The problem of the degree of economic development which took place in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and its effects on the modernization of Japan has given rise to considerable controversy. This is in part due to Marxist efforts to fit this development into Marxian categories, and to see in it elements of class struggle. These efforts have met stiff opposition from historians who have shown fairly persuasively how inapplicable these concepts are to the period. The trouble goes much further than this, however. Any kind of statistical measurement of the degree of economic development before 1868 is vastly complicated by the scarcity and by the notorious inaccuracy of Tokugawa statistical records, both public and private.

The non-cooperation movement dominated Indian politics in 1920 and 1921, and any account of the Kisan Sabhas or Cultivators Associations during those years is likely to lay less stress on their importance than on that of the wider political campaign. Linked by the name of Gandhi, the peasant movement was caught up in the whole campaign of the nationalist leaders against the government. Yet the background to the upsurge of agrarian radicalism in the United Provinces and Bihar shows that it was strongest in districts with particular tenurial and agrarian problems. Moreover, in these localities the radical leadership was independent of outside agencies, its links with wider political movements were tenuous and ambivalent, and it was little subject to external influence and control.

In this paper I present some general suggestions about the changing patterns of non-official influence in northern Indian cities at the end of the nineteenth century. I have adduced a minimum of local detail. But that which appears is largely taken from the city of Allahabad in the east central Gangetic plain which I have studied in detail. An impressionistic view of material drawn from other parts of the United Provinces and east Punjab does, however, suggest that some of these conclusions are capable of much wider generalization, although within the context of varying urban societies and different periods of time.

When 1 October 1965 dawned on Djakarta, the Sukarno régime appeared to have been bloodily consolidated. By evening its foundation had been undermined. The subsequent collapse took the lives of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the Communist Party, and ended hostilities against Malaysia. For the first time in many years it seemed that the prosperity of the people might be put before the ‘progressive’ posturing of politicians. The events of the day are therefore worth considering in some detail.

In the United Provinces a few hundred Europeans ruled nearly fifty million Indians. So few were not able to hold down so many by force, they could rule only with the acquiescence and assistance of some of their subjects. Clearly the relationship between government and its allies was the crux of dominion. This essay examines that relationship. It shows who, between 1860 and 1906, government's allies were and how their support was won. It also touches upon the processes of economic, social and institutional change which constantly undermined this support and illustrates how government's techniques of political control developed in order to keep its old allies and to contain new opponents.

Rapid population growth and widespread unemployment are twin dilemmas in all the South-east Asian nations. In other more developed countries, increases in population have coincided with the growth of industry and towns. Consequently serious rural unemployment has been avoided. However, the pace of industrialization in South-east Asia has not been able to cope with the natural growth of the cities, let alone to absorb immigrants from the countryside. Yet, even the very limited opportunities for employment in the towns has attracted people to them with concomitant spreading of slums, poverty and squalor. It can be argued that ‘urban growth in the underdeveloped areas is not a feature of the expansion of the industrial base but an expression of the severity of the agrarian crises’. Further, it seems unlikely that the current rate of urbanization and industrialization in South-east Asia will solve the unemployment problem in the region. A solution must be found within a rural context.

This paper discusses some of the initial findings arising from research into the electoral system of the United Provinces in the period before Independence, that is, from about 1935 until 1947. I have chosen to give particular attention to the activities of political parties in the 1937 and 1946 elections to the lower house (or Legislative Assembly) of the provincial legislature.

Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei, reformer and educator, chancellor of Peking University during the hectic first decade of the Chinese republic, is not usually considered a supporter of Confucianism. Since the early years of the 20th century Ts'ai had been an opponent of traditional society and an active member of the small but vocal revolutionary movement in Shanghai aiming at the overthrow of the imperial dynasty. In 1912, as first Minister of Education under the new republican government, he submitted a proposal to implement a programme for a new educational system, in which traditional Confucian elements were to be rigorously weeded out.

By the Kuomintang's own standards, the 1911 Revolution was a failure. Sun Yat-sen's movement nevertheless succeeded in imparting an impressive revolutionary legacy to modern China. After 1915, many of the student malcontents whom the T'ung-meng-hui had radicalized in Japan rallied to the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, keeping the revolution alive. These young intellectuals served to alert hundreds of thousands of Chinese, as well as a new generation of college students, to the importance of democracy, mass welfare, and, above all, national integrity.

