Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 1989"

Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity

Abstract: My choice of subject for this lecture arose from what I think might have been a matter of some interest to Kingsley Martin; as also from my own concern that the interplay between the past and contemporary times requires a continuing dialogue between historians working on these periods. Such a dialogue is perhaps more pertinent to post-colonial societies where the colonial experience changed the framework of the comprehension of the past from what had existed earlier: a disjuncture which is of more than mere historiographical interest. And where political ideologies appropriate this comprehension and seek justification from the pre-colonial past, there, the historian's comment on this process is called for. Among the more visible strands in the political ideology of contemporary India is the growth and acceptance of what are called communal ideologies. ‘Communal’, as many in this audience are aware, in the Indian context has a specific meaning and primarily perceives Indian society as constituted of a number of religious communities. Communalism in the Indian sense therefore is a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as the basis for an ideology. It then demands political allegiance to a religious community and supports a programme of political action designed to further the interests of that religious community. Such an ideology is of recent origin but uses history to justify the notion that the community (as defined in recent history) and therefore the communal identity have existed since the early past.

Dutch income in and from indonesia 1700-1938

Abstract: This paper attempts to establish broad orders of magnitude for the colonial period as a whole, and the results are necessarily rough and tentative. Nevertheless, this kind of quantitative macroestimation is useful in illuminating the plausible size of the magnitudes which are usually implicit in qualitative assessment.

The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’

Abstract: The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.

Banker's Trust and the Culture of Banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars of Colonial South India

Abstract: The notion of ‘banker's trust’ has a paradoxical quality, like ‘burning cold’ or ‘military intelligence.’ Common sense (another paradoxical notion) tells us that bankers have no trust. Perhaps this explains the appeal of Marxist and Weberian assumptions that capitalist economies tend to destroy pre-capitalist social formations based on trust. From the classic perspective, ‘primordial’ social ties mandate relations of trust (or something like them) in kin groups and castes only so long as the members of these groups do not operate directly—as bankers do—within a capitalist economic system.

From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective

Abstract: In 1985 riots racked the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, continuing for a period of almost half a year, form February through July, leaving some 275 people dead, thousands injured, tens of thousands homeless, and a loss of property and trade estimated at Rs 2,200 crores (US$1.75 thousand million) (India Today, 13 August 1985, pp. 60 and 119), in ‘the most alarmingly sustained bout of rioting (as opposed to the sort of terrorism Punjab suffered…) since India's independence’ (Manor 1986: 102).

British ‘Country’ Trade and Local Trade Networks in the Thai and Malay States, c. 1680–1770

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing knowledge of British and Asian ‘country’ trade to selected parts of Southeast Asia by drawing upon British private papers and the records of Fort St George, Madras. The 1680s marked the peak of international trade in Siamunder king Narai before the wars and revolution there of 1687–88. The decade also saw the elimination of the last great independent entrepot, Banten, on the Java Sea in 1682, as well as the final, ultimately-futile, Dutch efforts to control the Malayan tin-trade north of Perak. The Dutch also began in 1685 and 1689 their intermittent attempts to monopolize key commodities in the Johor–Riau–Lingga sultanate at the southern end of Malacca Strait. In one sense, given Dutch success or at least pretensions, the region from Pegu and Tenasserim–Mergui through certain Malay ports and Aceh to Ayudhya and Tongking constituted what might loosely be called the free-trade zone of maritime Southeast Asia. It was also one in which, with the exception of Perak after 1745, the indigenous monarchies retained complete or extensive independence from European supervision. Into this zone, with occasional ventures to the smaller Indonesian ports, British country traders sailed for over a century, from Bowrey and Dampier in the 1680s to Light and Scott in the 1770s. What were the principal features of the markets they frequented?

Economic Individualism and the Community Spirit: Divergent Orientation Patterns of Javanese Villagers in Rice Production and the Ritual Sphere

Abstract: In recent years there has been much evidence of an increasing trend towards the individualization of economic and social relations in Javanese village communities. The Green Revolution has been depicted as the main cause of the acceleration of this process in the present. Observations abound on labour-saving devices in rice cultivation, on the monetarization of wages and agrarian inputs, and on the commercial sale of yields (Aass 1986; Hart 1986; Husken 1984; Maurer 1984, 1986; Schweizer 1987, forthcoming). The roots of these monetary and commercial developments in the Javanese village economy reach far back into the past (Breman 1983; Carey 1986; Elson 1984; Knight 1982; Svensson 1983). But in the present these changes gain pace. There is evidence, too, that in the field of political relations the diffuse patron-client ties between village officials and the inhabitants in some places yield to a more rationalized, selfish style of leadership (Keeler 1985).

