Both papers in this section are concerned with issues of women's access to property and marriage in the medieval period, McDermott's with China (and in particular the study by Bettine Birge), and Kurushima's with Japan (and more especially with the marriage strategies of a political kind among the élite).

The issue of women's property rights during the Song dynasty has been heatedly debated for over half a century. First in Japan, and then in China, Taiwan and the West, scholars have developed strikingly divergent views of the legal and social dimensions of Song women's claims to property and control over their remarriage as widows. This article discusses and assesses the different views, particularly those of Bettine Birge in her recent book-length analysis of the topic. In siding largely with earlier studies that stressed Song women's legally backed rights to property as daughters, wives and widows, Birge's work provides the most comprehensive and persuasive treatment of this debate in any language. In addition, she discusses the fate of Chinese widows, accustomed to remarrying under favourable terms in the Song, and then suffering during the Yuan serious restrictions on their options for remarriage as well as on their property rights. The turning point, according to this book, was the merger of Mongol government and neo-Confucian court interests in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, thereby depriving women of many powers they had acquired in the Song.

This paper discusses the status of women in late medieval Japan through an examination of marriage and inheritance, in particular through the concept of ie (the household as a basic social unit). It casts a fresh view on the relationship between the ie and women, and in the process refutes the assumption of Takamure Itsue that the emergence of the ie prompted an oppressive form of marriage that deprived women of freedom, rights and a claim to property. Taking class distinctions into consideration, the paper reviews the legal, social and economic position of women. It shows that the ie was not an oppressor of women at its inception, but as time passed the independence of the ie was eroded from within and without, and in the process women were gradually excluded from positions of power. The paper also takes a close look at various patterns of marriage in different social classes and at inheritance. Even though primogeniture concentrated the ie property in the hands of the male heir, female inheritance continued well into the sixteenth century. The paper concludes that the position of women in modern Japan has its roots in the late medieval period, and criticizes Takamure for viewing the late medieval ie from a modern perspective.

This article revisits the same author's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988–93) through the lens of a pattern of alternating globalization and localization in Southeast Asian History. It highlights the effects of the intense globalization of the “age of commerce” (centuries) on Southeast Asian performance traditions, notably the state theatre of the great entrepôts. Reid considers the critiques of his emphasis on a seventeenth-century crisis in the region in the decade since publication, and defends most of his original position against Victor Lieberman and Andre Gunder Frank in particular. He pursues the theme forward in time, to note another period of significant trade expansion and globalization in roughly 1780–1840; the following high-colonial period which paradoxically had more of a localizing effect on most Southeast Asian populations, and the nationalist reaction which (again paradoxically) marked extreme globalization in some respects between the 1930s and the 1960s.

This paper explores the ocean produce trade that connected maritime East and Southeast Asia between 1780 and 1860. The essay explicitly concentrates on two “arenas” of action where politics, commerce, and the trade in sea produce combined in powerful ways: the Straits of Melaka, and the waters of Northern Borneo. In both of these regions, the collection of marine goods became big business. More importantly, however, the organized funneling of these objects helped keep disparate political projects alive and running. This was the case in the Straits of Melaka, where the collection of such bounty supplied one rationale for British expansion in Penang (1786) and Singapore (1819), in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century. In Northern Borneo, the collection of these commodities from shallow local seas was also tied to empire-building, in this case via the Sultanate of Sulu. Sulu used North Borneo's waters as a vast collecting-ground for sea-produce to be shipped to China. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, North Borneo's coasts became a major source for these products geared toward international trade, linking East and Southeast Asia in increasingly vigorous ways.

In the wake of the immolation of Roop Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987, sati has re-emerged as a controversial political and social issue in modern India. Many of the terms of the contemporary debate on sati have their roots in the colonial period and are based on assumptions and ideas formulated during the British debate on sati in the early nineteenth century. These ideas were often as much the product of changing British society and its preoccupations as they were the encounter with India, however. This article explores the connotations of changing attitudes to suicide in influencing the nature of British responses to sati. By examining the relationship between attitudes to suicide and changing depictions of sati between 1500–1830, it seeks to undermine the suggestion of a constant western “morality” with regard to sati, depicting instead an encounter with the rite that was bi-directional and fluid with the dichotomy between “East” and “West” cross-cut by a myriad of other issues and concerns.

This paper discusses the role of Indian merchants, especially Muslims, in the match trade between Japan and India, and situates the cooperative ventures set up in the middle of the 1920s between Indian merchants and Japanese manufacturers in the context of the economy of the Bengal Bay region. Their inter-regional networks and partnerships were important not just for trade, but also for manufacturing based on the flow of technology, ideas, information, and natural resources. The paper also shows that such ventures unexpectedly caused conflicts with movements in India to promote domestic industry and with the logic of territorial nationalism that lay behind them.

