This chapter offers a longue durée account of the most successful rebellion against Russian rule in 1916, that in the northern Kazakh steppe in the province of Turgai, led by Abdigapar Zhanbosynov (1870–1919). It shows how notions of political leadership in the region had changed since the defeat of the last Chinggisid leader to claim the title of khan in the region, Kenesary Kasymov (1802–1947). Under Russian colonial rule, the khan was replaced by the batyr, or warrior, as the key political figure, something which can be partly understood within the framework of Eric Hobsbawm’s “Social Banditry”. The chapter explores how the leadership of Zhanbosynov and his lieutenants played out in 1916 and early 1917, as they fought against Russian garrisons and punitive expeditions.

This chapter reviews and summarises the main findings of the collection and their implications for scholarship and policy. The chapter highlights some critical changes in emphasis in UK Africa policy since 2010, including divergences in emphasis and policy around trade across the three main UK political parties and a growing fracture in the 1997–2010 political consensus around UK development policy. In these cases, as with wider UK Africa policy, Brexit has represented a critical point of reference. The chapter also explores continuities in UK Africa policy since 1997 (and before), particularly in the realm of security and wider UK–Africa diplomacy. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of the collection’s findings for understanding broader power dynamics in the UK–Africa relationship and for future policy itself.

This chapter seeks to answer the question of how the decision about labour conscription of the native Muslim population was made. By examining the debates within the Imperial Government on the possibility of military conscription of the native men, this chapter argues that the decision in 1916 to conscript Turkestan’s native population for labour brigades did not arise out of the previously discussed scenarios for the performance by this population of one of the basic state duties. Instead, the decision was made in response to the pressing economic needs of the empire, without considering expert opinion and the possible consequences.

The Mono Lake case reached court in the early 1980s, but the crisis that led to the case began almost a century earlier, when the city of Los Angeles first began to run out of water. Moving water to Los Angeles, California’s most populous and economically dynamic city, has been a state priority since the turn of the 20th century. This chapter explores the water struggles that led to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and ultimately to the Mono Lake litigation. It reviews the history of water exports from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s and the devastating effects on the local community and ecology – prompting the decline of its once thriving agricultural economy (and an open rebellion by Owens Valley farmers). It then recounts the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928, which terrified the population and tempered judgements about the safety risks of large-scale water projects near population centers, further prompting water speculation in more remote areas of the state. The sobering loss of life in that infamous disaster testifies to the high stakes involved in managing water scarcity dilemmas that continue to bedevil California and arid regions throughout the world.

This chapter examines place-identity by finding it first in the pre-Christian schooling and educational practices from the Post-Classic Period (1400--1500 CE), demonstrating their complexity in the realm of the Triple Alliance. It focuses in on two of the most important altepemeh in the Valley of Mexico, Tetzcoco and Tenochtitlan. These and other fifteenth-century Nahua cities featured specialized schools, often if not exclusively run by priestly teachers, that were known as calmecac (‘house of the lineage’, schools for the sons of nobles with an emphasis on military training and religion), telpochcalli (‘youth house’, the schools for commoner boys), cuicacalli (‘song house’ in which ritual practices were emphasized for boys and girls), and ritual learning spaces such as plazas and courtyards associated with temples and other kinds of structures. Significant here are a number of rich studies of formal educational practices, above all as they were pursued in the famous calmecac.

Three fictionalized saints’ lives composed in Constantinople in the tenth century warn readers against the dangers of andromania, a male desire to have sex with other men, and paidophthoria, the corruption, or rape, of boys. The Life of Basil the Younger and the Life of Andrew the Fool condemn “andromaniacs” even while they linger over the beauty of angels and of young men. Young men risk encounters on the streets of the city, while all people should expect to have problems paying off demons for their earthly sins as their souls progress past tollhouses after death. The Life of Gregentios imagines a homophobic utopia where the death penalty renders a Christian society entirely free of “sodomites.” These texts offer some our richest narrative accounts of queer life in the Byzantine capital even as they condemn men attracted to men.

The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreign investment. The private sector was constrained by regulation. After 1991 Indian economic policy shifted sharply, deregulating and becoming more open to the global economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan moved in the same direction, but less sharply, partly because they were less statist to begin with. Other factors mattered besides government policy: the Internet boom and the service exports it facilitated; substantial remittances by migrants to the Middle East; and the protests of workers, women and other marginalized groups. In this chapter we highlight key elements of these narratives and flag the chapters that discuss them.

This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.

This chapter focuses on two major axes of social identity in India: caste and tribe. It provides an overview of the two categories, in particular focusing on how the categories are identified and measured in national-level macro data. It summarizes key features of contemporary economic disparities along these two dimensions. The chapter discusses the overlap between caste/tribal status and religion and provides a summary overview of the racial theory of caste. Tribe as a category has specific dimensions that are distinct from the caste system. The chapter reviews these and moves on to a discussion of the intersection of caste/tribe category with sex. The evidence in the chapter suggests that caste and tribe continue to define socio-economic status in contemporary India. India’s affirmative-action policies addressing caste, tribe and gender disparities are necessary, but not sufficient, to lower the influence of the lottery of birth on individual outcomes.

This chapter describes the history of the industrial labour force as it emerged in South Asia, mostly in current India, since the middle of the nineteenth century. New export-oriented industries created employment for many workers, mostly migrants from often remote rural areas, and mostly men. Despite this growth, the labour force structure did not ‘transform’. Industry never employed more than 10% of the labour force, only a small proportion of that was employed in large-scale enterprises, and many workers remained circulatory migrants. The chapter shows that it is imperative to understand this industrial labour force and forms of worker organization that emerged in the interaction of the nature of capitalist production with a large agrarian and impoverished economy, and of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ social relations and identities.

This chapter examines two divergent approaches to writing autobiographically about gay Asian American experience. Justin Chin’s autobiographical poetry and personal essays, published in the 1990s and early 2000s, embody the Marxist and anti-identarian tendencies of queer of color critique. His work self-consciously sought to push against the demand for a certain performance of oppression prevalent in a literary marketplace dominated by white appetites. In contrast, the contributors to the first collected volume of queer Asian American writing, Restoried Selves (2004), convey the challenges they have faced according to identarian scripts. In doing so, they slip into the role of the protestant ethnic as theorized by Rey Chow. The final part of the chapter attends to more recent works of gay Asian American autobiography and maps their attempts to avoid representing gay Asian American experience as a legible commodity to a predominantly white, heterosexual audience.

Irrigation development in British India is widely cited as a main achievement of the Raj. The hydraulic projects, which built upon indigenous practice and evolved through ‘learning by doing’, were impressive engineering constructs that brought water to extensive areas of the subcontinent. They permitted expanded agricultural production and exports, bolstered public finances and protected the population from famine. However, the colonial context of the developments has produced contention among historians as to their role and value. This chapter discusses the different forms of irrigation in operation, and the impact of the increasingly large and integrated new systems in changing the pattern of investment and benefits between geographical regions from 1800 to 1947. Taking account of the changing technological and management aspects of the systems over time, and the way cultivators reacted to them, a broad assessment is made of the irrigation inheritance at independence.