Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 1996"

Military Mobilization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China, Russia, and Mongolia

Abstract: From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries three agrarian states—Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian—struggled for power over the heartland of the Eurasian continent. Each had dynamic central leaders mobilizing agrarian surpluses based on drastically different ecologies, institutions, and military structures. When the dust cleared, by 1760, only two survived.

Tod's Rajast'han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract: This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called 'feudal system' of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have been the objects of Orientalist discourse. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), much academic scrutiny has been directed at uncovering the various ways in which Orientalist writers have posited an asymmetrically ranked, ontological difference between the essential natures of European and non-European civilizations.' Perhaps the most ambitious recent

Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature

Abstract: While the growing volume of new long distance oceanic trade which developed during the fifteenth century helped to stimulate an awareness of the wider world in Western Europe, it also had a much more specific enabling effect on the development of natural history and the status of science in the eyes of government. A rising interest in empirical fact-gathering and experimentation led to a growing enthusiasm for experimentation with new types of medical practice and new drugs. Apothecaries' gardens became established at the universities and were increasingly stocked with plants imported from distant lands. These gardens became the sites of the first attempts to classify plants on a global basis. The voyages of the first century and a half after the journeys of Henry the Navigator from 1415 onwards had already begun to transform the science of botany and to enlarge medical ambitions for the scope of pharmacology and natural history. The foundation of the new botanic gardens was, therefore, clearly connected with the early expansion of the European economic system and remained an accurate indicator, in a microcosm, of the expansion in European knowledge of the global environment. The origins of the gardens in medical practice meant that, as a knowledge of global nature was acquired, the Hippocratic agendas of medicine and medical practitioners continued to form the dominant basis of European constructions of the extra-European natural world.

No Boats to China. The Dutch East India Company and the Changing Pattern of the China Sea Trade, 1635–1690

Abstract: By 1690 the Supreme Government of the Indies in Batavia agreed that, financially speaking, it was no longer wise to continue the direct trade between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and China. It was argued that the vessels so far used for the China trade could be better deployed in the Indian Ocean.

Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portuguese Goa

Abstract: As the capital of the Estado da India, the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia and East Africa, Goa was subjected to a blizzard of policies designed at once to transform and fossilize life there. Desiring to preserve much of the precolonial village economic structure, yet determined to force their Goan subjects to total conversion to Catholicism, the Portuguese created policies that had a dramatic impact on Goan culture and identity. The focus of this article will be on the Hindu resistance to the policies that were appiled by the colonial regime and its role in the shaping of the regional culture: in the face of over-whelming physical force, direct defiance revealed itself primarily in the religious life of Hindu Goa as archival records of the Portuguese rule and temple histories demonstrate. Even formsof religious syncretism that are pervasive in Catholic Goa and might initially be perceived as indications of the success of Portuguese repressive and discriminatory policies represent a subtle pattern of ‘everday resistnce’ and are not simply the blending of Portuguese Catholic and Hindu cultures.

China's New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang Zizhong

Abstract: General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the eight divisions that constituted the Chinese 33rd Army Group, was killed at approximately 4:00 P.M. on May 16, 1940, in fighting at Shilichangshan (‘Ten li mountain’) near Nanguadian in Northern Hubei. The battle was one engagement of the Zaoyang-Yichang campaign that rumbled through late spring of that year. Surrounded by the Japanese, his forces had refused either to retreat or to surrender. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, General Zhang had been wounded seven times in all, by grenade, bullet, and finally by bayonet. The victorious Japanese realized Zhang's identity only when a major discovered, in the left breast pocket of his blood-soaked yellow uniform, a fine gold pen engraved with his name. The major quickly summoned senior officers; they ordered a stretcher brought and the body was carried away from the battlefield. (This was observed, through half-opened eyes, by Zhang's long-time associate, the Chinese major Ma Xiaotang, who lay nearby, bleeding from a bayonet wound, and who later gasped out the story to Chinese as he died).

