Betrothal was originally an independent rite that solemnized a promise to marry and also had legal and canonical ramifications in Byzantium. This chapter analyzes the ritual gestures employed in betrothal across the Eastern Mediterranean world, such as the exchange of rings or other gifts. It also discusses the ecclesiastical prayers recited at Byzantine betrothals and what they reveal about theological perceptions of marriage, as well as family roles and domestic practices.

The Introduction begins by unpacking a 1929 Taiwanese civil case where multiple parties were concerned with the formation of a marriage, showing how the case – and public debates as well as other civil and criminal cases presented in this book – evolved around sociolegal problems across the empire, social customs and new forms of family, masculinity tied to household relationships, and Taiwanese women’s agency. The argument of the circulation of gender ideals is followed using ethnographic and historical backgrounds on marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships in Japan and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century through the 1910s. Grounded in these historical contexts, the Introduction suggests gender was at the center of Japan’s international and colonial relations, the competition surrounding Taiwanese masculinity in society and law, and the contested formation of Taiwanese women’s agency in the colonial courts. The final section outlines the organization of Geographies of Gender by highlighting the shift in narrative from the larger historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese empire to the specific interactions between discourse and colonial law in gendered terms.

A sense of politics does not generally unfold easily as an unequivocally observable analytic category with significances and meanings that are, of necessity, revealed and concealed. The aim of this chapter is nevertheless to analyse, as clearly as possible, the People's Daily's representations of the border town of Kalimpong in the 1950s and 1960s. Kalimpong, as a meeting point or a metonymic space, came to play a pivotal role in the border politics of the PRC and the ROI for three reasons: (a) Historically a British trade post since the mid-nineteenth century, Kalimpong was favourably located on the Lhasa–Kolkata trade route—the same route used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the early 1950s to transport supplies from China to Tibet after the Battle of Chamdo. (b) A sizeable Tibetan population lived in Kalimpong, especially after the PLA invaded the Kham region, when refugees started to stream into Kalimpong.6 This Tibetan population included residents, traders, refugees and, most importantly for this chapter, influential members of the Kashag (or the Tibetan governing council). (c) A diasporic Chinese population lived in Kalimpong, many of whom were later interned in Deoli after the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Drawing on archival material from the People's Daily, fieldwork notes, along with interviews conducted over a period of six months, and many published primary and secondary sources, we shall attempt to show how Kalimpong functioned as a metonymic ambit in which ROI–PRC relations were to play out in the 1950s and 1960s.

Akin to Pravda's status in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at its height, the People's Daily, as an official organ of the CCP directly controlled by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, provided direct (and sometimes oblique) information on the policies and viewpoints of the government.

That bit on the ‘messy map’, the corner around Kalimpong, has been on edge in more senses than one. During the Doklam crisis of 2017, as China and India faced off against each other, the tension of a looming skirmish—if not full-scale war—radiated through this junction between China, Nepal, Bhutan and the former Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. This tense dynamic rumbled over into a replay in the Galwan Valley standoff in May–July 2020, as skirmishes were also reported during July–August on the border between Sikkim and China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

Anxieties flared up in Kalimpong. Kalimpong, after all, is a privileged prism, a unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow in this book. While the events covered in them start in the 1910s but are mainly between the 1940s and early 1960s, this overture attempts to corroborate the longer history of how Kalimpong was intimately connected to the northeastern border leading into Tibet and China. This history is largely inaugurated by British frontier anxiety as well as the lure that Tibet as a ‘forbidden’ land held for the colonial imaginaire in its singular way of living, seeing and making of the world. Thus, the ‘opening’ of Kalimpong along with the ‘opening’ of Tibet is recounted in this chapter, first in the section on frontiers and Lord Curzon (1859–1925) and then in the section on survey, settlement and Charles Bell (1870–1945).

Four texts drawn from Ibn Khaldûn’s History, especially the last volumes on the Maghreb and the Rihla gharbân wa-sharqân. The theory confronts the historical realities and their apparent resistance to universal schemes. In the last text, Ibn Khaldûn sums up the history of Islam as a passage of the Bedouin political force from the Arabs to the Turks, from the South to the North.

Cities and prosperity are what the state has been made for. Taxation is its main principle, as it piles up resources and encourages, through coercion, intensified working and gains in productivity.

This chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s political beliefs in the context of his biography. Schopenhauer was a well-traveled son of a merchant who failed to gain a foothold in academia and never pursued another career in the professions, business, or government. Without traditional prospects, he settled into a rentier existence. He retained much of his background’s bourgeois attitudes toward property, individual industry, and frugality, but since he was confined to a life outside professional circles, he came to occupy an outsider position and opposed both conservatives and progressives, orthodox Christians and secular radicals. Committed to the idea of a natural intellectual elite, he was skeptical of collective political movements, such as the nationalism and socialism of his own time. Yet he was also critical of the traditional aristocracy with its relative independence from the modern state. His preferred political regime was a nondemocratic, monarchical statism that would protect individuals and their property.

This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.