In this paper I want to explore the implications of the rise and fall of Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism from the point of view of tribal policy and tribal politics in Independent India. More especially I want to examine an ideology of tribal economy and society which informs most existing accounts of Jharkhandi politics and which makes the case for a specifically ‘tribal’ policy. The main propositions of this ideology are recounted in Section One of this paper. They are (1) that the concept of a tribe is given and uproblematical; (2) that the tribals of South Bihar are the original inhaitants of the Jharkhand, where they still predominate (see Figure I); and (3) that tribal politics and tribal policies are effective because individual tribes are themselves undifferentiated, united and geographically concentrated. (A corollary of this third proposition is that any decline in Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism since the mid-1960s must be due to factional disputes within the tribal leadership and/or to inter-tribal clashes, perhaps along denominational lines). These three propositions are examined in Sections Two, Three and Four of the paper, where they are measured against the recent historical experience of India's Jharkhand. The implications of any shortcomings in the ideology of tribal economy and society are taken up in the concluding section of the paper where comments are offered, too, on an alternative ‘model’ of tribal policy and politics in the Jharkhand.

During the period from late 1824 to 1826, a crisis in the Grand Canal system led to intense and sustained imperial involvement in chiangsu regional government. The collapse of the Yen-hsu retaining embankments on Hung-tse Lake in northern Chiangsu sparked the crisis and caused serious flooding in the Huai-yang region east of the Canal, which destroyed sections of the Canal at the critical Huai—Yellow River junction, and dissipated the lake's unsilted water reserves that were crucial to the crossing of government grain boats at the Huai—Yellow River junction on their annual northward journey to Pei-ching. As a result, the transport of strategic grain supplies destined for the capital was brought to a virtual standstill, precipitating a major government crisis that challenged the newly established Tao-kuang Emperor and indeed cast a shadow on the dynasty itself because of the intense

When the treaty system between the western powers and China was firmly established in 1860, a new ‘cooperative’ approach emerged in Great Britain's commercial and diplomatic transactions. British authorities believed that a conciliatory manner would bring greater gain in fostering British commercial and developmental interests in China rather than aggressive demands. The treaty system, they envisioned, would bring stability and reason to what had been an arbitrary and often combative relationship. After nearly a decade of trial under the new system, two disturbing incidents occurred on Taiwan which severely tested the treaty system and the cooperative policy and revealed a limitation of Britain's ability to control the use of force and maintain adherence to established policy by practitioners in the field. Moreover, an early consideration of British predominance on Taiwan came to an end.

En prenant son service, le 25 janvier 1520, à bord du Santa Maria do Monte, dans le port de Goa, l'escrivão de cette nau portugaise, Cristóvāo Afonso, était porteur d'un registre de cent pages. Conservé aujourd'hui à l'Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, à Lisbonne, sous la cote Núcleo Antigo 609, ce Lyvro da receyta e despesa da nao Santa Maria do Monte em que vay por capitam e feytor Paris Corbinell pera Ormuz com arroz delRey nosso senhor pera s'entregar ao feytor e oficiaes da feytoria no dito Ormuz nous est parvenu dans un état incomplet. Le texte ne comporte que 27 feuilles écrites, avec la numérotation originale de I à 8, 11 à 16, 24 à 27, 36 à 42, 50 et 51. La perte est loin d'être aussi importante qu'il semblerait. II restait toujours dans les ‘cahiers’ (cadernos) de cette sorte un bon nombre de pages blanches. La comparaison entre les títulos du sommaire établi par l'écrivain au feuillet Iv et l'état présent du manuscrit permet de constater que manque seulement la liste de ce que le capitaine avait reçu au magasin d'Ormuz pour le voyage de retour (fol. 60: ‘As cousas que recebeo o capitam no almazem per'a nao te Goa’), que nous pouvons d'ailleurs connaître en partie par divers items d'autres títulos. Tout à la fin du cahier avaient été transcrits deux alvarás, fol. 97 ‘Alvara da demasya da carga’, et fol. 99 ‘O alvara da capitania de Paris Corbynell’.

The object of this paper is to comment and analyse some passages of Correia's Lendas da India, Book III, Year 1534, relating to Mughal diplomacy and diplomatic letters immediately before the Gujarat campaign by the Mughal emperor Humayun, against Bahadur Shah Gujarati in 1534–35.

Although there has been considerable support for primary commodity agreements in the Third World, the experience of one of the pioneering agreements, the International Tin Restriction Scheme of the 1930s, has been very critically assessed, especially as regards its impact on the largest tin producer, Malaya.