Public Finance and the Rise of Warlordism

Abstract: Previous studies of the rise of warlordism have focused on the devolution of power after the Taiping Rebellion and the failure of political leaders to create a workable order after the 1911 Revolution. This article offers an initial exploration of the fiscal background. Foreign indemnities imposed after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and largescale borrowing by the Qing before 1911 and by the Republic subsequently resulted in a severe fiscal crisis for the central state, with the following consequences.

Commemorating War in Eighteenth-Century China

Abstract: Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

Women as Participants in the Pakistan Movement: Modernization and the Promise of a Moral State

Abstract: Photographs taken in Lahore in 1946–47 record the mass participation of women in the pro-Muslim League demonstrations against the Khizar Unionist government. This was the first such mass public mobilization of Muslim women anywhere in pre-independent India. The mobilization of women became a vital element in the League's tactics during the dramatic last months leading up to Independence and Partition. A small group of relatively emancipated female Muslim Leaguers from the Punjab who had been at the vanguard of the anti-Khizar demonstrations were also instrumental in mobilizing the unemancipated women of the North-West Frontier Province to protest against the Khan Sahib Congress ministry. This latter mobilization was evidently so successful that the British governor of the province, on seeing the crowds of burqa-clad women, was reported to have declared that ‘Pakistan is made’. It is perhaps no mere coincidence, then, that Jinnah made his statement about ‘awakening the political consciousness’ of Muslim women at the same session of the AIML at which the demand for Pakistan was made official League policy. The political awakening of Muslim women seemed to be inextricably linked to the struggle for a separate Muslim state in India. The question that this paper deals with, however, is whether in fact the Pakistan movement had a surplus of meaning for women over and above the nationalism of the Muslim League and why it was that many Muslim women were, in Begum Jahan Ara's words, ‘more impatient for Pakistan than men.’

The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937-1949

Abstract: Nie Er (1912–1935), a young Communist musician from Yunnan, could not possibly have imagined that when he wrote this patriotic song (with lyrics by the left-wing writer Tian Han [1898–1968]) for the 1935 film Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernu) it would soon become one of the most popular tunes in China. The overwhelming success of the song reflected a nation, long frustrated by imperialist (especially Japanese) aggression, thwarted reforms, domestic armed conflicts, and government ineptitude, venting its anger and crying out for a solution. When the Japanese invaded China two years later, ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was rapidly transformed into the quintessential song of resistance against Japan, sung at schools, in the army, at rallies, and on the streets. The song was influential in capturing the hearts and minds of millions during China's eight-year War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945); its impact, in the words of one contemporary song critic, was ‘similar to that of the “Marseillaise” [in the French Revolution]’. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power in it adopted the song as the official national anthem.

Testing the Self-Strengthening: The Chinese Army in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895

Abstract: On 25th July 1894, the Japanese navy sank the Chinese man-of-war Gaosheng without warning and thus officially started the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The war was a culmination of the rivalries between the two countries for two decades. Japan, strengthened by its Meiji reforms, and still growing in power, wanted to extend its power within the Korean peninsula. China, on the other hand, was desperately clinging to its influence over its largest, oldest and last vassal. The was was watched with great interest by the European powers as a litmus test of the relative success of the modernization programs carried out by the two countries in the years before. Many observers expected a real fight to be at hand. But this was not to be. The Chinese army was thoroughly beaten in one battle after another: in Pingrang (September 1894), Lushun (November 1894), and Weihaiwei (February 1895). Meanwhile, the Chinese Beiyang Fleet was also heavily beaten by the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Yellow Sea (September 1894). By March 1895, Beijing had come under the Japanese threat. In April, the Chinese government was forced to sue for peace under humiliating terms.

‘Modernity’ and ‘Tradition’ in ‘Thailand’

Abstract: This paper examines the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ as an ideal-typical pair and shows how they are typically misused as descriptive terms. It discusses the transformation of these terms' use from one of description to one of prescription as they are adopted by ‘developing’ nations. Focussing on Thailand, the paper shows how the term ‘tradition’, which formely stood alone, shifts in meaning as it is put into opposition to ‘modernity’, and how the pair serve as legitimating terms in a political context, tied to ‘nation-building’ and the interests of different political groups. This process and its ambiguities are explored through an examination of ritual, public monuments, and semantic changes.

