According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

In the early twentieth century, Korean Catholic and Protestant Churches found themselves in a period of significant power transition, from a neo-Confucian dynasty to a colonial regime. Imperial Japan and Christianity thus posed a mutual challenge: church leaders worked to sustain and increase their Evangelical mission field within Korea's new socio-political environment, while, simultaneously, the Japanese depended on the cooperation of the Korean Christian communities to fulfil their colonial project. In this dynamic of State-Church relations, Catholics and Protestants constantly vied for ascendancy. This article examines how the two Christian denominations engaged with each other and with Korea's coloniser, as imperial Japan's policies varied and its international status fluctuated.

This article charts a new course for the study of the Middle Persian documents from early Islamic Iran, which takes their early Islamic context into account more fully than has hitherto been done. This approach and its potential fruits for the study of early Islamic history are illustrated through an in-depth treatment of four seventh-century documents from the Qom region (previously edited and discussed by Dieter Weber), each of which contains a fiscal term that is apparently otherwise unattested in the documentary corpus. I show that the existing interpretations of these documents anachronistically project the fiscal terminology and structures of a later time into early Islamic Iran, and that these documents, considered in aggregate, suggest a certain course of development for the Islamic fiscal system in the post-Sasanian territories in the decades following the initial conquests: from broad and relatively unspecific impositions to more targeted exactions, based on increasingly detailed assessments.