Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 1977"

Hereditary Tenancy and Corporate Landlordism in Traditional China: A Case Study

Abstract: After half a century of intense debate, landlordism in traditional China continues to be one of the most controversial subjects in Asian Studies circles. The earlier literature on this topic tends to be contradictory and, at times, highly polemical. Two loosely defined schools of thought have emerged since the 1930s: (A) those scholars who argue that landlord-tenant relations were primarily exploitative with the balance of power passing increasingly to urban-based absentee landlords, and (B) those who maintain that a high rate of tenancy is not particularly unique to the twentieth century and that the relationship between landlord and tenant was not uniformly exploitative. The present paper does not fit neatly into either school, although specific elements of the following argument can be isolated to support opposing sides of the debate. I intend to explore one form of traditional Chinese tenancy, known in the literature as ‘hereditary’ or ‘permanent’ tenancy, which was common throughout many parts of Southeastern China until the Communist land reform campaigns of the early 1950s. The tenants were hereditary in the sense that the usufruct passed patrilineally from father to son while the actual title to the land remained in the hands of powerful lineage corporations. The tenants lived in satellite villages near the landlords' communities and were overshadowed in every way by their dominant neighbors.

Siraiki: A Language Movement in Pakistan

Abstract: It may be asserted with some assurance that the very name ‘Siraiki’ will be quite unfamiliar to most readers of this article. The well-known predilection of most South Asianists for working from English sources and their concentration upon the larger Indian scene, where such sources are so much more abundant than for Pakistan, may contribute to this unfamiliarity; but it is doubtless due principally to the quite recent introduction of the term on a general scale in its homeland. In simple terms, ‘Sirāikī’ is the language of the middle Indus valley, while the ‘Sirāikī movement’ that seeks to improve its standing is based in the central part of this region, the South-West Panjab, principally in its most important cities, Multan and Bahawalpur. This article sets out to inform a wider audience about the movement which is attempting to assert the language's separate identity and to secure for it increased official recognition.

The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760

Abstract: The eighteenth century in India has generally been described as a period of great turbulence, characterized by march and counter-march, rising and falling fortunes, and bewildering political intrigue. Many historians, focusing on this aspect, have dismissed the century as merely an unsavory hiatus between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British domination. Yet there was more to the century than the march and counter-march of armies. The other aspect of the period was the emergence of strong successor states in Gujerat, Bengal, Oudhe, Malwa, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Punjab. Recently, historians have begun exploring these successor states, looking both back towards the Mughal administrative and ideological heritage and forward towards their role as princely states in British India. There are also important issues within the century itself, such as the role of successor states in developing regional language and consciousness, and successor states as channels of economic and social mobility.

Changing Form and Function in the Ceremonial and the Colonial Port City in India: An Historical Analysis of Madurai and Madras

Abstract: The city has usually been first of all a ‘place’—a clearly defined space visibly possessed and controlled by human beings and often sacred to their gods, a statement of man imposed upon the chaotic and threatening vastness of nature. It has represented the desire of man to master his own world, creating an environment reflecting his powers of reason, his desire for convenience and order, and his aesthetic predilection for beauty and meaningfulness in his surroundings.

The Formation and First Years of the United Malays National Organization (U.M.N.O.) 1946–1948

Abstract: The United Malays National Organization has been the strongest Malay political party since its foundation in May 1946; its leaders place it pre-eminent in the history of Malay nationalism and Malayan independence. Needless to say, these claims have been disputed by its opponents and queried by its students; not only have the origins of Malay nationalism been traced to the pre-war era, but also, it can be argued, in its early years the party's leaders were more concerned to safeguard Malay rights vis a vis the other races of Malaya, and were more inclined to collaborate with the British authorities in opposition to radicalism within their own community, than to struggle for self-government. Nevertheless, the formation of U.M.N.O. was a remarkable event. For the first time a mass and pan-peninsula Malay movement emerged to attack British policy. Its popular support, forceful leadership and effective organization surprised Briton and Malay alike. U.M.N.O. amounted to an unprecedented Malay response to colonial rule.

