This book examines how new AKP authoritarian securitisation practices shape and reshape the daily lives of people purged by emergency decree. The Introduction defines key concepts such as authoritarianism, securitisation, and civic death, as well as describes the methodology. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical ethnographic and historical research with theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the political, the book highlights the new forms of citizenship deprivation, security, and punishment that have emerged under the AKP. It argues that new methods of securitisation are designed to reduce those targeted for civic death, a type of disposable citizen who is denied the opportunity to reclaim their social, economic, and political rights even after they have been acquitted or the state of emergency has been lifted.

Chapter 6 focuses specifically on the last two decades of the Ancien Régime. The traditional local credit market featured norms of solidarity, fairness, and cooperation and allowed its agents considerable input regarding the terms of their agreement either before contracting and/or afterwards. But structural changes in the 1770s, such as an increase in credit activities, drawing on the power and profitability of such exchanges, and especially the appearance of new investors, affected the social and legal norms and nature of these markets. The gradual and massive resort to external parties to handle and manage financial transactions remodelled these institutions into specialized and incontrovertible experts. Embedded in society, the local court system traditionally responded to the demands of its users and their input shaped the form of the institution. When a new category of investors emerged, their requests, in turn, tended to shape the judicial institution, serving their interests first and above those of other users, allowing the evolution of the judicial institution into a more specialized one. These institutions became more efficient in debt conflict resolution.

This book shows the roles that the family and law played in identifying, reforming, and reinforcing gender relations in interwar Japan and colonial Taiwan. Since the late nineteenth century, men and women across the Japanese empire had different lived experiences within the contours of the family and marriage represented by bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital relationships. In the late 1910s, however, those boundaries constituted forces that incorporated the seemingly private realm of relationships into the larger question of gender in the interwar era. Japanese and Taiwanese officials and nonofficials alike found gender relations to be changing in relation to the continuous tensions over metropolitan Japan’s positions in the world and the colony, to how men should situate themselves with women in and outside the male-centered Taiwanese households, and to the uplifting of Taiwanese women from such households. In other words, Geographies of Gender reveals the unsettled exchange of gendered norms, practices, and ideals about gender relations in relation to empire, domesticity, and personal autonomy in society and law.

After Rai returned to India in December 1919, he sought to apply what he had learned in America to his own activism in India. Inspired by the Rand School of Social Science, Rai formed the Tilak School of Politics in 1921 to educate underprivileged Indians. He also started his own newspaper, The People, to circulate his ideas on caste and racial science, and his opinions on Gandhian non-violence tactics. Rai's views regarding the effectiveness of Gandhian techniques evolved throughout the 1920s. At the start of the decade, he supported Gandhi's non-violence strategy. However, Rai questioned passive resistance as a viable method for overthrowing White supremacy and the British Raj following the failure of the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and his exposure to Du Bois's articles in The Crisis describing the mass lynchings of Black Americans in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Rai came to see violent encounters as an inevitability during social clashes predicated upon race and class. Sadly, this violence came to claim Rai's life. On October 30, 1928, Rai himself led a protest against the British to challenge their lack of inclusion of Indians on the Indian Statutory Commission, which was a group of seven White British members of parliament chosen by the British government to study constitutional reform in India. During the protest, British police superintendent James A. Scott ordered the police to attack the protesters and Scott personally assaulted Rai. Rai died a month later, never recovering from the injuries inflicted upon him.

Up until his death, Rai's outlook continued to evolve. Alongside his thoughts on violent protest, his perception of caste changed throughout the 1920s. While Rai saw India's caste problem as a secondary issue early in the decade, by the tail end of his life, Rai had brought the matter to the forefront of the Indian independence movement. He actively sought the abolition of caste discrimination and sub-castes even to the point that he considered postponing Swaraj to solve the issue of caste. This showed that Rai actively sought caste reform and advocated for the abolition of sub-castes. In the many articles that Rai wrote in The People, he condemned caste discrimination explicitly and stressed that India could never achieve unity and become a functional democracy so long as caste discrimination remained.

