Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 2020"

The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy

Abstract: What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally-integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India’s traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in south India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations, or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But locally and nationally the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures and evasions in post-liberalization India, suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and postcolonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces.

‘Produce or Perish’. The crisis of the late 1940s and the place of labour in post-colonial India

Abstract: This article argues that the late 1940s in India should no longer be reduced to the twin events of partition and independence. A generalized political crisis unsettled, for a brief period, the structures of social and economic power, and not just intercommunity relations and the constitution of the state. These years were thus, among other things, a catalytic moment for the definition of ‘labour’ as both a political category and a parameter of post-colonial politics: processes dating back to the First World War, at least, were consolidated, under pressure from this crisis, into a new labour regime that has withstood political pressure for almost seven decades. The article offers an analysis of the almost-forgotten post-war strike movement, which was nevertheless unprecedented in its social and geographical spread. The movement elicited both repressive and reformist responses: the extraordinary level of emergency powers applied to suppress it are, therefore, as much examined as the series of momentous legislative and institutional changes of the late 1940s. In conclusion, the long-term consequences of this cycle of strike–reform–repression for India's post-colonial labour regime are adumbrated. A strongly etatist, potentially authoritarian, regime of industrial relations, it is argued, was checked by an enduring political trade union pluralism. At the same time, divisions within India's working classes were deepened and consolidated as labour law and social legislation sealed off the comparatively small ‘core workforces’ of public sector and large-scale industrial enterprises from the majority of workers in what would soon be called the ‘informal economy’.

Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, sovereign kingship, and partition

Abstract: This article explores the idea of federation in late-colonial India. Projects of federation sought to codify the uncodified and fragmented sovereign landscape of the British Raj. They were ambitious projects that raised crucial questions about sovereignty, kingship, territoriality, the potential of constitutional law in transforming the colonial state into a democratic one, and India's political future more broadly. In the years after 1919, federation became a capacious model for imagining a wide array of political futures. An all-India Indian federation was seen as the most plausible means of maintaining India's unity, introducing representative government, and overcoming the Hindu–Muslim majority–minority problem. By bringing together ‘princely’ India and British India, federation made the Indian states central players in late-colonial contestations over sovereignty. This article explores the role of the states in constitutional debates, their place in Indian political imaginaries, and articulations of kingship in late-colonial India. It does so through the example of Hyderabad, the premier princely state, whose ruler made an unsuccessful bid for independence between 1947 and 1948. Hyderabad occupied a curious position in competing visions of India's future. Ultimately, the princely states were a decisive factor in the failure of federation and the turn to partition as a means of overcoming India's constitutional impasse.

Chinatowns and the Rise of China

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered ‘other’ by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental ‘other’. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and role has been transformed, while in other cities entirely new Chinatowns have emerged. This article discusses how Chinatowns today are increasingly contested sites where older diasporic understandings of Chineseness are unsettled by newer, neoliberal interpretations, dominated by the pull of China's new-found economic might. In particular, the so-called ‘rise of China’ has spawned a globalization of the idea of ‘Chinatown’ itself, with its actual uptake in urban development projects the world over, or a backlash against it, determined by varying perceptions of China's global ascendancy as an amalgam of threat and opportunity.

A Dreadful Scourge: Cholera in early nineteenth-century India

Abstract: In 1817–21, the Indian subcontinent was ravaged by a series of epidemics which marked the beginning of what has since become known as the First Cholera Pandemic. Despite their far-reaching consequences, these epidemics have received remarkably little attention and have never been considered as historical subjects in their own right. This article examines the epidemics of 1817–21 in greater detail and assesses their significance for the social and political history of the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, it examines the meanings that were attached to the epidemics in the years running up to the first appearance of cholera in the West. In so doing, the article makes comparisons between responses to cholera in India and in other contexts, and tests the applicability of concepts used in the study of epidemics in the West. It is argued that the official reaction to cholera in India was initially ameliorative, in keeping with the East India Company's response to famines and other supposedly natural disasters. However, this view was gradually supplemented and replaced by a view of cholera as a social disease, requiring preventive action. These views were initially rejected in Britain, but found favour after cholera epidemics in 1831–32. Secondly, in contrast to later epidemics, it is argued that those of 1817–21 did little to exacerbate tensions between rulers and the ruled. On the rare occasions when cholera did elicit a violent reaction, it tended to be intra-communal rather than anti-colonial in nature.