Recent Studies of Modern Chinese History

Abstract: Some time ago the Commonwealth and Overseas History Society of Cambridge University asked me to provide an overview of recent scholarship on modern Chinese history. What follows is a written version of this ‘public service’ lecture aimed at non-specialist historians. It discusses Western scholarship on China from the eighteenth until the twentieth century.

Angāre and the Founding of the Progressive Writers' Association

Abstract: The book Angāre, a collection of ten short stories by Sajjād Ẓahīr, Rashīd Jahān, Aḥmed 'Alī and Maḥmūduzẓafar published in Lucknow in December 1932, marks a major turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Acting as a powerful catalyst, it initiated a major change in the form and content of Urdu literature and helped to lay the basis for the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association, the most significant Urdu literary movement of the twentieth century.

The ‘Land of the Future’: The Jong Sumatranen Bond (1917–1930) and its Image of the Nation

Abstract: Indonesia is no obvious entity. The present borders of the largest archipelago in the world are the result of its colonial past; the only deviation from the borders of the former Netherlands Indies is the eastern part of the island Timor, which was annexed shortly after the departure of the Portugese in 1975. Thirty years earlier, following the declaration of independence of 17 August 1945, the young Republic of Indonesia had unambiguously proclaimed its ambition: the formation of a unitary state of Indonesia, encompassing all the former Asian territories of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Several times separatist movements in different regions ran up against the barrier of the unitary state doctrine.

Death of a Young Shanghailander: The Thorburn Case and the Defence of the British Treaty Ports in China in 1931

Abstract: On June 4th 1931 the North China Daily News—the principal British owned English-language newspaper in Shanghai published a small report on page 12 headed ‘Alleged crime by foreigner: Shooting affair on the Nanking railway: Held by military authorities’ This went on to state a Russian had been arrested for the murder of two Chinese gendarmes on the 1st of June at 10pm. He had been challenged as a prelude to a search but had fired on them and escaped having fatally wounded two men. The following morning a ‘suspicious looking foreigner’ had been arrested in the vicinity and was still being held in custody. The source of this story was the previous day's Shenbao, the leading Shanghai Chinese newspaper which had picked up the story from the Suzhou press. The Russian's name was given as Xi si ke tuo qu luo—which might be transliterated as ‘Sea Scout’, for reasons which will become clear.

War in the Making of Modern China

Abstract: No one even with only a casual interest in Chinese history can be unaware that China's capacity for war in the last few centuries has proved truly awesome. In the middle of the eighteenth century Qing armies numbering some 150,000 troops marched into central Asia. After many campaigns some of which continued for nearly two years, they rid China finally of the menace from the desert that had caused so much havoc in the past. In the process they exterminated the Zunghars as a people. In the nineteenth century, China fought wars with nearly all the major powers: England in the Opium War of 1839–42 and several times thereafter; France in the 1880s; and Japan in the 1890s. In 1900 it took on all of them at the same time. Civil war too was a frequent occurrence. The Taiping Rebellion of 1852–64 exacted casualties that should be counted in the tens of millions, and this was merely the most devastating of a series of rebellions. The scale of war in the twentieth century has proved even more spectacular. Warlord wars, fighting between the nationalists and communists, and the War of Resistance against Japan ravaged China until the communist victory in 1949.

Indigenous Trade and European Economic Intervention in North-West Borneo c.1860–1930

Abstract: The soil and productions of this country are of the richest description, and it is not too much to say, that within the same given space, there are not to be found the same mineral and vegetable riches in any land in the world (James Brooke, 1838).

