It is widely recognized that the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ developed largely out of the history of Europe. In Western Europe the process of state-building preceded and assisted the process of nation-formation. In consequence, the concept of the nation that developed from this process focused on the political community as defined by the institutional and territorial framework. In the tradition of Rousseau, Abbé Sieyes could define a nation as ‘a body of associates living under one common law and represented by the same legislature’. In most lands of Western Europe these developments also produced the model of a single nationality nation or nation-state. In Central and Eastern Europe the process was different: ‘the nation was first defined as a cultural rather than a political entity’ and the underlying theoretical foundation was in the tradition of Herder rather than Rousseau Nevertheless, once nationhood had been achieved in these regions there was a tendency to approximate to the model associated with Western Europe. This was made all the easier in such states as Italy and Germany because the majority of their citizens were from one ethnic group; they, too, were single nationality nations. Whatever the dualisms and amalgams in Europe, the export model has been that associated with that of Western Europe—for the simple reason that the predominant colonizing powers were from this part of the Continent.

The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

In the conventional rhetoric of Japanese social criticism, factionalism is an endemic condition caused by the lingering heritage of feudalism. Much the same kind of charges familiar in the political arena are common to discussions regarding cliques within the Japanese academic world, although there is almost no detailed research directly on the latter subject in Western languages. The following attempts to explicate one outstanding prewar example of factional strife in Japan's most prestigious university, the case of the Department of Economics at Tokyo Imperial University. It has been chosen for three reasons: (1) the Economics faculty were among the most deeply involved intellectuals in the dramatic prewar struggles over academic freedom; (2) the charge of factionalism has been raised explicitly and repeatedly by participants as well as others; and (3) the issues over which the struggle raged as well as many of the personalities have continued to be of significance in Japanese politics and within the universities down to the present. Because of its significance, there is available far more information than is common on such intramural factionalism.

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.

Although 1949 is not a magical year in Chinese history in the sense of marking a total break with the centuries-old traditions and culture, it is appropriate to say that 1949 is the year which symbolizes the end of Chinese sociology. In this paper we attempt to give a socio-historical account of the genesis, development, struggle and then death of sociology in China, covering a period of more than half a century. The first part of the paper will deal with the institutionalization of sociology as a transplanted Western flower in Chinese soil; the second part describes and analyses how Chinese sociology struggled for its legitimacy for survival under Chinese Communism and how the battle was lost.

British history on the occupation of Japan is largely a blank. Government publications on the Far East, political biographies, regimental histories and diplomats' memoires offer slim pickings. Historians interested in postwar Japan have tended to conclude from the apparent paucity of evidence that British influence on the conduct of the Allied occupation was negligible. Standard works on the period have repeated the conventional wisdom and then moved on. Those who were involved at a policy level rarely made any concentrated attempt to correct this picture. Cabinet ministers certainly did not spend any time confiding in their diaries and have not preserved private papers to indicate any particular fascination with the subject. Diplomats have been equally unforthcoming in print. Consequently, any research into British diplomacy and Japan before the opening of the British archives for 1945 and 1946 would have been an endless disappointment. The position has recently changed. Indeed, with a Thirty Year Rule also applying to the Japanese Diplomatic Record Office and with the material available at the Washington National Records Centre, there is suddenly an abundance of material.

Beginning in the late 1880s King Chulalongkorn of Siam embarked on a radical reform of the structure of his administration. The existing organization of ministries, which had had its origin in the mid-fifteenth century, was abolished and replaced by a western-style governmental structure in which each ministry had clearly-defined functional responsibilities. In addition an attempt was made to introduce western administrative, accounting, audit and correspondence procedures into the operations of the Siamese bureaucracy. At the same time the Government undertook a number of major public works projects, most notably the construction of railways linking Bangkok with the most distant provinces of the Kingdom. The essential objective of these reforms was to ensure a more effective and efficient administration of the whole Kingdom by the authorities in Bangkok. In turn this was regarded as essential if Siam were to maintain her political independence in a period when all her neighbours had fallen under European colonial rule.

Although the framers of the Philippine constitutional convention of 1934–35 were careful not to establish an imperium in imperio (kingdom within a kingdom), the local government system which developed was not under absolute national control either. For in spite of the efforts made by several delegates to include in the national fundamental law a provision that would have guaranteed ‘a more autonomous framework of government for the provinces and municipalities,’ and the efforts of other delegates to leave the future of local governments to the national legislature, a unitary government was agreed upon in which local governments were subject to presidential supervision. In the course of time, presidential supervision evolved to mean two things: 1) the power of the Chief Executive to appoint local officials and to review local budgets and 2) the power of congress to create local units and to grant local powers. Thus, these two political branches of the national government were to play major roles in the re-emergence of the issue of local autonomy in the fifties and the issue of decentralization in the sixties. In more specific terms, the two political branches had different views of central-local relations, especially the approach to, and extent of, decentralization. Before we proceed to discuss executivelegislative controversy on the problems of decentralization, the concept of decentralization must be understood.