Sino-Foreign Business Networks: Foreign and Chinese banks in the Chinese banking sector, 1890–1911

Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, foreign bankers viewed China as one of the up-and-coming markets for international banking. This led to a rapid influx of foreign banks into the banking sector of the China coast. Consequently, foreign banks became a major presence in the treaty ports, where they financed China's foreign trade, provided loans to the Chinese government, and supplied Chinese banks with credit. However, their operations in the Chinese banking sector were always dependent on interaction with Chinese banks. Previous scholarship has largely portrayed the relationship between foreign and Chinese banks in terms of the former dominating and controlling the banking sector of China's treaty ports. This article challenges this view and shows that the relationship between foreign and Chinese banks was one of interdependence rather than one-sided control. It demonstrates how foreign banks had to adapt their business practices to the Chinese business environment and how they were integrated into existing Chinese business networks. Moreover, this article reveals how Chinese entrepreneurs could use their relationship with foreign banks for the benefit of their own business networks and exploit information asymmetries between foreign and Chinese banks to generate profits. The result of the development of this interdependent relationship between foreign and Chinese banks, and of the integration of the former into existing Chinese business networks was the formation of Sino-foreign business networks, which played an important role in making possible the operations of financial markets in China's transnational treaty port economy.

The Emergence of the Informal Sector: Labour legislation and politics in South India, 1940–60

Abstract: The informal sector and informal employment relations occupy a prominent place in India's economy: one of their key features is the apparent absence of the state from labour regulation. This article seeks to trace the emergence of the division between the formal and informal sectors in India's economy from a historical perspective: it shows how the state, far from being absent, played a fundamental role in creating the dichotomy. This is done through a close study of labour legislation and the politics around it, taking South India as a case study. The article examines the enactment of four laws in Madras province in the late 1940s, ostensibly aimed at protecting workers, and their subsequent implementation by the Madras government. It shows how these laws ended by excluding workers from small unorganized industries (such as beedi-making, arecanut-processing, handloom-weaving, and tanning) from legal protection. It explores the ramifications of this exclusion and argues that the reinforcement of the formal–informal divide was the outcome of a complex political struggle between employers, workers' unions, and the state during this formative period.

Settling the Citizen, Settling the Nomad: ‘Habitual offenders’, rebellion, and civic consciousness in western India, 1938–1952

Abstract: This article explores the politics of civic engagement during India's long decolonization between 1938 and 1952 for communities—the erstwhile ‘criminal tribes’—whose lifestyles were complicated by controls on their movement before and shortly following India's independence. It argues that their varied and contingent strategies of mobilization increasingly identified community particularities—notably, their marking as ‘criminals’ and a history of movement—as a basis for negotiating their problematic inclusion within the evolving citizenship frameworks of the late colonial, then post-colonial, state. These early forms of civic consciousness set the parameters for later strategies that sought to mobilize communities by engaging with ‘universal’, ‘differentiated’, and indigenized conceptions of civic responsibility and rights. The most surprising finding of this research is that these strategies (via anti-colonialism) often embraced and celebrated forms of illegality and criminality. The romanticism of the dacoit (bandit)-cum-freedom fighter charged Dhaku Sultan-like figures with political heroism. In the context of independence and the founding of the Constitution, strategies turned to the (un)realized promises of freedom and citizenship rights. The final part of the article turns to the implications of ‘denotification’ for the so-called criminal tribes in the early 1950s, which provided both obstacles and avenues to strategies of mobilization after independence.