Ideology and Ethnicity under British Imperial Rule: ‘Brahmans’, Lawyers and Kin-Caste Rules in Madras Presidency

Abstract: Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imperial rule, analogous to the Hindu-Muslim communalism which emerged in north India? Or, as one opinion has it, was the ideological change an opportunistic maneuver on the part of a group of politicians, encouraged by British officials anxious to foil the nationalist movement? This paper takes an approach more in line with the first alternative and sees the propagation of an ideology of ethnic antagonism as a result of processes of the reformation of group and personal identities. I link the reformation of group identity to the confusion in rules regarding group behavior which resulted from the imposition and operation of the imperial system of dispute management, the Anglo-Indian legal system.

India and the Anglo-Chinese Opium Agreements, 1907–14

Abstract: The rise and significance of the opium trade from India to China are well understood by historians, but the trade's decline and disappearance have received very little attention. This article explores the motives which led Britain to agree to phase out its opium exports to China and the part which the government of India played in determining this policy.

Economic Aspects of the Dutch Expansion in Indonesia, 1870–1914

Abstract: The time appears due for a reappraisal of the economic argument in the imperialism debate. For decades the standard procedure has been first to refute Hobson and Lenin on empirical grounds and then to present a non-economic explanation for the European overseas expansion during the era of modern imperialism (1870–1914). Presently a new paradigm is gaining acceptance. It is an approach which puts the emphasis solidly back on the economic side but without its Marxist connotations. Cain and Hopkins took the lead with their theory of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’; they link the landed South and City finance with Imperial policy thus explaining overseas expansion by referring to macroeconomic changes at home. Davis and Huttenback associate the profitability of Empire investments with their ‘two-England hypothesis’ for British business: London investors stood apart, profited more and exerted a greater influence. It is my intention to show that a similar type of non-Marxist economic argument applies also to the case of Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago at the time of modern imperialism.

Hard Times in the Kantō: Economic Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Japan

Abstract: Things were not right in the Kantō region during the early nineteenth century. In his memoirs, Mastsudaira Sadanobu, architect of the Kansei Reforms, lamented the sorry state of the villages in Edo's hinterland:Much land throughout the Kantō is going to waste for want of cultivators. All the people of some villages have left for Edo, leaving only the headman behind. … Many Kantō villagers are suffering great hardship. Babies are killed, the population has declined, and land has gone to waste.

Health and Health Services in British Malaya in the 1920s

Abstract: British Malaya was a very unhealthy place in the early years of this century. Malaria, ankylostomiasis or hookworm, venereal disease, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, beri-beri, cholera and still other diseases accounted for thousands of deaths annually in the 1920s. Typically, persons suffered from two or more maladies at the same time. In the Federated Malay States (F. M. S.) probably more than half of those listed as dying from malaria also suffered from hookworm. Many pneumonia deaths were due to tuberculosis. Chronic malnutrition combined with malaria, hookworm and diarrhea in many, perhaps most, pregnant women to produce high infant and maternal mortality. The majority of the living were more or less continuously afflicted with disease. Most of the diseases were debilitating and slow to kill. Most were preventable although that was imperfectly understood.

Order and Disorder in Colonial South India

Abstract: Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.

Japanese Official Development Assistance to Southeast Asia

Abstract: Japan's involvement as a donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA) can be traced back, historically, to post-second world war arrangements for war damage reparations. At that time, the late 1940s, early 1950s, Japan was itself a low-income country, whose industries had suffered widespread dislocation and ruin due to war. Yet, the new post-war Japanese government, eager to work its way back into the comity of nations, undertook to make reparation for the destruction of economic assets in the territories that had been fought over. The reparations agreements concluded in the 1950s involved many of the developing countries on the Asia/Pacific Rim—reflecting the pattern of wartime conquest—some of them independent, others still under European colonial rule. Thailand and the People's Republic of China were excluded from reparations, the former due to its wartime co-belligerent status, the latter since it was unrecognized by Japan, ironically in view of their subsequent emergence as the largest recipients of Japanese bilateral ODA by the 1980s. In the event, by the time Japanese reparations had become available, reconstruction assistance had already begun to give way to post-reconstruction support for public sector economic growth. A greater part of these reparations consisted of deliveries of Japanese capital goods and equipment, e.g., cargo ships, through transfer mechanisms designed to match Japan's re-emergent industrial export capabilities with the import requirements of Southeast Asian economic development.By way of contrast with the contemporary Western orientation in development assistance to Asia, driven by a 'Big Push' syndrome towards relatively large-scale infrastructure projects through such mechanisms as the Colombo Plan, the Japanese experience with reparations provided from the outset a closer strategic integration between Japan's international donor obligations, on the one hand, and its export strategy and dynamic competitive advantages in international trade, on the other.