From Rulers to Servants: The I.C.S. and the British Demission of Power in India

Abstract: The study of the British demission of power in India has focused on the political story, on the nationalist pressures and the British policies that led inexorably to self-government and to partition. This began, explicitly at least, with the Montagu declaration in 1917. But the idea of gradually developing self-governing institutions seemed in many ways easier to implement in politics than administration. India was proceeding from an authoritarian to a popular government: the transfer of power was not only from British to Indians but also from administrators to politicians. And as Philip Woodruff, writing on the I.C.S., comments, ‘it is hard to serve where you have ruled’. On one level, the Service could be Indianized, and from the early 19205 Indianization proceeded apace. What was more complicated was the role the I.C.S. was expected to play in the changing constitutional and political circumstances from 1920 through to 1947—expected to play, that is, in addition to the sustained execution of the everyday functions of government.

The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar

Abstract: In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than objective statements, … For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors' claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his ordinary working equipment.

The Armed Police and Colonial Rule in South India, 1914—1947

Abstract: In recent years, studies of the mechanics of European colonialism in Asia and Africa have largely focused on the creation of collaborative systems and dependent economic structures within the colonized societies. The part that troops played in carving out a colonial territory and crushing primary resistance is often described, but seldom do accounts of colonial rule examine in detail the means of coercion employed to maintain a favourable political and economic environment. If, however, it is even partly true that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then discussion of colonial situations must take into consideration the role that the regime's armed agencies played in containing indigenous political movements and in themselves constituting one of the principal pillars of collaboration.

The Indian Press 1870–1880: A Small World of Journalism

Abstract: A Unianimous decision of the Viceroy's Council was taken on 14 March 1878 to establish a check over the vernacular press in India. This was Act IX of 1878, an act for ‘the better control of publications in Oriental languages’. It was to control ‘seditious writing’ in the vernacular newspapers everywhere in the country, except the south. Too much was being written in these newspapers of the ‘injustice and tyranny’ of the British government, ‘its utter want of consideration towards its native subjects, and the insolence and pride of Englishmen in India’.One hundred and fifty-nine extracts from vernacular newspapers of the North-Western Provinces, Punjab, Bengal and Bombay were produced before the Supreme Council as evidence of existing sedition. Surprised at its own importance, the vernacular press staggered into the eighties of the nineteenth century. The crucial demand for ajudicial trial in case of an accusation of sedition against an editor was never conceded by the government, although in October 1878 the act was modified in minor respects. The important thing was that the government from an almost complete unawareness had come to be so preoccupied with the vernacular press. What was the nature of the vernacular press in India in the 1870s and how wide was its range?

The Abrogation of British Extraterritoriality in China 1942–43: A Study of Anglo-American-Chinese Relations

Abstract: The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 7 July 1937 has been commonly regarded as the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war. The early days of the war were a history of rapid Japanese advances and, inversely, of the equally fast retreat of the Chinese. The Chinese Nationalist Government evacuated Nanking and moved westward to the Wuhan area in late November 1937. Central China soon became untenable in face of heavy Japanese reinforcements; the Chinese government again evacuated in October 1938, this time much further west to Chungking in Szechwan. There was no declaration of war and China clearly had the sympathy of Britain and the United States. The two countries continued to recognize the government at Chungking, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, as the government of China, despite the fact that it retained control only over the south-west corner of the country. Pearl Harbor strengthened the tie of relations; the Chungking government won Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands as allies in its colossal struggle against Japan.

Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel

Abstract: European enclaves were a characteristic feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century European presence in Asia, serving as centers of trade and European society far beyond the frontiers of metropolitan Europe. Yet to consider them as phenomena belonging only to the history of European Asia would be a mistake. Despite the protection of fortifications and control of the sea, the enclaves could never be completely isolated from their hinterlands, for not only did they receive their trade goods from the interior, but the changing local political stituation frequently threatened their survival. Moreover, the enclaves themselves had their definite non-European character, a population of local merchants, artisans and laborers which outnumbered the Europeans. These resident Asians provided goods, services and often capital for European trade; they were, as Holden Furber has observed, partners in European enterprise.

The Islamic Frontier in Southwest India: The Shahīd as a Cultural Ideal among the Mappillas of Malabar

Abstract: The only really unique feature of the Mappilla outbreaks which occurred in Malabar District during the period of British rule was that each attack was conducted as a kind of suicidal jihād, in which the Mappillas involved intentionally sought to become shahīds or martyrs for the faith. No other South Asian Muslims who took part in protest movements to achieve goals similar to those which underlay the Mappilla attacks resorted to suicidal jihāds as a means of coercion. Yet no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to account for the Mappillas' peculiar militancy. Modern scholars have generally ignored the question, while the few British officials who tried to answer it usually argued, or implicitly suggested, that the attacks represented the inherent fanaticism of Islam. This explanation is, of course, vitiated by the very uniqueness of the Mappillas' suicidal ritual.

The Romance of Revolution in Japanese Anarchism and Communism during the Taishō Period

Abstract: Much can be learned about the character of a political movement by examining the personal relations between its principal members as well as their political writings, speeches, and ‘formal’ activities in the movement. This is all the more the case if the movement is politically radical, for radical politics often generate a radical subculture which has as its chief function the moulding of an ideal revolutionary personality which will serve the movement in all of its vicissitudes and be a model for the type of citizen the movement wishes to create in society.

Japan's Enigmatic Election of 1928

Abstract: When universal manhood suffrage was promulgated, with much eclat, on 5 May 1925, its friends and its enemies both agreed that this act was a new high-water mark in the thirty-five year history of Japanese parliamentarianism. Of a national population of nearly 40 million in 1890, the first electorate had been carefully confined to 400,000 adult males who met a stiff property test. By the early 1920s inflation, population growth, and eased voting requirements had gradually spread the franchise to some 3 million persons, still a mere fraction of the populace. Then, at a stroke, the universal suffrage law of 1925 gave the vote to males aged twenty-five and older, swelling the pool of electors four-fold to more than 13 million.

Crop Trends in the Central Provinces of India, 1861–1921

Abstract: In the opening chapter of his study of Agricultural Trends in India, 1891–1947, George Blyn explains the double significance of determining crop production trends in a society where agriculture is the largest single sector of the economy. Firstly, crop trends reveal the nature of changes in production and provide the basis for estimating changes in consumption. Secondly, since availability of crops for consumption depends not only on output but also on foreign trade, changes in cropping patterns provide a basis for estimating the pace and direction of commercialization of the economy. Blyn's study covers the fifty-six years before Indian independence and provides detailed analysis of such topics as aggregate crop trends for the eighteen crops that constituted most of India's agriculture. More recently, there have been a number of studies concerned with the agricultural history of nineteenth-century India. My own work is concerned with the social and economic history of the Central Provinces for the period 1861–1921. Within this broad subject an important specific topic is that of cropping patterns. This paper provides data on crop trends in this part of India for a period of fifty-four years from 1867 to 1921 and evaluates and analyzes this data. Its object is to establish the broad trends in cropping patterns and to shed some light on methods of agriculture in the Central Provinces in the later nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. (Provincial data are given in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 at the end of the paper.)

