During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.

Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

The final published debate in which Neurath participated was with Horace Kallen, founding member of the New School in New York. This discussion with manifold cultural dimensions was a fitting swansong for Neurath, summarizing key themes of his thought and highlighting essential issues of his complex and contentious legacy. Kallen suspected Neurath’s drive for ‘Unity of Science’ as harbouring the danger of totalitarianism, but Neurath defended the pluralism of his approach while accepting Kallen’s proposed term of ‘orchestration’ instead of ‘unity’ for the sciences. Neurath felt rather neglected for his scholarly achievements at the end of his life, but these now become increasingly more relevant.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

While Rabindranath Tagore and Taraknath Das did not travel to the US to learn about American racism, Lala Lajpat Rai specifically journeyed there to understand the Black experience. Rai was born in 1865 to a Jain family in the Punjab Province. His father was a teacher of the Urdu language at the Government Higher Secondary School where Rai also studied as a child. In 1880, Rai attended the Government College at Lahore to study law, graduating four years later. During his time at there, Rai began to grow disillusioned with British rule. In 1886, he moved to the village of Hisar in Haryana to practice law and founded the Hisar district branch of the Indian National Congress and the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. Like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj campaigned against caste discrimination, and they supported widow remarriage and women's education. The organization also had an internationalist outlook and established chapters in British colonies with Indian populations, such as South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. Rai was an active participant and campaigner during the early years of the organization's existence. Like the Arya Samaj, Rai had an internationalist philosophy toward advocating for Indian independence as well as social reform. In 1914, he quit practicing law to dedicate himself to the Indian independence movement fully. That same year, Rai planned a six-month trip to the US to collect material for a book on the plight of Black Americans. However, while he was in the US, the British categorized him as a political exile for criticizing British rule and he was not allowed to return to India until the end of 1919.

During his five-year stay in the US, Rai had a considerable impact on Americans. He formed alliances and garnered support for Indian self-rule from Irish nationalists, American civil rights activists, and other American anti-colonialists. In addition to seeking out support for Indian self-determination, the strife of Black Americans was a central part of Rai's advocacy. Rai wanted to understand how the Black American struggle related to the plight of Indians under the British Raj, and he also sought to compare American racism to the Indian caste system.

This chapter recovers Schopenhauer’s previously neglected account of prudent political action. It points out the connections between the skilled governance of society and the savvy self-control of the individual in Schopenhauer’s works and argues that a full analysis of his conception of politics must include a treatment of prudence in world affairs as well as in interpersonal encounters. In fact, Schopenhauer supplemented his account of the modern state as an instrument of society-wide pacification with an account of prudent self-governance as an obligation for the modern subject. He believed that the state must impose constraints on disruptive egoism from the top, but that individuals should also prudently mask their egoism and in this way soften antagonisms. In Schopenhauer’s view, Hobbes’ theory of statehood could be constructively linked to Baltasar Gracián’s account of prudence; implemented together, they could strengthen the prospects of peace.

As Chapter 4 has already made clear, this chapter is not another caravan-to-car story. Nor is it another case study of threatening mobility vs. governmentality. It is rather a continuation of Chapter 4 on the transformations of economic and political geography that put caravans to the test. Building on Chapter 4 and contrary to developmentalist notions of modernisation, this chapter argues that the end of caravans was a cumulative process, just like its persistence until the interwar period. New kinds of territorialisation (automobility and what I define as the ‘evening of mobility’ were part of it, indeed) fostered gradual disintegration and divergence across the caravan regional market. This would gradually erode the caravans’ raison d’être and deepen their transition to shorter routes while camels and traders would find new employments.

Chapter 4 focuses on the role and activities of women in credit transactions. That women made economic contributions to their households in the management, care, and sale of livestock and farm products, and in the production of various marketable items, is incontrovertible. Yet, the significance and extent of their larger economic role has been neglected, especially when it comes to financial exchange and credit. For the most part, much remains to be written about the extent of women’s capacity to lend and borrow, of gendered practices related to credit, of the impact of female involvement in credit networks traditionally dominated by men, and of the effects of female participation in the economic life of their household and community. This chapter sheds light on their roles and motivations as particular actors. But it also aims to show their significance in credit networks at large.