The Indonesian revolution was a costly affair. Not only was it accompanied by the extensive destruction of life and property, but the actual logistics of fighting a protracted revolution placed enormous financial demands on the new Indonesian Republic, founded on 17 August 1945, three days after the Japanese surrendered, at a time when the revolutionary government was decidedly ill-equipped to meet them. The Republic was unable to take over immediately all the revenue sources of the colonial government and faced major difficulties in rapidly building up an alternative taxation structure. Needing a ‘soft’ form of taxation which was easily collected and which did not fall too obtrusively on the shoulders of its citizens, it turned to opium. The sale of opium to addicts had been used by colonial governments in Southeast Asia as a source of revenue, although its importance had greatly declined in the twentieth century. The Republic, however, not only maintained the colonial distribution and sales network but expanded its use of opium to make the drug an important source of government revenue and, for a time, a major source of foreign exchange.

In 1986 the International Activities Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council decided to undertake reviews of progress in ‘area studies’, and to do this by means of small, inter-disciplinary conferences. A review conference on South Asian studies was held in Cambridge, and attended by forty-one scholars from different disciplines and from India, France, Holland and the USA as well as from Britain. The purpose of the review was understood to be a ‘stock-taking’ in different fields of research, intended to identify conceptual, theoretical and substantive issues at the frontiers of enquiry; and to examine the implications and contributions of research on South Asia for historical research and for the social sciences in general. In the pursuit of these objectives the conference had three components. First came sessions in which two economists (Toye and Chaudhuri), two historians (Tomlinson and Washbrook), an anthropologist (Fuller) and a sociologist (Hawthorn) presented views of ‘progress and problems’ in their fields. Then came two pairs of concurrent working groups on broad themes, drawing partly on the earlier papers and discussions; and finally three panelists (Bharadwaj, Breman and Lipton) offered commentary on the proceedings. The review papers by Toye, Tomlinson and Washbrook appear in this issue of Modern Asian Studies. What follows here is a commentary on some of the themes that emerged in the papers and discussions.

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South Asia and the Commonwealth with those in Japan, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. Equally, whereas twenty years ago the publication of South Asia-related research was restricted to a few specialist journals, today this research provides the staple of at least four quarterlies with major international circulations and appears regularly in most of the leading historical periodicals. In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States.

The dark and fatal passage of plague across the Indian sub-continent in the early twentieth-century, and the inability of Western medicine quickly to halt its incursions symptomized disharmonies in the relationship between modernization and Indian society and ecology. The impact of economic development and environmental change on Indian mortality has been examined elsewhere, but the result was the perpetuation or increase of high death-rates from a multiplicity of diseases through the end of World War I. In the half-century 1872-1921 annual mortality ranged between 40 and 50 per thousand, more than twice the death-rates of the advanced West, and life expectancy fell from about 25 to 20 years. The Indian experience was not unique. Epidemics of cholera and the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis in the industrializing West, and the ordeal of mortality in the colonial Philippines also illustrated how development activities induced social and environmental disruptions and sustained or promoted high death-rates.

In this paper my main empirical data are taken from the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, but much of what I say applies equally to the other East Malaysian state of Sabah. What is more, my argument is relevant in large part to the southern two-thirds of the island of Borneo—that is, to the four provinces of Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan. For the purposes of this discussion I have to treat the small, newly independent oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam on the north-west coast of Borneo as an exception. My general concern is with the peripheral position of the Borneo territories, economically and politically, in relation to the developed core areas of the nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. As a result of its environmental and demographic characteristics, its historical experiences under British protection and then colonialism in the north, and Dutch colonialism in the south, and its subsequent post-independence experience, Borneo is admirably suited to perform the role of a natural resources area for the national development programmes of Malaysia and Indonesia (Avé and King, 1986). For Indonesian Borneo there is an additional issue; it is also an area for the resettlement of some of the excess population from the densely populated islands of Indonesia's heartlands, especially from Java and Madura. Fortunately, Malaysian Borneo has no need to fulfil such a role in relation to West Malaysia.

The merchant who arrives in a locality unknown to him must also carefully arrange in advance to secure a reliable representative, a safe lodging house, and whatever besides is necessary, so that he is not taken in by a slow payer or by a cheat.