Though veiling by Muslim women has been discussed from many angles and with various methodologies, the very basis of the discussion – the relationship between the Qur'a¯n and the veil – still remains unclear. This paper returns to this basis, focusing on three relevant passages from the Qur'a¯n (33:59, 33:53, 24:31). An analysis of the first two of these passages in association with a number of prophetic traditions [hadi¯th] shows clearly that one of the main purposes of veiling in early Islamic society was to distinguish, and secure the safety or status of, privileged women. Problematic is Verse 24:31, which contains another reason for veiling in Islam: to cover women's beauty. Because of the ambiguity of the words contained in this passage, and the absence of any solid hadi¯th concerning it, ample room for interpretation was provided for later religious authorities. The extent of covering changed over time and so did the grounds for argument. By following major exegetic texts [tafsi¯r] on this verse from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, this paper shows the relationship between the Qur'a¯n, hadi¯th, tafsi¯r, and the veil.

In ancient and medieval south India, from about the fifth century, the term nādu denoted a micro-region which was important as the basic unit of agricultural production. The agricultural community formed in the nādu was called nāttār or nāttavar, literally meaning the people of the nādu. Initially it was exclusively composed of the Vellāla peasantry, but from the eleventh century there began to appear in Tamil inscriptions the term periyanādu meaning “big nādu” to denote a supra-nādu assembly. In this paper we examine the meaning of the emergence of this and other similar supra-local and/or multi-community organizations.

The Chola dynasty, which had ruled south India for about four hundred years, disappeared in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The succeeding Pandyan dynasty was put down in its turn by the invasion of the Delhi Sultan's army at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Therefore, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in south India were a period of political turmoil, during when, nevertheless, foreign trade was carried out vigorously in the Indian Ocean. Merchants and artisans joined peasants in the activities of the periyanādu, generating a new state and social formation that became explicitly visible in the fifteenth century under Vijayanagar rule.

Inside and outside China, it has been widely believed that in premodern China common people did not bring civil cases to magistrate's courts but settled them at the level of their clan, village or guild. However, David C. Buxbaum's research based on the Dan-Xin Archive and Shiga Shu¯zo¯'s study of legal memoranda show that people quite regularly turned to the magistrate's court to resolve civil disputes. During the Qing dynasty, legal cases were divided, not in civil or criminal terms, but according to how serious the offence was. The less-serious offences were civil cases that included disputes concerning marriage and inheritance, land and property, money and loans, and minor battery. Whereas the latter category, criminal cases in today's terms, were handled with the intention of maintaining legal stability, magistrates involved with civil cases tried to strike a reasonable balance by examining each case on an individual basis. However, how the law was applied to civil cases remains a subject for future research.

A study of the site of Kharakhorum suggests it was a large city with an extensive population. The rulers however did not live here permanently but in seasonal palaces in the environs of the city. I have identified the Spring and Winter Palaces and been able to narrow down the possible sites of the Summer and Autumn Palaces. The Spring Palace (the Qarshi-“Sūrī” of Juvainī, the Gegenchaghan of Rashīd al-Dīn and the Jiajianchahan-dian of Saolin-cheng of the Yuan shi) is located at the site known as Doityn Balgas, and the Winter Palace (the Ong-khin of the Rashīd al-Dīn) I consider to be at the Shaazan-khot site. The sites of the Summer and Autumn Palaces are uncertain at this point. Judging from the location of the Spring and Winter Palaces, it is clear that the emperors moved over a distance of 450 km each year and a reconstruction of the migration route shows that the emperor had a domain of 14,000 square km. This area can be called the peri-urban area of Kharakhorum, the political, economic, and cultural centre of the Mongol empire.

This paper explores the link between globalization, as the source of contemporary crises in representation, and the academic crisis in Asian Studies. The situation of Japanese Studies in Australia is used as a case study to illustrate these links. I argue that traditional area studies, as a colonial structure rooted in the (Cold) War, has become anachronistic. It is suggested that one strategy through which conventional area studies may be reconfigured and revitalized is by more fully and warmly embracing those movements or networks such as cultural studies that can be seen as responses to global changes.

The following article is the first part of a translation of Dentō Chūgoku hō – hinagatasetsu ni taisuru ichishiron by Nakamura Shigeo, which was published in 1979 in the Hōsei riron 12:1 (Niigata University). The second part will appear in the next issue of the International Journal of Asian Studies.

While Chinese law is on the one hand widely understood to have contained minute administrative and penal provisions and to be related to the examination system, it has always been shadowed, on the other, by a different image. First, the law was seen to have been determined as no more than a reflection of political ideas and so to have been divorced from reality.

A frequently discussed theory about the nature and function of traditional Chinese law claims that, in traditional China, law was no more than a model, with little practical applicability. This theory seems to be still dominant.

On a different occasion in the past, I presented some doubts about this theory of law as a “model”, based on impressions I received from reading through a body of judgments from Qing dynasty lawsuits.