Dancing the Goddess: Possession and Class in Tamil South India

Abstract: Religion in India has always been profoundly politicized, which is why it has remained of enduring importance, instead of ‘withering away’ as in the West. Though its presence is somewhat hidden in parties that profess a secular view, it is of vital importance, at the local village level, as a focus for the organization of political factions. More precisely, even if local political parties in Tamilnadu do not organize around religion, they use religion and ritual events for their political purposes, in their struggles to dominate local politics. The fact that this politicization of religious ritual is implicit, not explicit, only testifies to the fact that power-relationships—and struggles—exist in all aspects of life (as Foucault often noted), including apparently ‘innocent’ rites such as religious possession.

Growth of Non-agricultural Economic Activities in Java in the Middle Decades of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The indigenous population in Java, it is generally believed, remained by and large subsistence peasants under the colonial rule in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Javanese could not participate in the estate plantation industry or 'transform their general pattern of already intensive farming in an extensive direction, for they lacked capital, had no way to shuck off excess labor'. Their access to waste land too became restricted and consequently they sought refuge in the wet-rice cultivation which 'soaked up almost the whole of the' population in a process of 'agricultural involution', which 'went on steadily' during the nineteenth century.' Thus Javanese were confined to the subsistence agriculture for their living because they had neither

Warlords against Warlordism: The Politics of Anti-Militarism in Early Twentieth-Century China

Abstract: In a recent article published in the Journal of Military History, Arthur Waldron noted that war in Chinese history has been ‘treated at best as a largely unexamined context’. One has only to look at the cursory treatment given by most textbooks to the incessant civil wars of China's ‘warlord’ period (usually dated from 1916 to 1926) to see the truth of this statement. In the above article, Waldron seeks to remedy some of this neglect by pointing out the important relationship in this period between war and the course of modern Chinese nationalism. Although less ambitious, this article also seeks to explore a more specific, yet also largely unexamined, aspect of this relationship, namely the emergence of anti-militarism, or more specifically anti-warlordism, as a defining theme in modern Chinese nationalism.

Sir William Jones, Biblical Orientalism and Indian Scholarship

Abstract: For many students of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British intellectual and literary history, Sir William Jones (1746–94) has lately come to seem a figure of great significance for our understanding of the period. A notable if implicit claim for his importance is to be found in Jerome McGann's revisionist New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993); A Hymn to Na'ra'yena (1785), Jones's translation from the Sanskrit, is symbolically placed as the anthology's first item. This essay will argue that Jones's Indian scholarship will be better understood in the light of its links with contemporary developments in biblical criticism.

The Tragedy of Wuhan, 1938

Abstract: There is a striking disconnect between the imaginative range of interests which preoccupy historians of World Wars I and II in Europe and North America and the much more narrow political concerns of China historians working on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Since Jacoby and White's Thunder Out of China (1946) and Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism (1966), Western historiography on the Sino-Japanese War has focused not on the war itself but on the continuing political struggle for supremacy between the Communists and Nationalists. The war is seen as the key to the eventual triumph of the Communists over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists by 1949. Other issues like the military history of the war itself or its long-term impact on Chinese society and culture have received scant attention.

Nationalist Army Officers during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945

Abstract: Effective combat performance depends on the following: First, there must be a sound command structure capable of making rational decisions. Second, there must be efficient means of communication to transmit decisions through the chain of command and to give the commanders continuous control over their units. There must also be sufficient transportation to allow the units to execute their mission in a timely way. Third, there must be adequate quality and quantity of weapons and supplies commensurable with the given military mission. Fourth, there must be high-quality soldiers at all levels able to perform their duties competently. Finally, the entire military effort must be guided by clear and coherent strategic thinking.

The Role of Power Struggle and Economic Changes in the ‘Heshang phenomnon’ in China

Abstract: One of the most talked-about topics among Chinese intellectuals and Western China observers in the past few years has been the six-part television series Heshang (River Elegy). After its first broadcast in June 1988 through the national television network Zhongyang dianshitai (China Central Television, or CCTV in short), the film caused immediate shockwaves throughout China, marking the climax of the so-called ‘wenhua re’ (cultural fever). It was re-played through the CCTV in August, and some local stations aired it even more than twice. twice. Videotapes of the series have been circulating widely among overseas Chinese circles. Total number of viewers was reported to be over 400 million [Lee 1989]. The script appeared in various editions, and much attention has been paid to the ideological dimension of the film.