Of all the Western diplomatic personalities who served in Peking during the nineteenth century, Anson Burlingame was perhaps the most celebrated figure. He acted as the first American resident minister in Peking from 1861 to 1867. He also acted as the first ‘Chinese’ envoy to the Western courts from 1867 to 1870, when his untimely death at St Petersburg cut short his colourful diplomatic career. Viewed against this unusual background, it is not surprising that his diplomacy in and out of China became something of a cause célèbre among his contemporaries. With the passing of the events and men associated with his name, however, a new and deatched appraisal of the man and his diplomacy is in order. It is outside the scope of the present paper to treat his spectacular diplomatic mission on behalf of China in the Western capitals, better known as the burlingame Mission. This paper focuses instead on his role in the inauguration of the Co-operative Policy. In doing this, the apper attempts to shed some light on the origins of one of the most significant Western policies toward China.

Although the Foreign Office was theoretically the department of state responsible for British relations with the Kingdom of Siam, it has for some time been recognized that the strategic interests of both the Indian Empire and the Straits Settlements and Protectorates in the Malay Peninsula necessitated the active participation of the India and Colonial Offices in policy making. The role of the Calcutta authorities and their superiors in Whitehall in the formulation of British official attitudes towards Siam in the latter part of the nineteenth century has yet to be made known. But much has been done, including several recent attempts, to evaluate the extent of Colonial Office interference in the Siamese Malay States before 1909. To some extent, the renewed interest in the broader metropolitan implications of the subject is characterized by a desire to investigate the character of British imperialism itself.

Sikh history has produced few men as controversial as Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu. His conduct, especially in the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46, continues to evoke bitter argument. Whereas the debate at the end of the war pertained to the wisdom of creating the independent state of Kashmir, in more recent years it has centred around Gulab Singh's part in the conflict, which resulted in the partial dismemberment of the Sikh state. Two major evaluations have been made. A school of Panjab historians condemns the Jammu Raja's conduct as perfidious and brands him as a traitor. This conclusion is disputed by pro-Dogra historians who, while acknowledging his reluctance to become involved in the war, imply that he played an effective political role on behalf of the Sikhs which prevented the complete annexation of their state in 1846. Such widely differing assessments, often made without sufficient historical data and characterized by political or regional bias, have done little to produce a balanced understanding of this highly controversial affair. This paper tries to reconstruct and re-evaluate the Raja's role in the war.

In 1857 Delhi ceased to be the seat of the Mughal kingdom, and in 1912 it became the capital of the British Empire in India. The city had always had strategic and, therefore, economic and political significance. In the half-century between 1857 and 1912 Delhi's increasing economic and commercial activity prevented the city from sinking, as some historic Indian cities did, into the obscurity of just another provincial town. Curzon described it in 1899 ‘a capital city, now of commerce as once of power’. It acted as the commercial entrepôt for all north India, after becoming the junction of a huge railway network connecting north India to the ports. Commercial expansion in turn led to a steady growth in the city's population. This physical and economic expansion was, however, affected by the government's concern for security in Delhi. The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of urban development in Britain, but when urban government was taking root in India in this same period, it was cramped not only by apathy and financial stringency, as in Britain, but also by strategic considerations. This is an aspect of Indian local government which has not been studied at all. As for Delhi itself, the city has yet to find its urban historian. In this paper I shall examine how far official considerations of military security affected the city's development.

Indian tariff policies, historians of British India have stressed, illustrated an economic determinism in imperialism, in which Manchester blatantly served its self-interest in generating exploitative policies. Ironically, the influential work of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, which indirectly qualified the idea of an imperialism that was solely economically motivated, has helped to produce a new view of British economic exploitation regarding Indian policy.

With the Kangwha treaty in 1876 Korea ended its period of isolation and became exposed to foreign pressures. In 1906, after a period of turmoil in Asian international affairs, Korea was declared a Japanese protectorate, and in 1910 it became a colony of that country. Korea remained a Japanese possession until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. This essay is concerned with some of the economic and social changes that took place in Korea under Japanese rule. The first part of the paper discusses the reorganization of the traditional economy by changes in institutional control over it, and the second part describes the growth of the economy during these years.

The Reorganisation Loan, or as many Chinese writers call the Grand Loan of the Second Year of the Republic of China (Min-erh ta chiehk'uan ), arranged by the ‘Old Consortium’,1 played a significant role in Chinese internal affairs in the early twentieth century. The loan has been condemned by Chinese historians, nationalist and communist alike, as one of the ugliest crimes committed by the imperialist powers in China because it enabled Yüan Shih-k'ai to defeat the Kuo-min tang in the Second Revolution in 1913, and to rid China of all semblance of democracy up to the point in 1915 when he aspired to re-establish an empire and to occupy the dragon throne himself. Being unanimously labelled as ‘father of the warlords’, Yüan's autocratic practices and his sudden death in June 1916 have always been blamed for throwing China into the disastrous warlord period, in which the country was split into autonomous units, and in the subsequent decades experienced chaos, weakness, and humiliation.