Vertical Integration and the Indian Steel Industry

Abstract: At a very early stage in their respective careers, most of the major iron and steel plants of Europe and North America recognized the strategic importance of possessing colliery capacity in order to safeguard their requirements of coking-coal, a basic input to the blast furnace. In the Ruhr—where the tendency towards vertical integration probably reached its apotheosis—the Huttenzechen (tied mines), accounted for nearly twenty per cent of the total coal output at the turn of the century and no less than fifty per cent during the inter-war period. The precise legal standing of the integrated units naturally varied from country to country. In Britain and Germany, for example, the most favoured practice was for the iron and steel plant to establish outright ownership of the mines and to treat them merely as a department of the enterprise complex itself, whereas in the United States, the giant steel works such as Kaiser, Republic, and Bethlehem, preferred to create semi-autonomous subsidiary companies. In India, the two steel firms ofthe pre- Independence era, i.e. the Tata Iron and Steel Company (henceforth abbreviated to T.I.S.CO.) and the Indian Iron and Steel Company (I.I.S.CO.), inclined towards the former organizational model (with the single exception of T.I.S.CO.'s West Bokaro colliery which was purchased in 1947 and was wholly owned by the Company's shareholders).

Shipbuilding and the State in Japan since the 1850s

Abstract: In the past decade or so there have been several critical revisions of the long-accepted view of the important role of the state in Japan's economic development and programme of modernization generally. Professor Harry Oshima has attempted to demolish the argument that the Meiji governments' policies were at all economically beneficial. On the contrary, he has said, those policies retarded growth, particularly through their neglect of agriculture. Professor Hugh Patrick has cautioned us against giving the Meiji governments too much credit for the development of the banking system. Private enterprise, he has insisted, was also important. Most recently, Professor Kozo Yamamura has delivered yet another broadside against what he considers the myths of Japanese economic history. This time he criticizes the view that the government, by intervening and pioneering model plants, played a significant role in Meiji Japan's industrial dcvelopment.

Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: the Mahatma in Indian politics 1928–34. By Judith M. Brown. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1977. Pp. xix, 414. £15.50.

Abstract: This volume traces Gandhi's career from the Calcutta Congress session in the last days of 1928, when Gandhi emerged from his temporary retirement from politics and suggested a new campaign of non-cooperation, to the Bombay Congress session in October 1934, when Gandhi again withdrew and consigned the Congress to those who wished to enter the new legislatures. The approach is largely similar to that of Dr Brown's first book on Gandhi's emergence as an Indian leader some ten years earlier; the main difference is that while the first laid claim through its subtitle to be a study of'Indian politics 1915-1922', this book is hesitant to make a similar claim and its subtitle, 'The Mahatma in Indian politics 1928-34', conveys the difference of intent. It is a political biography rather than a political history arranged around a biography. Indeed, of the two elements in the title, the second, the campaign of civil disobedience, takes up less than a fifth of the book; the rest is delivered to the Mahatma at what Dr Brown sees as 'the peak of his political influence over his countrymen and the British raj' (p. xiii). Moreover the account of civil disobedience is deliberately very partial; as Dr Brown notes, 'in the context of Gandhi's political career and position it [civil disobedience] must be analysed primarily in terms of its depth of support and degree of cohesion, and on the product of these, Congress's negotiating position at the end of the campaign' (p. 99). It is a big book. In some 200,000 words, Dr Brown gives a very detailed narrative of Gandhi's political decisions, and the discussions with British officials and Indian colleagues against which these decisions were set. Her technique is to give a very sympathetic account of Gandhi's mental peregrinations, and to describe the reactions of important British and Indian figures to them, without intruding her own evaluations or opinions into the story to any great extent. The study is based on exhaustive research in the Gandhi papers, the published volumes of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, the All India Congress Committee collection, and the papers of Irwin and Hoare, with additional material from newspapers, the Home Political files, and other private papers stored in Delhi and London. The accounts of the civil disobedience agitations themselves rely heavily on the provincial fortnightly reports.

The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts. By George L. Hart, III. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London1975. Pp. ix, 308. £8.25.

Abstract: but stopped publication in 1913, started again in 1916 and appeared continuously at least into the late 1930s, n. 341; Vilayat AH was Bambuq, not Mambuq, n. 341; Persian was replaced as the language of government in 1837, not 1832, n. 369. The list could be extended. Such problems apart, however, we can only thank the editors for making a work of such interest available to a wider public, and congratulate Unesco on its enterprise in supporting them. No library with pretensions to covering the South Asian or Islamic fields should be without this book.

