Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.

In response to US plans to withdraw troops from South Korea in the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee administration (1961–79) leveraged all defense-related civilian industries to build an independent system of weapons production. In keeping with Park's advancement of military modernization driven by strong private-sector growth, an agenda that he promoted with his banner slogan “rich nation, strong military,” large Korean companies known as chaebŏl were transformed to serve as government contractors that drove both national economic development and military modernization. A case study of one such company, Hanwha, illustrates how the state's hyper-militarization of Korean industries determined the distinct course and character of South Korea's national development. The study highlights the dynamic interplay that occurred between state actors and private-sector CEOs, managers, and laborers in shaping the chaebŏl-centered economic and defense industrialization.

This article examines the emergence of a new emphasis on contemporary specialized knowledge in sixteenth-century China. During this period, sources of authority such as antiquity and the court came to lose their elevated status. As a result, scholars increasingly saw the expertise of a contemporary disciplinary community as a superior standard for validating knowledge. This trend appeared in scholarly collaboration and the citation of contemporaries, as well as new kinds of paratextual materials such as lists of works cited and literature reviews. These findings on new intellectual communities in the sixteenth century call for a reassessment of the better-documented shifts in East Asian intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

Cooperatives are a promising link that can coalesce subdisciplines such as agrarian, labor, economic, and social history. This article reassesses the significance of cooperatives in the agrarian and social history of South Asia. It provides a broad sketch of the major historical developments—legal, economic, and social—in India up to 1970, emphasizing the continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods in terms of state engagement with cooperatives. The article goes on to discuss the existing historiography regarding the cooperative movement on the subcontinent, arguing for the substitution of the prevailing notion of failure with a more historically grounded and nuanced approach that takes into consideration the broader economic context, as well as social stratification and inequality. Finally, some promising avenues—including, but not limited to, organizational economics, bottom-up social and cultural history, and global history—are suggested for the future historiography of cooperatives in South Asia.

Building on current research regarding constitutional migration, this article shows how constitutional provisions protecting religious freedom (“subject to public order”) arrived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, not via colonial British or traditional Islamic sources—both explicitly rejected—but via deliberate constitutional borrowing from “anti-colonial” precursors in Ireland and, especially, India. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau's notion of “empty signifiers,” the article highlights the shifting political circumstances that transformed the meaning of Pakistan's borrowed constitutional provisions. Even as core texts guaranteeing an individual's right to peaceful religious practice were imported, political, legal, and conceptual modulations ensured that specific forms of peaceful religious practice were refashioned as a source of religious provocation and, therein, public disorder. Far from protecting religious freedom, this repurposing of imported constitutional clauses tied to “the politics of public order” underpinned the formal legal restriction of an otherwise explicit right.