Nehru and the British

Abstract: Ironically enough, the arch rebel against the Raj came from one of the most anglicized families in India at the turn of the century. His father, Motilal Nehru, had built up a fabulous practice at the bar of the Allahabad High Court. He had clashed head-on with Hindu orthodoxy, defied the caste taboo on foreign travel, dressed, lived and even looked an Englishman. The process of 'modernization' in the Nehru household involved not only adoption of western furnishings and use of knives and forks at the dining table, but employment of European governesses and resident tutors for the children. High British officials liked Motilal's company and enjoyed his hospitality; one of them, Sir Harcourt Butler, who rose to be Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, claimed in 1920 'a friendship of thirty years' standing' with him. In the evening of his life, Motilal was asked by Aldous Huxley, the English novelist, whether it was true that Sir Harcourt Butler had provided him with maple furniture and champagne in gaol, Motilal laughed and said: 'No, it is not true. But in the good old days rivers of champagne must have flowed between us.'2

Home Market and the Artisans in Colonial India: A Study of Brass-ware

Abstract: Studies on Indian artisans in the recent times have tended to be guided by the notion of a world market which, it is believed, drove them towards obsolescence through changing tastes or productivity. This framework, however, is not without problems. First, the presence of older industries in modern India, or their long continuance, tends to be seen in terms of ‘survivals’ or ‘revivals’, which terms deny them any inherent dynamics. On the other hand, the impression that many of them ‘survive’ today in strikingly modernized forms, utilizing production and marketing institutions vastly different from those that prevailed a hundred years ago, would demand of historians an account of how old industries evolve, and become integrated into the rest of the economy. Secondly, the crux of the world market story is the economy's opening up to trade. That foreign trade had a critical impact on crafts such as textiles, partially decimated by imports, or leather, where trade commercialized an erstwhile custom-bound exchange, is indisputable. But there are other notable examples where the effect of trade was benign, minor, or indirect, where artisans remained producers of a mass consumable; and where neither did they face significant competition from imported goods, nor were reduced to fodder for metropolitan industrialization. Yet they changed profoundly. In a way, their history reflects not the play of a dominant exogenous process, but the totality of the economy's structural change. Crafts history does not yet provide us with prototypes of this endogenous transformation.

East European Aid to Asian Developing Countries: The Legacy of the Communist Era

Abstract: One consequence of the democratization of Eastern Europe has been a sharp reduction in the provision of development assistance by the former Communist countries. At its high point in the mid-Ig8os, aid from Communist Eastern Europe to the developing countries is estimated to have peaked at between $516-537 million a year, supplementing Soviet aid of some $4-4.5 billion.' Taken together, it is estimated that Soviet and East European Communist aid represented nearly Io% of total world Official Development Assistance (ODA) disbursements during that period. Following the political changes that wrought democratization to Eastern Europe, these aid flows declined drastically or even ceased. This downward shift in aid reflected a profound and widespread aversion to any ongoing East European role in international development. That democratization would have resulted in a repudiation of East European support for international development might come as a surprise, and could perhaps be even a little disconcerting to many people in the West and in the developing world. In order to understand this attitudinal shift, it is necessary to review the Communist legacy concerning aid so as to discern the policies, programs and activities that brought such discredit to the development assistance effort. A review of East European aid orientations during the Communist era should provide further insight into that little known factor in world ODA,2 and could also help contemplate the prospects for a

Concretely Imagining the Southern Digambar Jain Community, 1899–1920

Abstract: In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a ‘small but select’ group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, the dakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā. The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, while so many of the other associations in that lush growth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India have disappeared. It has been instrumental in forging a Jain ethnicity, in creating a new sense of a specifically Jain past and present, and in fostering new habits of education and of social intercourse among Jains. A good proportion of what is today taken for granted by Jains about southern Digambar samskrti, ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, was moulded by Jains acting in and through the Sabha.