The sciences belong only to sedentary state-protected life. More familiar with sedentarity, the Persians took the lead in most Islamic sciences, including the creation of ‘Classical’ Arabic and its grammar.

Kalimpong as a ‘Nest of Spies’

Situated just a kilometre away from Kalimpong Police Station, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School (see Figure 4.1 for a map of the town) opened its doors for the first time in June 1941. Established by three wealthy entrepreneurs, Ma Zhucai, Liang Zizhi and Zhang Xiangcheng, the school developed as a branch of the Calcutta Mui Kwong School. The primary purpose of the school was to provide education for the children of Chinese refugees from China and Southeast Asia who had fled to the hill station during the Second World War. The curriculum initially consisted of Chinese-language studies, complemented with Tibetan and English; class lectures on the Chinese anti-Japanese war effort were also held. Apart from transmitting and preserving ‘what was and continues to be regarded as Chinese identity … and links with the ancestral homeland’, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School performed, unwittingly or otherwise, a dual function: like its counterparts in Calcutta, it served as a political playhouse where the factional struggles between the GMD and the CCP were staged after the 1950s.

Jibanananda Das, a leading Bengali poet of the twentieth century, never travelled to the Malay Peninsula. However, in an allegorical verse in his famous poem ‘Banalata Sen’, an ode to the eponymous eternal woman, Das expressed that he had travelled for thousands of years from Sri Lanka to the Malay world to attain a moment of peace. His literary mind knew no bounds. Though his journey was a fantasy of love, it gives us a sense of the constant flow of Bengali mobility and culture between the two coasts of the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Sea. Factually, the Bengalis did voyage to the Malay Archipelago over the course of a thousand years. This truth fuelled the imagination of the Bengali poets, as reflected in Das's verse. With the advent of British colonialism, Bengali mobility took a new turn, and Das's verse reflects its nodal points in the eastern Indian Ocean domains during the late colonial period.

The trans-regional mobility of peoples, goods and cultures and its attendant space-making is the central theme of this book. Although studies of connected histories have flourished in the past few decades in the Global South, Bengali historical diasporic experiences have remained largely unexplored. With a focus on the historical mobility of the Bengalis from both Bangladesh and West Bengal of India, the book argues that there was robust Bengali trans-regional mobility in the Malay world, a story that has been largely lost in the narrative of ‘Indian’ migration.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the total number of Bangla-speaking migrants from Bangladesh in the Malay world was approximately 900,000, the vast majority being in Malaysia, followed by Singapore and Brunei Darussalam (hereinafter Brunei).

Taiwanese masculinity was not defined only by young intellectuals and social elites. Rather, it was constructed, expanded, and complicated by ordinary men as represented by household heads and their family members. This chapter explores their masculinity by revealing the ways in which they continued to negotiate with judges over the treatment of brides and adopted daughters. Household heads had traditionally been free to choose their sons’ brides and preside over any adoptive deals, and thus they established masculinity as tied to household authority. Yet, this unchallenged image of patriarchy began contradicting judicial calls for a more equitable form of the family from the late 1910s. What involved those household heads in judicial reforms was the situation in which two or more household heads competed over the better treatment of brides and adopted daughters, establishing a protective form of masculinity. However, this did not end with the emasculation of male household heads in terms of their preexisting authority; instead, they shifted to a type of masculinity involving collusion between two or more household heads and colonial judges, undermining efforts to address women’s difficulties after the 1920s.

This chapter discusses the resilience of caravans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by suggesting a move from competition and technologies-focused narratives to more comprehensive histories of mobility. The aim is not to deny the transformative effects of steam and, later, automobiles. It rather promotes a synergy approach in which speed was not systematically the decisive factor and the experience of mobility and the ‘channelling’ (V. Huber) was not yet an unescapable feature. Geography, season, markets’ specific features provided economic rationality to slow, incremental and yet efficient type of mobility. As suggested by the intertwined histories of the chapter, this did not influence economic calculations only. The persistence of caravan trade and its connection to a widening array of means of mobility also had an influence on the very working of inland territories from urban settlements along caravan routes to the cities’ daily connections with the steppe and desert.