The concept of exploitation as applied to the relationships between peasants and their ruling élite has frequently been utilized by anthropologists to distinguish peasants from other rural cultivators. This essay, based on a single peasant community of East Nepal, illustrates that exploitation occurs at many levels and that a peasantry's relationships with the larger society may not, in fact, be as unequal as the current literature asserts. It is suggested that many characteristics frequently ascribed to the exploitative capacities of the non-peasant élite may be attributed to the system of social stratification found among the peasants themselves and to the effects of a rapidly expanding population.

When, more than ten years ago, Professor Harry Benda urged Southeast Asian historians to consider the significance of peasant movements, he wrote with singular perspicacity. The attention that had been paid to the peasantry as a political force in the literature published up to the middle 1960s was limited. Nevertheless, on the basis of his own research into the Samin movement in Java and a shrewd estimation that much available evidence had been neglected, he argued for both the possibility and the worth of studying peasant movements throughout colonial Southeast Asia. Like many other students, I was struck by the force of Harry Benda's arguments, and the following essay owes much to his scholarly inspiration.

The main outlines of the Vietnamese Revolution of 1945–46 are by now well enough known to Western scholars, through the writings of Philippe Devillers, B. B. Fall, K. C. Chen and J. T. McAlister. But the detailed history of Vietnam during that period remains to be written; in particular only very scant treatment has so far been accorded to the actual political record of the Viet-Minh Provisional Government, which was established in Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh on 28 August 1945 and which lasted until the formation of the Coalition Government (or Government of Union and Resistance) in February 1946.

A maval is the generic name for one of the fertile river valleys which run east from the watershed of the Western Ghats in the Poona District of Maharashtra. They are called mavals only so long as they are fairly narrow and enclosed between the many spurs which run east from the summit crest of the Ghats and they end roughly at a line drawn north-south just short of Poona city itself, so that the whole belt of country west of Poona, about 25 miles wide and 70 miles from north to south is often called ‘the Maval’. The sub-district of Maval Taluka which lies north-west of Poona and through which run the main road and railway to Bombay, is only a small part of this area. It was in the Maval that Sivaji first established the power base which, after many vicissitudes, developed into the Maratha kingdom and the hardy mountain people who formed his guerrilla forces and raiding parties were known as māvaḷe. The word probably derives from the Marathi verb māvaḷaṇeṃ—‘to set, of the sun or any other heavenly body’, and so the Maval was originally just ‘the West’ if you happened to live in Poona. An alternative name for some of the higher and narrower valleys is khor.

There can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography. Within this larger area of neglect, urban history occupies a special place. The indifference with which Indian historians have approached the urban heritage of the subcontinent is all the more difficult to understand because to contemporary European visitors, the merchants and other travellers, the towns and cities of Mughal India held a profound fascination. From the time of Tomé Pires and his highly perceptive Suma Oriental down to the end of the eighteenth century, stories of Indian travels and the accompanying descriptions of Mughal urban life continually entertained the popular literary audience. Not all of them understood or reported accurately what they saw. As the Scottish sea captain and country trader, Alexander Hamilton, who had an unrivalled knowledge of the sea ports and the coastal towns of India, pointed out with some candour, one great misfortune which attended the western travellers in India was their ignorance of the local languages. But the manifest contrast between the physical appearance of the European cities and those of Asia provoked some considerable and sensitive analysis of the nature of the urban processes in the two continents. Perhaps the most able and penetrating comments on the Mughal political, economic, and civic order came from the pen of the Dutch merchant, Francisco Pelsaert, and the French physician, François Bernier.

In 1972 a land reform programme based on the objectives of maximizing agricultural production and employment and reducing inequalities in wealth and income was initiated in Sri Lanka. It commenced with the enactment of the Land Reform Law, No. 1 of 1972 which imposed ceilings on private ownership of land and provided for the setting up of a Land Reform Commission (hereafter, LRC) vested with powers to acquire privately held land in excess of the ceilings. Three years later, the scope of the reform was extended through the Land Reform (Amendment) Law, No. 39 of 1975 under the provisions of which land held by public companies was nationalized. Both these laws provided for the payment of compensation to dispossessed owners.

