After the Kuomintang of China (KMT) succeeded the Japanese government in Taiwan in 1945, officials continued to apply the then current method of categorizing Taiwanese aborigines into nine groups. However, since the 1980s, many aboriginal groups have launched Name Rectification Campaigns calling for “independence” from their originally designated groups.

Dutch records in the seventeenth century identify the Sakizaya as a distinct people, different from the Amis. The decline of the Sakizaya was initiated in 1878 by the Jia-Li-Wan event. After defeat by Qing soldiers, the Sakizayas obscured their identities by mixing themselves among the Amis. By the time that the Japanese began their ethnographic research in the early twentieth century, the Sakizayas had become relatively “Amis-ized,” and were regarded as a sub-branch of the Amis for both academic and official purposes. The Sakizaya's new ethnic group movement was initiated in 1990. Seventeen years later, on January 17, 2007, the Sakizaya gained official recognition as an independent aboriginal group.

This article intends to investigate the strategies of movement activists. It not only examines the concept of cultural construction, but also explains why this concept is so important in understanding the case of the Sakizaya.

Based on published sources as well as information gathered through observations and interviews, this article intends to provide a general account of the adaptation of the Vietnamese refugees in China since the late 1970s. The description and analysis are focused on three aspects of the social-political life of this community, namely, its initial resettlement, its subsequent division, dispersion and stratification, and the process, problems and prospects of its assimilation. The article argues that whereas Western countries adopted the International Refugee Regime – primarily a European product – in resettling the Vietnamese refugees, China's resettlement policies reflected her experience in handling the returned overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the relocation temporarily reduced all migrants to refugees, the diverse nature of the migrant community, the different local conditions in China, as well as China's official policies contributed to the reemergence of social-economic stratification among the migrants, and this was accompanied by their geographic dispersion. Though assimilation has been going on ever since they entered China, the migrants have managed to maintain their group identity, which, however, is not sustainable.

2010 saw the millennial celebration of Thăng Long/Hà Nội as capital of an independent Vietnam, and archaeology has tended to confirm this strong sense of continuity. Yet study of written texts shows us how political power, administrative style, and religious belief have shaped the city and how a cyclical pattern in this history has appeared twice and may be in its third time. In this pattern, each cycle saw the city begin as the provincial capital of an external power before becoming capital of an independent Vietnamese state. Then a local base draws power to itself and displaces Thăng Long, eventually dismantling it, before a new external power enters and begins the cycle anew. In this way the Tang and Ming dynasties of China and the French made the site their local administrative center. Lý Công Uẩn, Lê Lợi, and Hồ Chí Minh in succession drove them out and established Thăng Long/Hà Nội as their capital, bringing Buddhism, Confucianism, and Socialism to it. But first the Trần and Hồ, then the Mạc, Trịnh, and Nguyễn, shared power with, and eventually displaced, the Royal City. Will it happen again?

Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, a distinguished economic historian, and R. Bin Wong, an eminent world historian and specialist on imperial China, have collaborated in this effort to shed light on the causes of the eighteenth-century economic divergence of China and Europe. This book has many of the virtues one would expect from such a collaboration – keen insights into comparative history, explicit models of economic relationships, and novel ideas regarding causation. Yet it also has some defects that reflect this combination: at some points in their argument, the logic of models seems to outweigh historical facts. At other points, details of history that don't fit the models, such as the history of productivity gains in agriculture in imperial China, are neglected. I shall start with the virtues of their arguments, and then discuss some particulars that lead me to question their view.

Although the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.

This article explores the repeated renovation of south Indian temples over the past millennium and the conception of the Tamil temple-city. Though the requirement for renovation is unremarkable, some “renovations” have involved the wholesale replacement of the central shrine, in theory the most sacred part of the temple. Rather than explaining such radical rebuilding as a consequence of fourteenth-century iconoclasm, temple renovation is considered in this article as an ongoing process. Several periods of architectural reconstruction from the tenth to the early twentieth centuries demonstrate the evolving relationship between building, design and sacred geography over one millennium of Tamil temple history. The conclusion explores the widespread temple “renovations” by the devout Nakarattar (Nattukottai Chettiar) community in the early twentieth century, and the consequent dismay of colonial archaeologists at the perceived destruction of South India's monumental heritage, in order to reassess the lives and meanings of Tamil sacred sites.

The paper discusses the effective operation of money and credit among Europeans in Calcutta around 1800, arguing for the importance of informal processes and ties of friendship that facilitated, regulated, and enforced agreements, helping both to tide over individuals in times of economic stress and to underwrite the provision and transfer of capital. The argument is advanced by a detailed case-study of debts owed by one resident—Aaron Upjohn—to another, the diarist, Richard Blechynden, amid a web of acquaintance, officialdom, and law that variously ensured that the debts were honoured. It is defined as a support system among acquaintances, necessitated in part by shortage of money and abundance of risk.