Beyond 'propaganda': Images and the moral citizen in late-socialist Vietnam

Abstract: This article forges connections between two vibrant areas of current research within and beyond Asian studies: visual anthropology and the anthropology of morality and ethics. Its focus is on achieving moral citizenship as represented in Vietnam's visually spectacular capital, Hanoi, and on images as active and morally compelling, not mere reflections of the challenges of late-socialist marketization. The case of Vietnam compares intriguingly with other contexts where visuality has been fruitfully explored, including India and post-socialist Eurasia. The question asked is how images, both personal and official, can work either to provide or deny the viewer a quality of moral agency which they feel to be their due. The answer is found in the intertwining of silence and speech in relation to images. This includes what is said and unsaid in regard to public iconography, including memorial statuary and state message posters. It is proposed that the visuality of the urban street space is a continuum involving significant interaction with the intimacies of home and family image use. The article also seeks to add to our methodological ideas about treating fieldwork photographs as a basis for interaction with interlocutors, hence as active research tools rather than mere adjuncts to observation and analysis.

Dynamics of Memory and Religious Nationalism in a Sino-Vietnamese Border Town

Abstract: This article analyses the dynamics of official and unofficial religious nationalism in the Vietnamese border town of Lao Cai. In 1979 it was one of many Vietnamese towns that were reduced to rubble during the short but bloody war between Vietnam and China. The normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991 allowed a booming border trade that let Lao Cai prosper, while the painful memory of this war continued to haunt the town and the daily experiences of its residents, both humans and gods. Since the Vietnamese state forbids any official remembrance of the war, Lao Cai residents have found a religious way to deal with their war memories that skilfully evades state control. By analysing narratives about the fate of the gods and goddesses that reign in the Father God Temple and the Mother Goddess Temple—two religious institutions located right next to the border—this article shows that it is in the symbolism of the supernatural that one can find memories of the war and of the changing social landscape of Lao Cai and reconstruct its history.

Gender, Family, and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India

Abstract: In the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

At the Crossroads of Empire and Nation-State: Partition, gold smuggling, and port cities in the western Indian Ocean

Abstract: This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Cosmopolitan Moment in Colonial Modernity: The Bahá’í faith, spiritual networks, and universalist movements in early twentieth-century China

Abstract: This article outlines the spread of the Baha’i religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Baha’i movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Baha’i connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique ‘cosmopolitan moment’ in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce ‘cosmopolitan moments’ at specific historical junctures and locations.

The Great Second World War Vietnam and Java Famines

Abstract: This article provides quantitative assessments of the great famines that occurred in Vietnam and Java in 1944–1945, which together claimed the lives of some 3.4 million people. It shows that in both Vietnam and Java, harvest shortfalls, in which weather figured prominently, were so large that insufficient food was available to feed everyone. Nevertheless, in both instances, even with the pressures of war and weather, governments could have acted differently and largely, perhaps even wholly, prevented famine. Although Java's famine had few political repercussions, Vietnam's was instrumental in the August 1945 Viet Minh and communist revolution.

Legal Mediators: British consuls in Tengyue (western Yunnan) and the Burma-China frontier region, 1899–1931

Abstract: British consuls were key agents for the British imperial presence in China from 1842 to 1943. Their role, which was to perform administrative duties that protected the rights of British subjects, is most prominently remembered in connection with the east coast. Here larger foreign communities and international maritime trade necessitated their presence. However, British consuls were also posted to the far southwest province of Yunnan and the Burma-China frontier region. This article sheds light on the role of consuls working in the little-known British consular station of Tengyue, situated close to the Burma-China frontier. Using the reports of locally stationed consuls and Burmese frontier officials, it argues that consuls were important mediators of legal power operating at the fringes of empire for British imperial and colonial interests in this region. They represented British and European subjects, and were mediators in legal disputes between British Burma and China, helping to smooth over Sino-British relations and promoting British Burmese sovereign interests. The article serves to shift our attention from the British presence in China on the east coast to the southwestern frontier, demonstrate the importance of consular legal duties, and emphasize the trans-imperial nature of British legal roles across this region.

The Advance of Marketization in North Korea: Between political rigidity and economic flexibility

Abstract: North Korea is a unique regime that has not followed the ‘mono transition’ path (economic reform under modified one-party rule) of other surviving communist regimes (China, Vietnam, Cuba) in the post-Cold War era. Debates over North Korea’s unique features (reluctance in economic reform, absence of political modification, international troublemaking) have generated two contending interpretations. The mainstream interpretation attributes North Korea’s uniqueness to its regime’s highly rigid political system (‘monolithic leadership system’). For the alternative interpretation, structural pressures and political calculus have driven the monolithic regime towards economic reform (‘marketization from above’), making it more convergent with the ‘mono transition’ regimes, at least in the economic aspect. In support of the latter interpretation, this article will delve further into three contentious issues that represent the most common doubts about the advance of marketization in North Korea. First, how can the regime reconcile marketization with the interests of its ‘core constituencies’? Second, since ‘crony socialism’ exists, how does it influence distribution and productive activity? Third, how does marketization advance in view of the persistence of monolithic rule? In so doing, it will show how the sources of economic reform (structural factors and political calculus) have enabled the marketization constraints to be overcome.

