex process of Islamization in the region which began around 700 years ago. I explore two questions in particular. First, in what ways do keramat embody cultural diversity? Secondly, where do keramat stand in relation to state- and organization-driven Islam?

In this paper I compare late nineteenth and early twentieth-century sport hunting of markhor, a mountain goat, by British civil and military officials in the mountainous northern frontier region of Kashmir State, with their hunting of tigers, particularly man-eating tigers in the hilly and plains regions of India. Using these two instances, this paper elucidates and compares two competing visions of colonial governance. The British sportsman hunted man-eating tigers in order to protect Indian society from wild nature. Hunting them was also symbolic of their welfare-oriented governance ideology. They also hunted markhor in the northern mountainous region using begar, or forced labour, which they justified by falling back on the wider colonial representation of the northern mountainous region as a civilization-less area, where a more coercive form of governance was needed. So, rather than protecting society from nature, as in the case of man-eating tiger hunting in the plains, what was needed in the mountains was the ability of the British to introduce civilization into unruly nature via a strong disciplinary force. I argue that colonial governance entailed not simply a struggle to civilize India and its population, but a more profound struggle for control over nature.

This paper explores the institution of caste and its operation in a micro-level village setting of West Bengal, an Indian state, where state politics at grass roots level is vibrant with functioning local self-government and entrenched political parties. This ethnographic study reveals that caste relations and caste identities have overarching dimensions in the day-to-day politics of the study villages. Though caste almost ceases to operate in relation to strict religious strictures, under economic compulsion the division of labour largely coincides with caste division. In the cultural–ideological field, the concept of caste-hierarchy seems to continue as an influencing factor, even in the operation of leftist politics.

This paper discusses the responses of The Netherlands Indies colonial government to the rise in urban unemployment in Java brought about by the 1930s Depression. At least one in six of the large European/Eurasian population in the colony, and an even larger proportion of urban Indonesian workers, became unemployed as a result of the Depression. The colonial government and the European community were greatly concerned that the growth of unemployment among Europeans would lead to destitution for many, ultimately forcing them into the native kampung1. They were also concerned about what they saw as the moral decay of local-born European/Eurasian youth who were unemployed in unprecedented numbers. Furthermore, the European community feared that the growth in unemployment among western-educated Indonesians in the towns and cities in Java would create a fertile recruitment ground for nationalist political parties leading to urban unrest. Fear of the kampung for destitute Europeans, and fear of urban unrest from unemployed western-educated Indonesians, shaped the colonial government's responses to urban unemployment. The impact of the Depression on both Indonesian and European unemployed in the towns and cities in Java triggered lengthy debates on the role of the state in the provision of social security.

Colonial transformation of the relations of production contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices, and tastes for the Bengali Hindu middle class. These cultural values, together with the political and economic conditions of colonialism, formed the habitus of this class. This paper tries to understand this self-fashioning by the middle class through their construction of a ‘Bengali’ cuisine. A distinct enthusiasm for new gastronomic possibilities defined this cuisine, and yet, at the same time, it possessed important elements of continuity from pre-colonial times, evidenced especially in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. The resultant cuisine was cosmopolitan yet still Bengali.

Sikh policemen were an indelible part of the landscape of Shanghai in the first decades of the twentieth century, and have left their mark in the ways in which the city is remembered up to the present day. Yet their history has never been told and historians of the period have, at best, simply referred to them in passing. This paper redresses this gap in the literature by accounting for the presence of the Sikh branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police and exploring their role in the governance and policing of the International Settlement. This enriches our understanding of the nature of the British presence in China and the ways in which Indian sub-imperialism extended to China's treaty ports, for on the streets of Shanghai, and not Shanghai alone, British power had an Indian face.

While various scholars of Indian economic history have focused on the progress of import substitution in India after the 1920s, few have studied why this led to hardly any export of industrial products during the colonial period. One of the most probable reasons for the lesser popularity of this issue could be attributed to a commonly shared view that there was less hope for the export of industrial products in colonial India since import substitution had progressed only so far. Although it is accepted that the industrial development of colonial India was generally stagnant, this does not necessarily apply to specific products in specific industries. For instance, the iron and steel industry achieved almost a full self-sufficiency rate for some of its steel products during the 1920s, although the industry hardly exported the products afterward. This paper aims to clarify why hardly any steel of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), the only steel producing company with modern technology until the mid-1930s, was exported. A detailed study of the company's archives will show that the steel export of the company was fundamentally hindered by a fact which had its origin in British imperial policy: the strict quality specifications in the production of steel.

Compared with other public media, the colonial state showed a relative lack of interest in radio broadcasting, which developed in Vietnam in the 1930s under the aegis of two organizations based in Hanoi and Saigon, the Radio-Club de l'Indochine du Nord and Radio Saigon. These two groups were largely responsible for the new technology's expansion and for determining the content of broadcasting. The groups actively consulted the growing radio public, and that vocal audience played a role in determining not just what was heard but also in the social life of radio in late-colonial Vietnam. The content of radio was limited to a non-political domain and this fact, along with the particular position that many radios took in the social geography of towns and cities, lent itself to the easy entry of the radio into day-to-day life. Indeed, the early history of radio in Vietnam is remarkable for how rapidly it became commonplace, even banal.

This paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.