Edward Warren Clark and Early Meiji Japan: A Case Study of Cultural Contact

Abstract: Protestantism in the early Meiji era has long interested Western students as an aspect of the encounter between Japan and expanding European culture in the nineteenth century. Edward Warren Clark (1849–1907) and other American laymen, who went to Japan as teachers and not society missionaries, played a significant role in the process during the 1870s. Edward Warren Clark is known to Western scholars of the Meiji period for his contribution to the development of English-language education and as the author of books based upon his experiences in Japan. In his letters to William Elliot Griffis (1843–1928), Clark reveals opinions concerning Japan and Japanese acquaintances, and the hopes and tribulations of teaching Western studies. These are interesting in themselves as one American's views, and they also shed more valuable light upon Japanese attitudes toward the West between 1871 and 1875. In this study of cultural contact, particular attention will be paid to Clark's evangelistic work in Shizuoka and later in Tokyo, and the influence of his Christian ideas and misconceptions upon certain Japanese, especially Nakamura Masanao (Keiu, 1832–91).

The ‘East Coast’ in Malayan Politics: Episodes of Resistance and Integration in Kelantan and Trengganu

Abstract: TERRITORIAL integration and resistance to it by the Malay States of Kelantan and Trengganu are not mutually exclusive categories of response to political modernization. Unlike the peoples of East Malaysia ('Malaysian Borneo') the population of eastern Malaya is overwhelmingly Malay in language and culture. Thus resistance to centralizing pressures has rarely had separatist overtones but has tended to express rejection of particular developments in the west coast polity from a standpoint of moral superiority. Resistance is often an expression of intense empathy with the condition of the Malays in other parts of the Peninsula, and should not be interpreted as a failure of national integration. By a curious dialectic, resistance takes on qualities of an integrative process. Let it be said at once that this interpretation or its near kin do not keep good company with every critical episode of this century. To see in the Kelantan rebellion of I1915 a manifestation of embryonic nationalism, as one British historian has done,l surely errs well on the side of fancy. Allen's assumption that because To' Janggut was a Haji he was also a Holy Man (and thus some kind of millenarian or proto-nationalist leader) is entirely contradicted by the accounts of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries at Nering.2 On the other hand, there are some clear indications of a religious dimension to the Trengganu revolt of

Japanese Government Policy, Business Opinion and the Seoul–Pusan Railway, 1894–1906

Abstract: Like most research on Japanese involvement in Korea in the latter years of the Meiji period, this article is deeply indebted to the pioneer work of Professor Hilary Conroy. I have also drawn heavily on the work of Eugene and Han-kyo Kim. However, a detailed study of the railways of Korea does not come within the framework of Professor Conroy's book, and there is little material on the subject available in English. In Japanese there is the official government history, the Chōsen Tetsudō Shi , but the purpose of this essay is to show the views of the business world on the subject, and so contemporary articles in the leading economic journals have constituted the most important source. A consideration of those articles which comment on the changing state of affairs will perhaps clarify the reasons underlying dōmestic pressure for Japanese involvement in the construction of Korean railways.

Origin of the Heaven and Earth Society

Abstract: Chinese secret societies have usually proved to be enigmatic topics for scholarly study. Although a considerable amount of writing and research in several languages has been published about Chinese secret societies during the past hundred years, the topic remains beset by a variety of contradictory information.

Bureaucratic Capital and Chou Hsüeh-hsi in Late Ch'ing China

Abstract: Bureaucratic capital—that is, capital accumulated through public office, or state revenue diverted by individual officials for capital investment— has had a long history in China since early Han times. This paper is concerned with the development of bureaucratic capital for ‘modern’ industry during the last forty years of the Ch'ing dynasty.

Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. by E. Michael Mendelson, edited by John P. Ferguson. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1975. Pp. 400. £12.70, $19.50.

Abstract: believe that if the n o million had been spent in Germany, one could make the finest garden in the world, even out of the Mark of Brandenburg. Very salutary cultural work could also be accomplished at home if 110 million were spent on an area smaller than an ordinary Prussian district, an area only as large as the Free City of Bremen.' The image of Germany which comes through the wonderful mass of carefully sifted detail in this book simply will not fit the orthodoxies now fashionable on the other side of the Rhine. If I had to choose a pre-1914 European capital in which to take a stroll after midnight, drink the water, breathe the air or consult a doctor, I should choose Berlin without any hesitation. Clearly, thousands of Chinese voted with their feet that way too, for the population of Tsingtao jumped from virtually nothing to 57,000 by 1913. This is not to say that the Germans were lovable or loved as colonial masters, but merely to call into question the image of a Germany in the agonized grip of dreadful crises now often trundled out to explain the causes of the First World War. For his sane, practical evidence alone, we German historians must be grateful to Mr Schrecker for this book. It is a splendid achievement, and he is to be congratulated.

The Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847–1908. By Robin Jeffrey. Sussex University Press: London, 1976. Pp. xxi, 376. £9.

Abstract: between state and agriculture presented by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and A. Mahalingam, with a rather rambling critique of D. C. Sircar's ideas on Indian feudalism stuck on the end. The attack somewhat rebounds upon its author since it reveals not just the uncertainties of Mahalingam and Nilakanta Sastri, but the difficulty of writing a sophisticated rural history of this period when the principal evidence is the settlement details of a very small handful of villages. George Hart tells us how good his own dissertation on ancient Tamil literature is and, by way of contrast, how bad most of the translations of the Tamil classics are. Franklin Southworth endeavours to explain what sociolinguistics are, and points to a number of works on caste dialects. Stephen Barnett outlines the theory of caste change which he has worked out in his study of the Kondaikottai Vellalas, and then employs excerpts from the work of earlier anthropologists to show how the theory may have more general application.

Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture . By Abdul Halim Sharar. Translated and edited by E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain. Paul Elek: London, 1975. Pp. 295, 32 plates. £12.50.

Abstract: of millions was one that he shared with his enemy, Churchill. Yet if in the end we sense this greatness, it is not the overriding impression left by this volume. Rather it is the sourness and ennui that marked Nehru's middle years, particularly in the loneliness following the deaths of his father and wife. Gopal's bitter and caustic judgements on men and events catch a mood which more flattering or more complacent biographers have failed to bring out. From this strain of disillusion and quickness of temper was derived much of the hard practical drive tempering Nehru's sentimental nationalism and socialism. Yet it makes often for a sombre and joyless tale. At times the author conveys the impression that he, too, is engaged in a tedious but necessary chore preparatory to his main task. He shows what store he sets on the first fifty-eight years of Nehru's life by allotting them exactly a third of his projected biography. As with the career of Churchill, the first three score years seem but the prelude to greatness, and it is as prime minister of the largest democracy on earth that Gopal wishes Nehru to be judged. Other biographers—even the muse of history herself—might choose differently. It is therefore as a description of the long arduous approach march to the heights of power that this volume has to be viewed, and artistically it serves a parallel function within the planned trilogy. The main Himalayan chain has yet to be scaled and Professor Gopal has been careful to harbour his powers for the greater task ahead. One slip on the ice wall of near contemporary politics could be fatal to the expedition, but if successfully negotiated the prospect of original success on untrodden peaks is glittering indeed. This is the most extensive and important biography attempted by an Indian writer since independence, and dwarfs the enterprise of other professional historians labouring in the South Asian field. The first volume has been executed in a sober, business-like fashion appropriate to the author's conception of his task. There can be no doubt of the practised skill in the writing and in the balancing of the construction. Professor Gopal has whetted our appetite for the two volumes to come in which he will carry us to the heart of his subject.