Fed by Famine: The Hindu Mahasabha's politics of religion, caste, and relief in response to the Great Bengal Famine, 1943–1944

Abstract: This article demonstrates how the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–1944 and relief activism during it fed the politics of the Hindu right, a development that has not previously received much scholarly attention. Using hitherto unused primary sources, the article introduces a novel site to the study of communal politics, namely, the propagation of Hindu communalism through food distribution during a humanitarian crisis. It examines the caste and class bias in private relief and provides the first in-depth study of the multifaceted process whereby the Hindu Mahasabha used the famine for political purposes. The party portrayed Muslim food officials as ‘saboteurs’ in the food administration, alleged that the Muslim League government was ‘creating’ a new group of Muslim grain traders undermining the established Hindu traders, and publicized the government's failure to avert the famine to prove the economic ‘unviability’ of creating Pakistan. This article also explores counter-narratives, for example, that Hindu political leaders were deliberately impeding the food supply in the hope that starvation would compel Bengali Muslims to surrender their demand for Pakistan. The politics of religious conversion played out blatantly in famine-relief when the Mahasabha accused Muslim volunteers of converting starving Hindus to Islam in exchange for food, and demanded that Hindu and Muslim famine orphans should remain in Hindu and Muslim orphanages respectively. Finally, by dwelling on beef consumption by the army at the time of an acute shortage of dairy milk during the famine, the Mahasabha fanned communal tensions surrounding the orthodox Hindu taboo on cow slaughter.

Cornelis Matelief, Hugo Grotius, and the King of Siam (1605–1616): Agency, initiative, and diplomacy

Abstract: This article addresses the proactive agency of the Siamese kings in cementing commercial and diplomatic ties with the Dutch in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The focus will be on two interrelated developments: one, the first diplomatic mission to the Dutch Republic in 1608–1610 and, two, a scheme hatched by Siamese officials to assist the Dutch in obtaining access to the Chinese market. This was deemed necessary after the Dutch, supported by some overseas Chinese businessmen from Southeast Asia, failed to gain trading access in 1604. On the Dutch side, two men stand in the limelight: Admiral Cornelis Matelief de Jonge, a director of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and supreme commander of its second fleet to Asia, and Hugo Grotius, who at the time was a rising star in the Dutch government and would later be celebrated as one of the pathfinders of modern international law. Both their published and unpublished manuscripts will be examined to ascertain how Matelief and the VOC directors reacted to these Siamese initiatives and how, in turn, the admiral sought to mobilize and co-opt the Siamese into his own commercial and military agenda, with the help of Grotius.

Measuring Up: Better baby contests in China, 1917–45

Abstract: This article charts the Chinese indigenization of better baby contests, from Christian health services offered by the YWCA to positive models of nourishment organized by Chinese philanthropic organizations and local and central governments. American missionaries and milk-powder companies played a large role in sponsoring the contests in China. Influenced by the rise of scientific measurement and ‘national rejuvenation’ as promoted by the New Culture Movement in 1915, Chinese organizers tended to focus on liveliness, gender equality, and statistics that pointed to the need for public reform. As in the United States of America, scientific criteria sometimes also challenged conventional notions of plump cuteness. These goals sometimes conflicted with the implicit aims of corporate sponsors. Contests thus celebrated new material conditions and public hygiene facilitated by modern industry, but was at the same time circumscribed by commercial advertisers, reticent evangelists, or other sponsors.

A Laboratory for a Composite India ? Jamia Millia Islamia around the time of partition

Abstract: This article explores the role of Jamia Millia Islamia—the National Muslim University—in the formation of a composite national identity in India around the time of partition. This institution, born under the dual influence of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, constituted for its members a ‘laboratory’ for the nation. Through their educational experiments and constructive work a la Gandhi, Jamia teachers and students sought to lay the ground for an independence that would be ‘meaningful’ not only for Muslims but for the entire nation. In so doing, Jamia members claimed the right for Muslims to be recognized as ‘unhyphenated Indians’, able to speak for the nation. This article thus discusses the efforts of Jamia members to promote an inclusive conception of ‘composite India’ of which Muslims were fully part. At the same time, it highlights the ambiguous attitude of government authorities vis-a-vis the institution. Despite Jamia members’ strong affinities with Congress leaders, notably Nehru, the school received little support from state authorities after independence. Paradoxically, Nehru's government preferred to turn towards another Muslim institution—Aligarh Muslim University—often considered the ‘cradle’ of ‘Muslim separatism’, in order to reach out to Muslim citizens and promote national integration. By exploring the motivations behind this paradoxical choice as well as the complex relations between Jamia and Nehru's government, this article highlights some of Nehru's own ambiguities towards the ‘Gandhian’ legacy as well as to Muslim representation in secular India.

Illegal Markets and the Formation of a Central Asian Borderland: The Turkestan–Xinjiang opium trade (1881–1917)

Abstract: This article utilizes material from archives in Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan as well as published Chinese sources to explore the opium trade between Tsarist Turkestan and Xinjiang from the early 1880s to 1917. It focuses on two different levels: the borderlands economy and society, and state policies towards illegal (or ‘grey’) markets. The main groups active in the trade were Hui/Dungan and Taranchi migrants from China, who had fled Qing territory after the repression of the great anti-Qing Muslim revolts during the 1860s and 1870s. After settling in Tsarist territory, they grew poppies and exported opium back across the border to China. This article shows how the borderland economy was influenced by the late-Qing anti-opium campaign, and especially by the First World War. During the war, the Tsarist government tried to create a state opium monopoly over the borderland economy, but this attempt was botched first by the great Central Asian revolt of 1916, and later by the 1917 revolution. Departing from the prevailing historiography on borderlands, this article shows how the international border, far from being an obstacle to the trade, was instead the main factor that made borderland opium production and trade possible. It also shows how the borderland population made a strategic use of the border-as-institution, and how local imperial administrators—in different periods and for different reasons—adapted to, fostered, or repressed this most profitable borderland economic activity.

Archaic Sovereignty and Colonial Law: The reintroduction of corporal punishment in colonial India, 1864–1909

Abstract: The judicial and summary punishment of whipping—absent from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860—was passed into law through Act No. VI of 1864. This legislation, tacked on as an appendage to the IPC, invested the judge with wider discretionary powers to administer violence across Indian society. In this case what emerged was an evolving attempt to enlarge the colonial state's capacity for quotidian violence, targeting certain bodies to reaffirm, manage, and police the social hierarchies upon which colonial sovereignty depended. In the context of a slow imperial movement away from the cast-iron distinctions that had been made between groups in the early nineteenth century—distinctions that had, among other things, supported a legally enforced system of slavery—new methods to mark the value of different bodies were created. The events of the 1850s, in particular the rebellion of 1857–1858, saw the re-emergence of the colonial idea that certain bodies could withstand violence, and that violence itself could be used to create economically productive colonial societies, in debates around penal law and punishment. This article will trace this history through formal legal restrictions and informal legal-cultural practices in relation to corporal punishment in colonial India. Over the course of the period under study, this legislation introduced into law what one official termed ‘the category of the “whippable”’.1 Charting the changing shape of this legal category along lines of race, gender, caste, class, and age, the article will argue that a logic of exceptionality, channelled here through the application of judicial violence, attempted to structure and manage Indian society in complicated ways.

Glocalizing Medicine in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau Region in Late Qing China

Abstract: This article looks at how globalization in the nineteenth century was inextricably entangled with localization in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau nexus on the southern fringe of China by tracing the growth of its unique medical culture. It explains the ‘glocalizing’ process by tracing the development of this medical culture, which consists of knowledge construction and institution building, in the context of highly volatile epidemiological conditions aggravated by increasingly heavy inter-regional trade and migration. It traces the dynamic circulation of people, materials, ideas, and practices in this southern edge of China, which was traditionally connected to southeast Asia and shared ecological backdrops that produced similar epidemiological experiences. The Canton nexus in the nineteenth century saw the growth of native medical knowledge that focused less on theoretical innovation than on the efficacy of therapeutic strategies. These ideas were likely to have been informed or reinforced by new anatomical knowledge disseminated by Western medical missionaries on the ground early in the century. The medical culture in the region was also marked by the formation of a series of local institutions that were fusions of Western-style hospitals and native merchant-run charity halls where diseases were studied and treated, and new public health management negotiated and implemented by experts from different traditions.

Infrastructural Contingencies and Contingent Sovereignties on the Indo–Afghan Frontier

Abstract: The Khyber Pass Railway is a defunct 42-kilometre-long railway line that connects the western reaches of Peshawar to the Afghan border. Completed in 1925 mainly to carry British troops, the railway line failed to attract decent passenger or commodity traffic. Instead, it made an impact on a more primal register. Negotiations carried out between the British Government of India and populations from around the Khyber to allow its construction reproduced and rearranged lines of authority among the latter. They also embedded colonial administrators in tribal hierarchies. Efforts to acquire land and labour opened up spaces of collaboration between the colonial administration and members of frontier tribes, effectively contributing towards a reconfiguration of sovereign power in the area. This article weaves questions of customary law and colonial legal cultures into a retelling of the history of the Khyber Pass Railway. Examining transactions across three domains of sovereign power—the economic right to use land, extension of juridical regimes, and territorial control—it argues that the operation of sovereignty in the late-colonial Indo–Afghan frontier did not adhere to conventional ideas about its concentration and monopoly. The colonial government as well as members of frontier tribes deployed the inconclusive nature of their transactions strategically and, often, sovereign power lay with the stakeholder who could determine which domains fell within the bounds of the sovereignty question and which domains fell without.

Of Music and the Maharaja: Gender, affect, and power in Ranjit Singh's Lahore

Abstract: This article focuses on performing artists at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1801–39), the last fully sovereign ruler of the Punjab and leader of what is termed the Sikh empire. After Ranjit's death, his successors ruled for a mere decade before British annexation in 1849. Ranjit Singh's kingdom has been studied for the extraordinary authority it exercised over warring Sikh factions and for the strong challenge it posed to political rivals like the British. Scholarly exploration of cultural efflorescence at the Lahore court has ignored the role of performing artistes, despite a preponderance of references to them in both Persian chronicles of the Lahore court and in European travelogues of the time. I demonstrate how Ranjit Singh was partial to musicians and dancers as a class, even marrying two Muslim courtesans in the face of stiff Sikh orthodoxy. A particular focus is on Ranjit's corps of ‘Amazons’—female dancers performing martial feats dressed as men—the cynosure of all eyes, especially male European, and their significance in representing the martial glory of the Sikh state. Finally, I evaluate the curious cultural misunderstandings that arose when English ‘dancing’ encountered Indian ‘nautching’, revealing how gender was the primary axis around which Indian and European male statesmen alike expressed their power. Ubiquitous in the daily routine of Ranjit and the lavish entertainments set up for visitors, musicians and female performers lay at the interstices of the Indo-European encounter, and Anglo-Sikh interactions in particular.

Khandan-i-Ijtihad: Genealogy, history, and authority in a household of ‘ulama in modern South Asia

Abstract: Revisiting the debate on how Islam's ‘learned men’ (‘ulama) have sustained their religious authority through changing historical circumstances, this article offers a longue duree account of the so-called ‘Khandan-i-Ijtihad’: a family of renowned scholars and jurists who have held scholarly and popular precedence within South Asia's Shi‘i clerical networks for some 250 years. Instead of analysing the ‘ulama as a corporate group or a class of religious professionals, this article examines the ‘ulama as members of households (khandan, khanwadah) and emphasizes the important role of family lineage and inherited social influence as conduits of clerical leadership. Tracing both the genealogical succession and the vocational enterprises of this family over several generations, the article proposes a framework for understanding an individual scholar's relationship with the collective household, arguing that a cleric's own reputation (hasab-va-nasab) rests on a mingling of ancestral pedigree and personal achievement, with the stature of individual and household perpetually affirming and reinforcing each other in the making of Islamic clerical authority. Furthermore, the article establishes the importance of the ‘ulama-biography (tazkirah) as itself a mechanism for actively sustaining the relevance of contemporary ‘ulama, by perpetually memorializing their ancestors.

China Normal: Patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and trade on a Eurasian discursive base

Abstract: Comparative historians have illuminated the weaknesses in the Europe-derived and Europe-centred historical paradigms of the preceding century-and-a-half, while questioning the factual foundations and depth of Europe's development towards capitalism, imperialism, and industrialism. But a continental perspective on China's early modern development suggests the possibilities of a vicinage—or integrated environment—approach to China's development and its relevance to more widespread changes of the early modern period.

Dynamite, Opium, and a Transnational Shadow Economy at Tonkinese Coal Mines

Abstract: The rise of the coal-mining industry in colonial Vietnam has often been associated with the French economic presence and their drastic methods of exploitation. But, beyond the confines of French mining enterprises, coal mining gave rise to transnational economic links, fuelled clandestine economic activities, and bound communities across the Chinese–Vietnamese borderland. Drawing from business and police records located at the Vietnamese national archives including those of the Societe Francaise des Charbonnages du Tonkin (SFCT)—the largest French coal-mining company in Indochina, this article reveals a thriving, complex, and intersected world of criminal activities involving the theft and trafficking of explosives and opium at Tonkinese coal mines. An investigation into the patterns of these crimes and their perpetrators exposes a transnational shadow economy that managed to stay under the radar of both the French surveillance system and the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Breaking away from the metropole–colony paradigm in colonial historiography, this blended history of labour and crime provides a new lens through which to explore the dynamics of colonial rule and the interplay of the local and the global, as well as the creation of new and important inter-Asian networks.

Ethnic Conflicts in Hillside Borderlands. A study on headhunting in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Taiwan

Abstract: This article examines ethnic conflicts in hillside borderlands, with special emphasis on the tradition of headhunting. Moreover, this study investigates how the self-autonomous new settlers negotiated with the aboriginal tribes to establish their living space, as well as the social relationships that were formed as a result. The findings of this study reveal, on the one hand, the multiple meanings of the headhunting custom and its evolution following the influx of new settlers and under Qing statecraft, and, on the other hand, shed light on how immigrants established their living space in the face of complex ethnic relationships and conflicts in the hillside borderlands. Although the practice of headhunting did not have its roots in conflicts between mountain inhabitants (shengfan) and plains immigrants (shufan and Han Chinese), changes in the nature and scale of headhunting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the result of the mass influx of new settlers and state intervention. In borderland regions where government authority was not well established, immigrants were left to fend for themselves and were much affected by the local cultural environment. Hence, when analysing the development of immigrant society or local history, due attention should be paid to the social traditions and characteristics of native inhabitants, which often provided the background and underlying reasons for ethnic conflicts.

‘He Causes a Ruckus Wherever He Goes’: Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali as a missionary of modernism in north-west China

Abstract: This article examines the activities of the Syrian hadith scholar Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali al-Ṭarabulsi al-Shami (1870–1932?), better known as Shami Damulla, as a window onto the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the Muslims of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkistan. Scholars of Islam in the Soviet Union have identified al-ʿAsali as an influential figure in Soviet Turkistan in the 1920s, but much remains to be clarified about his formative years, and his multiple sojourns in China prior to the Russian Revolution. Here, I seek to fill some of these gaps by tracing al-ʿAsali's connections to modernist and revivalist scholarly circles in India and the Middle East, his activities in Xinjiang, and the strategies he adopted to insert himself into the relationship between the Ottoman court and China. These strategies were both political and intellectual. While moving within Muslim communities across Eurasia, al-ʿAsali also sought to engage the Chinese tradition on its own terms, authoring a 1905 study of Qing institutions entitled The Law of China (Qanun al-Sin)—a rare example of intellectual exchange between late-Ottoman Islamic reformism and the revitalized Confucianism of the late Qing. From a diverse range of sources, a picture emerges of a figure much more complicated, though no less controversial, than can be found in existing characterizations of al-ʿAsali.