If a scholar were to search for water-marks in the development of historical writing on medieval India, the contribution of the ‘Aligarh school’ could very justifiably lay claim to such a distinction. While the work of the Aligarh scholars covers a wide spectrum of historical processes of the Mughal period, it is bound quite closely by their basic understanding that has acquired the status of an almost undisputed assumption among a large number of historians today. The Mughal state, in brief, is perceived as a systematically centralized one, both theoretically and in reality. It is seen as one that had acquired the power to enforce uniformity of government in all parts of the empire and was sustained by its ability to appropriate a large portion of the economic surplus generated within its frontiers. The administrative machinery (both official and quasi-official) involved in the maintenance of this ‘Mughal system’ presents a picture of truly gigantic proportions, yet one that is portrayed as almost uniformly conforming to elaborately formulated methods of functioning. The works of Irfan Habib, S. Nurul Hasan, M. Athar Ali and N. A. Siddiqi apart from a host of others, are among the more impressive contributions in this context.

If the establishment of the Estado da India in the early sixteenth century owed much to indigenous aid, its survival in the ensuing two hundred years owed even more. The centuries after 1600 were indeed sad ones for imperial Portual. The mother country itself was under Spanish rule until 1640, whilst its colonies and colonial trades were everywhere attacked, and more often than not annexed by European rivals. Nowhere was the picture more depressing than in Asia where the heirs of da Gama and Albuquerque had to contend frist with the English and the Dutch and then with a whole host of indigenous opponents ranging from the ever formidable Japanese to the Mughals and the Marathas under the redoubtable Shivaji, once innocently hailed as another Ceaser, but soon identified as the ‘new Attila’. Portuguese correspondence is full of eloquent descriptions of the lamentable condition of the Estado. Trade was at a standstill; war was ubiquitous; food was at the mercy of enemies; manpower was inadequate; the funds inevitably exhausted. In fact, under competent management, the surviving fragments of empire might well show a profit, as was the case in 1680. But not for long. Four years later there was talk of quitting Goa, too large and vulnerable to defend, and by the end of the century it was gloomily reported that all that remained of the erstwhile imperial glories were Goa, its local seaborne commerce, and what was described as ‘the convoy of the China boats’.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent analyses of the process of development in India which have used the concept of ‘political economy’ as their principle of intellectual organization. The focus will be primarily on studies which have been published in the 1980s. Some of these make explicit their reliance on political economy as their analytical framework (e.g. Jha, 1980; Rubin, 1982; Bardhan, 1984). For others it remains more implicit but the underlying concern to fuse economic with political analysis is much the same.

Study of the economic and social history of modern mainland South Asia—covering present-day India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh over roughly the last hundred years—has been a major academic growth industry since the 1960s. The result has been a bulky and disparate corpus of work, spinning off in many directions and adopting increasingly inter-disciplinary approaches, with historians borrowing from, informing, and interacting with anthropologists, sociologists, and economists among others. The sheer volume of recent research is impressive. One survey of empirical work on the nineteenth century (N. C. Charlesworth, The Indian Economy under British Rule, 1800–1914, London, 1983) lists over 150 titles, more than half of them published in the 1970s; another discussion of conceptual material available for the study of Indian economic growth and development in an historical context has over 100 footnote references, and an appendix listing 109 further relevant works published between 1979 and 1984.

A decade has passed since there appeared the fourth and latest edition of that great classic of travel literature, the Relaçāo do Novo Caminho Que Fez por Terra e Mar Vindo da India para Portugal no Ano de 1663 o Padre Manuel Godinho da Companhia de Jesus. It is a very methodical and elegant composition, the work of a man of culture who was also a keen observer. As the censor's certificate of approval in the first edition says, it can provide ‘useful recreation’ and also serve as ‘a guide-map for similar journeys, as in the case of navigations the experience of others has left us sailing charts.’

The time has come when the communal holocaust must be confined to the Indian States, the time has come when both the Hindu and Muslim newspapers must be prevented from blowing communalism into British India. There was a time when our politicians like Gokhale rightly used to take pride in Indian States being free from communalism, which was a vice in British India.… But the table appears to have been turned.

David Washbrook's original treatment of the question of law and society, to which the title of the present paper refers, has not yet stimulated the response which might have been expected. It is a wideranging study; only part of it will be taken up in this paper, namely its arguments about landed property rights in the nineteenth century. Washbrook states that in the first half of the century private property in land remained a ‘pure farce’ in India because of continued state involvement in the economy, excessive revenue demands, the persistence of personal law (as codified), and the weakness of the system of courts. He emphasizes the political implications of the co-option of dominant groups for revenue collection and other purposes of British administration. For the second half of the century, Washbrook proposes an improvement in the position of landed and powerful interests, as the law at last ‘beat back the frontier’ of personal law and disentangled private property rights from family and communal fetters.