Despite the important role played by urban settlements in Southeast Asia, the city in general and urban society in particular have received little attention from historians. The study of town government is a particularly neglected field, especially for the period of colonialism. Although a considerable literature devoted to the political organization and institutional development of colonial rule exists, information on the situation in urban centers remains surprisingly meager. The lacuna is more marked for the indigenous peoples than for Chinese. Nonetheless enough pertinent data do exist to suggest that some form of indirect rule was widely paracticed as a mechanism for urban administration. Since most towns and cities in colonial Southeast Asia were characterized by some degree of social and cultural pluralism, indirect rule had the effect of segregating the various ethnic groups and further segmenting urban society along ethnic lines. This essay analyzes the development of urban government during the colonial period through case study of Kuching under the Brooke Raj (1841–1941). It then attempts to define some general patterns through a brief comparative analysis of several other cities in the region.

One of the functions of any imperial system is to stabilize the subordinate political structures over which it exercises suzerainty. Without such a role for the central authority, control of local politics becomes impossible and, without such centralization, the stability of the entire empire is threatened. This policy has often acted to support or maintain local socio-economic relationships which, in the absence of overarching centralization, would show greater instability and flux. The precise nature of these relations can best be seen in an examination of the interregnum period between the decline of one imperial power and the imposition of a new generation of centralized stability.

In his final minute in March 1856, just on the eve of his departure from India, Lord Dalhousie, while reviewing the last eight years of his administration, describes the railways, electric telegraph and uniform postage which he introduced into India as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’. Posterity certainly knows how correct Dalhousie's description was, but under this prophetic utterance of Dalhousie flows a subtle current of philosophy which few scholars working on the Dalhousie era have been able to detect and interpret. That philosophy was the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his faithful and able lieutenant, James Mill. In his History of British India, which Mill undertook before 1808 and published in London in 1817, Mill had questioned the values of Indian society and suggested its reform on Benthamite principles. The key to progress in India, Mill also pointed out, lay in the introduction of Western science and knowledge. It is surprising that Daihousie, though a staunch Tory, subscribed to this view of Bentham and Mill about India and as a result ‘the natural alliance of the Scientific Benthamite administrator and the authoritative Tory gentlemen’ which ‘was never fully achieved in England’ was ‘achieved only in India’.

With the passing of the Government of India Act of 1935, the history of Indian nationalism underwent a subtle change. Though not noticeable immediately after the introduction of the Act, the provincial elections, held under its provisions in 1937, and the results thereof, made this change more apparent and clear. The Indian National Congress secured a sweeping victory in five provinces and was in a position to form coalition ministries in two other provinces—a victory which revealed the efficiency and capability of the party so far as the election machine was concerned. It proved its claim of being a ‘National Party’. The Muslim-League, on the other hand, did not fare well at all, especially in the Muslim majority provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. Although it did better in the non-Muslim provinces, yet that was not enough to enable the League to boast of being the sole representative organization of the Muslims. The success of provincial parties like the Krishak Lok Party in Bengal and the Unionist Party in the Punjab showed that the Muslim electorates still thought in terms of ‘provincial’ or ‘local’ considerations, and were not moved so much by all-India issues. What was true of the League was also true of the Congress so far as the Muslims were concerned. The latter, too, was not able to capture Muslim seats in numbers adequate enough to demonstrate its popularity amongst Muslims.

The foundation of a State in Afghanistan by the Pashtun tribesmen in 1747 posed the question of a religious policy. The issue was not that of proselytism. Most of the Afghans did adhere to one or another form of Islam and the followers of other creeds did not even constitute one percent of the population. But the Islam adhered to by the tribesmen did not have Shari'a (Islamic Law) as its judicial basis and no religious tradition enforced allegiance to monarchs.

We commonly find in the literature on pre-colonial mainland Southeast Asia a tendency to treat the principal ethnic groups—Burmese, Mons, Siamese, Cambodians, Vietnamese—as discrete political categories. This tendency is particularly marked in the historiography of the Irrawaddy valley, where the recurrent north—south conflicts of the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries have usually been interpreted as ‘national’ or ‘racial’ struggles between the Burmese people of the north and the Mon, or Talaing, people of the south. In writing of the last major ‘Mon—Burmese’ war, that of 1740—57, historians have characterized the 1740 uprising at the southern city of Pegu as an expression of ‘Mon nationalism’. The ensuing conflict reportedly became a struggle between Mons and Burmese each ‘fighting for the existence of their race’; and Alaùng-hpayà, said to be a champion of ‘Burmese nationalism’, allegedly made vigorous efforts to destroy the Mon culture and people once he had triumphed.