French Far Eastern Policy in the 1930s

Abstract: The completion in 1986 of the Documents diplomatiques francais, 1932–1939 permits a review of French Far Eastern policy during that troubled time characterized by J.-B. Duroselle as ‘la decadence.’ This massive documentary collection, however, still dose not provide a full picture of the forces which shaped French East Asian policy in the years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Understandably focused upon European developments, it begins and ends, from the Far Eastern perspective, in medias res; that is, after the outbreak of the Manchurian crisis and before the Japanese occupation of Indochina. Moreover, like other compilations of what statesmen and diplomats said to each other, this one slights economic factors and, though to a lesser extent, the role of public opinion. Even taken in their own terms, the documents perhaps reveal more about what others said and did to the French than about what they themselves accomplished. That points to a more fundamental problem, for one can question whether anything so gelatinous as the French responses or lack thereof to developments largely beyond their control can even be described as ‘policy.’ Still, although much more work in archives and private papers will be necessary before the entire story can be pieced together, these documents do shed light on what passed for French policy in East Asia during the years before the outbreak of World War II.

Law, Legitimacy, and the Hereditary Rights of Tamil Temple Priests

Abstract: This paper examines the arguments whereby the Brahman priests of a Hindu temple in the town of Kalugumalai, South India, claim exclusive rights to perform worship in that shrine. For comparison, it also deals briefly with the priests of a much larger temple in the nearby city of Madurai, whose arguments partly contradict those used in Kalugumalai. This discrepancy will be explained by treating both sets of arguments as strategic statements, which legitimize the self-interests of their respective protagonists.

Thai-Japan Monetary Relations at the Start of the Pacific War

Abstract: In the wake of their rapid advance into Southeast Asia after 8 December 1941, the Japanese began to implement a new monetary policy in the region to replace the long-established Western financial order that was being swept away. The purpose of this article is to discuss aspects of this monetary policy, in particular how it was carried out in regards to Thailand during the first year of the war, the period during which Thai–Japan wartime relations became established. In the wake of their rapid advance into Southeast Asia after 8 December 1941, the Japanese began to implement a new monetary policy in the region to replace the long-established Western financial order that was being swept away. The purpose of this article is to discuss aspects of this monetary policy, in particular how it was carried out in regards to Thailand during the first year of the war, the period during which Thai-Japan wartime relations became established. With the outbreak of war the most urgent need of the Japanese in their relations with Thailand was to convert that country into a suitable rear area for their campaign in Malaya and for the one upcoming against Burma. To this end the Japanese and Thai governments signedon 8 December an agreement permitting Japanese forces to pass through Thai territory to attack Malaya; but equally important the agreement also stipulated that Thailand would afford the Japanese forces all necessary convenience for their passage through Thailand. This stipulation was the key that opened the way for the Japanese to pursue their plans towards Thailand. By passage, of course, the Japanese did not simply mean the travel of their army through Thai territory to attack Malaya and later Burma (although superficially this is what was implied).

Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth Century Marātha Svarājya. By André Wink. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1986. Pp. xviii, 417.

Abstract: where the Portuguese were able to muster any force), to differing local reactions to the presence of European intruders, or the inspiration, character and influence of Portuguese missionary and religious policies. He gives a masterly analysis of the scope and nature of private country trades and of the society and economy of Goa. He looks dispassionately at the decline of the State of India as Brazil came to count for so much more in the politics and economy of the mother country, and as dwindling resources faced evergrowing commitments. The book is rounded off with a useful survey of the history of Goa—virtually all that remained of the one-time Estado da India— until present times and with a lengthy critical bibliography. There are few subjects on which Pearson has not something fresh and stimulating to say, whether on the interaction of cultures, seen from a less lofty and recondite standpoint than that usually favoured, or on the role of the Catholic church in social integration. He takes a more cautious view than many of his predecessors on the importance of technological and economic factors in Portugal's expansion, and he gives the first systematic analysis of the remarkable phenomenon of the large-scale settlement of Portuguese, or those of alleged Portuguese descent, far beyond the bounds of any Portuguese authority. And in discussing what little is known of Goa from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries he gives a persuasive explanation of the ubiquity of its citizens in so much of the economy of society of the East.

