The great arc of Asia, from India through South-east Asia to China, has seen during the greater part of the twentieth century the working out of something akin to a ‘general crisis’ of immense proportions. The term ‘general crisis’ was made familiar as a description of a series of occurrences in western Europe in the seventeenth century, where (so it was argued) there was a far-flung rising of ‘the country’ against ‘the court’. The greater part of Monsoon Asia has passed through a not dissimilar ‘general crisis’ in the twentieth century, born of a conjuncture between an intensifying revulsion towards continuing imperialist domination and a deepening exasperation with the inefficient, inequitable structures of society with which it was seen to be lumbered.

There is a widespread assumption that the histories of the various countries of this region are quite adequately understood in their own terms. Certainly there has been little inclination to look beyond their own borders. Whilst each country has had its own superabundance of particularities, an over-rigorous concentration upon these does seem, however, to have been at the expense of allowing for the highly significant similarities that in a range of very important respects many of them have at the same time experienced. The briefest of glances at the twentieth-century history of the greater part of the countries of Monsoon Asia will immediately reveal that they have passed through a number of comparable political upheavals, sometimes palpably during the same few years.