This article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.

The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

The contents of the Rawlinson papers have now been sorted into a meaningful order and the contents listed, this note contains a brief description of its contents, in order to make clear what it does and does not contain. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–1895) is mainly remembered as a pioneer in the decipherment of cuneiform scripts but it will be seen from the documents in the collection that his interests covered a rather wider range of topics.

This article explores Gandhi's engagement with the industrial workers of Ahmedabad city and his effort to integrate them into urban society. As the emergence of a large textile industrial sector shaped Ahmedabad as one of the first industrial cities in India, migrants flowed into the city in search of work, and settled in makeshift slums surrounding the textile mills. Concepts such as citizen and citizenship were progressively redefined so as to place the whole city in counterpoint to the countryside. For the migrants, becoming a citizen meant conforming to a lifestyle which reflected the ideal model of urbanity. In 1918, one year before launching the first national satyagraha, Gandhi led the mill workers of Ahmedabad in a ‘righteous struggle’ in opposition to the city's industrialists. While he led the workers in their quest for higher wages, Gandhi also acted on a broader level to help workers integrate in the city as ‘citizens’.

In the 1800s it was not only merchants from British India who participated in the expanding trade with China, but also those from the princely states who sought to profit from the increased demand for cash crops. Smuggling—just as most commercial activities unsanctioned by the Bombay Government were labelled—was a source of great anxiety for the colonial authorities in India, especially in the western territories. This article looks at smuggling activity in and around the Bombay Presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century. It will assert that local ‘smuggling’ was, in many cases, the continuation of pre-colonial trade relations, labelled as illegal as a result of ill-defined boundaries and ambiguous legal restrictions. In fact, the success of these activities was less a reflection of widespread criminality than structural weaknesses in the colonial administration. Evidence suggests that British anxieties over smuggling had a greater effect on the political economy of western India than the actual financial damage caused by the illicit trade. The coordinated subversive smuggling network, ultimately, did not exist, and held power largely as a figment of the imperial imagination.

The History of a Loyal Heart (Xin shi) is allegedly a work by the Song loyalist, Zheng Sixiao, written to bemoan the fate of the Song empire after its conquest by the Mongols. There have always been doubts about its authenticity, however, and many scholars have believed it to be a forgery. The arguments for and against this have remained inconclusive, and the work has been commonly used as a source for the history of the Song–Yuan transition period. This article adduces compelling evidence to show that there can be very little doubt that it is a late-Ming forgery. Some of the implications of this conclusion are briefly addressed.

Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the first Protestant missionary to China, was responsible for the completion of the earliest Chinese-English Dictionary in 1814. Though this work would not have reached publication without the help of Chinese assistants, and of the printer P. P. Thoms (1790–1855), even so Morrison's scholarly achievements in this and other aspects of Chinese studies were prodigious. This survey of recent research makes clear the continuing value of his writings to contemporary scholars, and also suggests that he was not simply more seriously engaged in attempting to understand China than his contemporaries but also more enlightened than a good number of his successors in missionary work.

Since my article on the Rawlinson papers was written the Society's new archivist Nancy Charley has drawn my attention to some correspondence in the Society's archives which sheds further light on the acquisition of its Rawlinson papers. It consists of letters from Miss Elmira Wade, who in 1972 was employed as archivist both at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, the seat of the Methuen family, and at the RAS. Miss Wade had been a friend of Harry Rawlinson and his wife Meredith up to the time of the latter's death in 1951, and was named as executrix of her will.

Recognising the parallelism between the conjugation of a verb such as √lug ‘pour’ (pres. ldug, past blugs, fut. blug, imp. lhugs ‘pour’ and a verb such as √kru ‘wash’ (ḥkhrud, bkrus, bkru, khrus), Li Fang-Kuei suggests deriving the present stem ldug from a reconstruction *ḥlug (1933: 149). In this sub-case of Conrady's law, the change of *ḥl to ld- may be analyzed into the following changes: *ḥl > *ḥdl > *ḥld > ld (cf. Conrady 1896: 59, Li 1933: 149, Hill 2011: 446–447, Hill 2013: 193–195). This sound change obscures the synchronic relationship between verb forms beginning with ld- and other present formations, and the resultant synchronic opacity gives rise to analogical forms (e.g. the alternate present blug). Consequently, the dictionaries present a certain level of confusion about the paradigms of lateral initial verbs.

On 13th November a panel appointed by the Royal Asiatic Society's Publications Committee decided that the Barwis Holliday Award, for an article on an East Asian topic, should be given to Dr George Mak for his article ‘Without Note or Comment’ Principle in Late Qing China’.

Albeit with some deterioration in recent years, Malaysia has a state with high levels of capacity that has achieved sustained economic growth through a commitment to macroeconomic stability and other pro-business measures. Recent comparative historical work argues that this state capacity is an institutional legacy of a specific model of British colonisation. While Malaysia is an amalgam of areas formerly under direct and indirect rule; the former – a model of colonisation characterised by the construction of a legal-rational bureaucracy with extensive geographic reach – was more prevalent. Prior to the transition to independence, the British increased the “direct” nature of their rule by creating a powerful central government that brought the various territories together. And, a concerted transition of power to a cohort of “bureaucrats-turned-politicians” ensured that the new nation's leaders inherited an intact state apparatus. However, a disproportionate number of these senior bureaucrats hailed from Johor, a state formerly under indirect rule - a colonial model associated with small, neo-patrimonial states with limited capacity. By using colonial sources to map the contours and composition of the Malayan state under British and, subsequently, Japanese rule, this article will explore the reasons for this paradox.

Aid donors, civil society groups and the Cambodian government have tended to focus their policy initiatives concerned with communities and their forests on Cambodia's indigenous minorities. Few attempts have been made to document the relationship between ethnic Khmers and forests. However, with almost three quarters of Cambodia covered with forests until quite recently, and a large proportion of the Khmer population living in proximity to forests, it is not surprising that Cambodia's dominant ethnic group has had a close and meaningful relationship with forests. In this article, we examine the traditional systems of forest management of Khmer social groups and how these systems are changing. We argue that traditional Khmer systems of forest management are still relevant in the context of the rapid changes that have occurred in rural Cambodia over the past two decades. These systems shape how Khmer groups make sense of the natural world and claim rights of tenure over forest areas. They continue to play a vital role in preserving Cambodia's natural forests in the face of deforestation driven by plantation schemes and logging operations.

This paper examines how the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) struggled to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle in late Qing China, which was a vivid case attesting the tension between the ideals of Protestant missionary societies and the reality of mission fields. The BFBS regarded the ‘without note or comment’ principle as its fundamental principle, since the principle not only embodied its biblical ideology but also helped solicit interdenominational support. However, Protestant missionaries in China urged the BFBS to modify the ‘without note or comment’ principle so as to publish and distribute Chinese Bibles with readers’ helps explaining the biblical world to the Chinese people, who belonged to a non-Christian culture. Having refused the missionaries’ request for several decades, the BFBS eventually published an edition of the Gospel of Matthew in Chinese including explanatory readings called translational helps in 1911, as the BFBS was concerned about the loss of support from missionaries in the face of increasing competition from the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), which began to publish and distribute annotated Chinese Gospels in the 1890s in response to demand. However, this paper argues that the BFBS did not abandon its ‘without note or comment’ principle but instead, by adopting a minimalist approach to compiling its translational helps, the BFBS made use of its Chinese Bibles with translational helps as an expedient means to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle.