Scholars of Burma cannot, in good conscience, invoke the usual justification — lack of adequate primary materials — for failing to construct an economic history of the precolonial era. By comparison with Siam, Cambodia, the Malay principalities, or indeed any Indianized Southeast Asian society with the possible exception of Java, Burma offers a uniquely continuous and voluminous array of documents bearing on patterns of cultivation, monetization, taxation, and domestic and foreign trade from at least the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta [sic], since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin [sic], priest of Brahma and Vishnu, and Indra, who sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The purc Walden water is mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the Periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time. Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view. One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877. In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context.

Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.

While Britain was amassing the largest empire ever seen, her policy makers continued to believe that economic ties were a far more effective means of control than costly and provocative military domination. Fortunately for British empire-builders, the peoples they encountered were frequently divided amongst themselves, and lacked confidence in their ability to challenge British domination. This was not entirely the case with Japan's attempts to establish hegemony over Korea following the Russo-Japanese war (1904–05). Although there were serious political and regional divisions within Korea, these were subordinated to broad hostility towards Japan. Japanese technological superiority was seen as a hand-me-down from the West, and Korea's elite, raised in the Chinese tradition, was largely dismissive of Japanese cultural attainments. Even financially, Japan remained a small player in the international market, dependent for her own overseas development on New York, London and Paris. To win Korean converts, Japan had to introduce rapid, visible improvement. One means to support this aim was the idea of Asian unity underJapanese leadership. Failing this, she could enforce her actions with a sizeable, but expensive, military and police presence. However, the rhetoric of Japanese—Korean unity could not be overstressed in view of the burgeoning Western fear of an Asian resurgence. Moreover, the concept of Japan and Korea stemming from one family was unconvincing given the historical enmity of the two peoples. Consequently, Japan sought to diminish native antipathy and retain international sympathy by emulating Britain's exaple of discreet civilian control in Egypt.

In January 1932 Wang Ching-wei and Chiang Kai-shek came to an agreement and formed a joint leadership in the Kuomintang (KMT) Government. The alliance between the two men lasted until December 1938 when Wang defected to the Japanese side during the Sino-Japanese War. Chinese historians often term this period as the era of ‘Wang-Chiang cooperation’ (Wang Chiang ho-tso). In fact, this was not the first time when these two men came to ally with each other in the party. The first time when Wang and Chiang formed a joint leadership was in August 1925 after the assassination of Liao Chung-k'ai. The death of Liao at that time had great repercussions throughout the party and both Wang and Chiang eventually emerged as the beneficiaries in the ensuing power struggle; for a time they jointly ruled the party. However, this alliance did not last long. The outbreak of the March Twentieth Incident in 1926 made Wang Ching-wei decide to let Chiang have his way and he later led a self-imposed exiled life in Europe. It was not until April 1927 when the KMT was seriously divided on the communist issue that Wang went back to China. Immediately after that was a split in the party with Wuhan and Nanking as the two rival centres, each of which claimed to be the legitimate Party Central. Wang and Chiang respectively became the leaders of these two Party Centrals.