The Communal Award of 1932 and its Implications in Bengal

Abstract: The debate over the separate and joint electorates as rival modes of election to the various representative institutions by the British began with the Simla deputation of 1906 and remained controversial until 1947. Not only was the issue controversial in pre-Independent India, but it also raises debates among contemporary historians and political scientists. For John Gallagher, the Communal Award was nothing but ‘a sign of [the] determination [of the British Government] to warp the Indian question towards electoral politics’. While looking into the operational aspect of the Award, Anil Seal, too, has affirmed that ‘by extending the electorate, the imperial croupier had summoned more players to his table’. Looking at the Award from the British point of view, both of them thus arrived at the same conclusions: (a) the Award introduced the native politicians to the sophisticated world of parliamentary politics; and (b) as a result of the new arrangement, as stipulated in the 1935 Act, politics now percolated down to the localities. The available evidence, however, does reveal that the Award and the constitutional rights guaranteed to Indians under the Act were the price the British paid for the continuity of the Indian Empire. What thus appears to be a calculated generous gesture was very much a political expedient. The surrender of power into Indian hands, though at the regional levels, was not welcomed by some senior officers who saw an eclipse of British authority in this endeavour.

The Emergence of the Asian System of Powers

Abstract: The ‘downward sweep’ of Japan after Pearl Harbor has been widely noted for its long-term effects in Southeast Asia. The rule of the established colonial masters was shattered, and those failing to escape disappeared into the camps of the Kempeitai. In Burma and Java, in particular, Japanese rule promoted local organizations, local administratiors, the indigenous language and, in Burma, a ‘national’ government and a ‘national’ army, under Japanese supervision: the one thing Japan did not bring was freedom and independence. Yet the greatly-increased social mobility and political, military and administrative experience had long-term consequences: none of the post-war attempts at colonial restoration proved viable.

Civil Adoption in Contemporary Chinese Law: A Contract to Care

Abstract: An outstanding feature of the far-reaching plans for development which China has been earnestly promoting under the general rubric of the ‘four modernizations’ is the post-Mao leadership's determined effort to revive and thoroughly institutionalize a meaningful and formal legal system. There is an obvious and sharp distinction between the policies towards law pursued during the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s and the more recent attempts to fashion a pivotal role for law in Chinese society. Throughout much of the course of socialist rule China's leaders have been concerned not with promoting effective legal institutions but, rather, with the direct insertion of extrinsic political norms and values into the law. During the Cultural Revolution many important legal structures ceased to function. In contrast, in the years since 1978 an important aspect of the rigorous political reaction to the uncertainty and conflict of the Cultural Revolution has been unequivocal support for the establishment of a sound legal system. The leadership now believes that systematic and regulated law-making, public awareness of the law, and proper application of the rules should be integral elements in the administration of justice in the PRC. The hope is that this approach will prevent the recurrence of arbitrary political rule, curb reliance on ‘connections’ or guanxi in bureaucratic conduct, promote economic growth and generally encourage the development of a more predictable and orderly social life.

Wang Jiaxiang, Mao Zedong and the ‘Triumph of Mao Zedong-Thought’ (1935–1945)

Abstract: While Mao Zedong might still be China's most famous communist, only scholars of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have heard of Wang Jiaxiang and even they have never studied his career in detail. But recent Chinese publications show that there were very few CCP leaders who had such a tremendous impact on the Chinese communist movement in general and Mao Zedong's career in particular. This article will show that Wang not only supported Mao during the power struggles of the 1930s and helped convince Stalin that Mao should be acknowledged as the CCP's leader, but that Wang also played a decisive role in establishing Mao Zedong-Thought as the Party's guiding ideology. The release of numerous Party documents in the last five years also throws some light upon the relations and conflicts between Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders such as Wang Ming, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Shaoqi in the decade between the Long March and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945.

Tax Reform in South Asia: Yesterday and Today

Abstract: The subject of this paper is the fate of progressive taxation in South Asia. This is a subject about which Kingsley Martin himself would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he strongly advocated a redistributive fiscal strategy. On the other hand, he was never at all comfortable examining the kind of economic analysis with which it is usually justified. Somewhat unfairly, he distrusted all orthodox economists on moral grounds (Martin, 1966: 34). Moreover, his prolonged encounter with the unorthodox economics of Maynard Keynes was equally unsatisfactory as an educational experience. Lord Boothby summed up Martin's efforts to learn the technicalities of economics from Keynes as follows: ‘Kingsley simply never understood economics and yet he was always trying to understand. “Explain it to me, then” he would say, but his attention soon wandered’ (Rolph, 1973: 195).

The Experience of Rural Poverty in Malay Novels

Abstract: In significant contrast with Indonesian writing there is in Malay literature a body of work concerned with rural life. That this is the case suggests the degree to which Malay writers even today have their roots in the agricultural cycle of peasant experience. Those who now work in clericaljobs, in publishing, injournalism, in teaching, those in fact who make up the writers of the novels, however divorced and remote their present life-styles and occupations are from their origins, still look back to the village as the world of their formative experience. It is a world with which they are intimate and familiar, a source of spiritual reassurance, of values which they may not endorse, but which they understand fully, in opposition to the alien environment of the modern city where the totality of life is fragmented into exclusive and contradictory domains of experience. And it is precisely because the writers are not so removed from rural life in space and time, that when they do cast a glance backwards they are never tempted to review that life through the distorting lens of nostalgia. On the contrary, there is the realistic acknowledgement that their own moving away from the village has also been an escape. There is, therefore, ambivalence: the village is perceived as the repository of Malay culture, the locus of traditional values, yet at the same time it is a locus of ignorance, frustration and poverty, somewhere to return for spiritual regeneration, but never again for permanent residence. This historical closeness of urban-dwelling writers and readers to rural experience gives the Malay novel a texture very different from its European equivalent. For one thing, rather than a celebration of a rural idyll, a common direction taken by the Malay novel is to transpose the experience of uncertainty of the new middle-class back into a rural context in which the dominant paradigm is of the failure and rejection of the alienated individual. By transposing the experience of alienation

The Social Alignment Patterns of the Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Penang

Abstract: Being the concluding part of the study on the Chinese in the nineteenthcentury Straits Settlements, the inquiry has a twofold aim: to construct a social alignment pattern of the Chinese in Penang, and to compare the pattern with those in Singapore and Malacca. Altogether 14,500 names of donors from epigraphic sources were processed. The Penang Chinese exhibited a rather unique social alignment pattern in that the Hokkiens had been very active in a number of community oriented associations. Cases of cross-dialect-group participation were few, as compared to the other two settlements, for the various dialect groups in Penang, particularly the Hokkiens, were largely attracted to the inter-provincial associations. This was a unique social alignment pattern. The findings from Penang, together with those in Singapore and Malacca were used to reconstruct an unidimensional scale for measur

Ai Ssu-ch'i's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism . By Joshua A. Fogel. Harvard Contemporary China Series: 4. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.

Abstract: centre. Often in a single village there were numerous amaldars. Rivalries and threatened conflict in the locality thus reinforced the centre's ability to manage a 'union'. In the last two sections, Wink considers the significance of monetization and revenue farming for the eighteenth-century Maratha society and economy. The influence of the financier-merchants, a considerable amount of their direct political power and their patronage of religious institutions are illustrated through some interesting examples. But Wink prefers to remain non-committal about their role in politics. Wink presents revenue farming as an organized means of agricultural restoration. He argues that it 'cleared the field of the heavy undergrowth of the established zamlndari rights' and was 'zulrrC or oppression from the viewpoint of the centre only as it implied relaxation in its control. Andre Wink's conclusions are supported by the recent researches on the period for the different parts of the subcontinent. His book is sure to provoke many of its readers to look again at some of the established notions about the social and political relationships in late medieval and early modern South Asia. He would have to provide, however, much more evidence to satisfy them about the feasibility of hisjitna paradigm. Further, no serious historian would dispute the plea that the intricate mechanism of the political process at various levels in the locality is to be looked into carefully, drawing on the sources from the locality itself. It must, however, be added here that even for Wink's subject, it is difficult to ignore the vast Persian material with no less bearing on the local social politics. Wink quotes directly from earlier Arabic and Persian authorities to build his theory ofjitna. I see no reason why he decides to cite from the incomplete and often incorrect translations of the Persian sources when it comes to his own period.

History Writing and Spirit Writing in Seventeenth-Century China - The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China. By Frederick WakemanJr, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1985. Two volumes. Pp. xiv, 1338. - The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan. By David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1986. Pp. xx, 330.

Abstract: China has been one of the great discoveries of twentieth-century Western historiography. Whereas our forebears for the most part chose to be impressed by the inertness ofChina's millions within the general movement of history, we are now appreciably better informed—to the point where China, by comparison with Japan, for example, emerges as prone to extremely rapid and dramatic transformations. Some of these, perhaps, amounted to mere surface squalls upon the depths of a profoundly pacific ocean, but our knowledge of Chinese social history, rudimentary though it still is, nonetheless makes it clear that the whole of Chinese society has suffered sea changes not once but several times. It has, of course, been our relative inexperience as observers of China that has kept us from the truth for so long. The events of our own century, bisected by the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, have helped to teach us all a lesson; by contrast, the nineteenth century, which saw the failure of the Heavenly Kingdom and other concurrent rebellions, seems in retrospect somewhat misleading, in that it encouraged the conceit that the 'Western invasion of China' constituted the only historical force capable of transforming that ancient empire. Only once before our own century did Europeans have the opportunity of witnessing a successful change of Heaven's mandate and of reporting on it, and that was in the seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty, itself wracked by internal problems, met its fate at the hands of Manchu invaders. A reconsideration of this process may thus serve the double purpose of illuminating the immediate predecessor of the Chinese Revolution of our own times and of marking out just how far our perceptions of China have evolved. Modern scholarship on the Ming-Ch'ing transition has been far from lacking, but it is only now that a study has appeared which attempts to do full justice to the complex sequence of events stretching out on either side of the pivotal year of 1644. The Great Enterprise, by Frederick Wakeman, Jr., is a masterpiece, not because it achieves some infallible perfection, but because it represents the very best that a first-rate Western historian of China, fully settled in a successful academic career, could reasonably be expected to produce in the 1980s. Everywhere throughout its two substantial volumes are the signs identifying it as the distinctive product of a top North American history

From Custom to Right: The Politicization of the Village in Early Meiji Japan

Abstract: In 1874 Itagaki Taisuke and other critics of the newly established Meiji government submitted a petition demanding a popularly elected national assembly. This is said to be the origin of the Liberty and People's Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō). Around the same time a number of local political leaders intensified their campaign for the creation of village assemblies. Although the demand for local autonomy in the early Meiji period was both deep-felt and widespread, only a few scholars, notably Neil Waters, have diverted their attention from Itagaki and other political activists and thinkers at the center. An examination of Meiji local politics is nonetheless essential to understand Japan's modern political development.

Consul de France in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract: What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-a-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

Congress Muslims and Indian Nationalism A Nationalist conscience: M. A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj . By Mushirul Hasan. Manohar: New Delhi, 1987. Pp. xvii, 277. Rs 200. Abdul Kalam Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography . By Ian Henderson Douglas. Edited by Gail Minault and Christian W. Troll. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1988. Pp. xvi, 358.

Abstract: In the first half of the twentieth century four of the great figures of IndoMuslim life were Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad and Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari. As the second half of the century has worn on it has become noticeable how differently those who supported the movement for Pakistan have come to be remembered as compared with those who devoted themselves to Indian nationalism. Iqbal's tomb of sandstone, lapis lazuli and white marble, which stands before the main gates of the Badshahi mosque in Lahore, is a place of pilgrimage. Jinnah's Mazar, whose dimensions would not have disgraced a Mughal emperor, is a symbol of Pakistan's identity and one of the first places to which the visitor to Karachi will be taken. Azad's mausoleum before Delhi's Juma Masjid, on the other hand, is not greatly frequented; not once on many visits to the city over twenty years has anyone taken me by the hand and said 'come, let us pay our respects to Abul Kalam'. Ansari, moreover, seems almost entirely forgotten; although I have visited the Jamia Millia Islamia a fair number of times, I had to read the biography under review to learn that he is buried there. It may be said, of course, that regard for great men need not only be displayed at their tombs. But amongst Muslims, the Wahhabi sort apart, it is a natural instinct to respect the resting places of great souls and to frequent them in search of both solace and inspiration. The relative neglect of the tombs of Azad and Ansari suggests that many Indian Muslims may have lost interest in keeping their memories alive. It also suggests that Indian society as a whole may no longer value as before, and perhaps may not even know, the principles for which they stood.