In January 1635 there arrived in Goa a delegation from the English East India Company. The affluent air and dignified behaviour of its members, not to mention the obviously well-gunned and well-equipped ships that had brought them, greatly impressed the Portuguese, according to the then viceroy, the redoubtable Conde de Linhares. After the solution of the usual niceties of protocol, and after the viceroy had expatiated on the iniquities of England's erstwhile allies, the Dutch, a truce was agreed. So ended something like half a century of war at sea as the English had pushed—and surprisingly slowly, considering their reputation in Europe—into Portugal's Asian preserves. The peace did not, as Linhares had hoped, lead to the downfall of the Dutch, who went on to inflict grievous blows on Portugal in east and west alike. Nor did it establish England and Portugal as ‘senores de tudo’.Nevertheless it opened an era of generally amicable relations between the two countries in Asia, and so forms a convenient point from which to survey their previous history, and to indicate what may be learned from English sources as to the condition and affairs of the Estado da India.

Those who kindly invited me to give this lecture showed some resistance to its sub-title. I insisted on ‘a view from the sidelines’ because I wished to emphasize that my remarks would be based on my own presence at the events of 1947 and confined to those matters with which I had direct acquaintance. This is still largely true: mine is in part an undisguisedly personal tale. But the matter is rather more complicated. For one thing, while I was certainly a spectator I was also able for a couple of months in 1947 to scamper on to a segment of New Delhi's field of fateful play, even to get a touch or two of the ball, before returning to my place on the terraces. But for the purpose of this lecture I could not content myself with recollections; I have, as it were, examined the slow re-plays of the television cameras. In trying to match my memories, diaries and letters from 1947 with the files at India Office Records, there have, I confess, been phases of bewilderment on the way to such modest and provisional enlightenment as I can offer. It is not simply that in the 34 years the world has moved on, the perspective has changed; that is a problem which the historian's whole skill is devoted to overcome. The difficulty is aggravated when the spectator cum minor actor in the drama of yesteryear puts on the historian's robe; for not only the world but he with it has changed.

In the early decades of this century, Naitō Konan (1866–1934) became Japan's leading authority on Chinese history and contemporary Chinese affairs. His early education in Kangaku (Chinese studies) had emphasized the Neo-Confucian tradition of jitsugaku or the practical application of learning, a broad trend in Japan then and one subscribed to by Naitō's family. Thus, before his arrival in Tokyo in late 1887, Naitō was already deeply concerned with China. He also possessed a kind of Kangaku assumption that China and Japan were linked culturally, and by extension their contemporary fates before the West were linked. The jitsugaku underpinning to Naitō's thought spurred him to seek out solutions for China's ills (and Japan's) on the basis of his knowledge of the past.

However surprising Russell's combination of mathematical logic and pacifist anti-capitalist ethics may appear, it becomes understandable if one looks for its psychological roots. He who is ready to overthrow the oldest traditions in logic and to uncover the illusory nature of ancient ideals will also look with more freedom at the ideals of bourgeois ethics and not be afraid to give up values which those who are tradition-bound are unable to renounce.

Overseas Chinese political links with China have been a subject of interest for many years. Travellers, journalists, officials and scholars have constantly made speculation, assessments and predictions about the political loyalties of overseas Chinese, and their future in their host countries. Although the overseas Chinese share a common historical and cultural background, they live in different economic environments and political climates, and in different stages of transition. Their political loyalty is especially difficult to assess. It is not just moulded by cultural, economic and political environments; it is also affected by other, less predictable factors. The rise of nationalism in the overseas Chinese communities at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was a major factor in shaping the political life of the overseas Chinese. Using Singapore and Malaya as case studies, this paper seeks to explain how and why overseas Chinese nationalism arose during this period.

American trade with China was ushered in by the voyage of the Empress of China to Canton in 1784. Within a few years commerce had become so profitable that the United States appointed Major Samuel Shaw to act as the American Consul in China. Very quickly the United States became the number two trader with China and the most serious rival to England. However, American ships were neither as large nor as numerous as those of the British East Indies Company and American merchants possessed neither the financial backing nor the prestige of their British counterpart. The United States was still a weak naval power and traders could not depend on any significant protection from the fleet. Furthermore, the Washington government was unable to exert any appreciable influence on Chinese authorities and they settled into a well-patterned position of following the British lead in the Far East.

Writing for Premchand (1880–1936) was a mission. In the course of a literary career that spanned over three decades he passionately clung to the belief that no writer in a subject country could afford the luxury of writing without a social purpose. India, so long as it was ‘under the yoke of alien subjection’, could not ‘scale the highest peaks of art’. Her writers were obliged by their political and social conditions to educate the people wherever it was possible for them to do so. The more intensely they felt, the more effectively educative became their work. Aware of the inevitable price, in terms of literary quality, that the colonial writer had willy-nilly to pay, Premchand had the insight to see the identity between the demands of society and the demands of literature. And precisely because he could perceive this identity, he succeeded increasingly in creating works that combined social purpose and artistic excellence.

Modern Japan has experienced two constitutional revolutions, one from the latter half of the nineteenth century until 1945, and the other since 1945. By ‘constitutional revolution’ is meant a long process in which a fundamental shift takes place in constitutional values diffused throughout society by means of law, administrative actions, judicial decisions, and education, both formal and informal.

Prior to the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949 the formal apparatus of the Chinese imperial state rarely extended below the hsien, or county level. There was, in effect, ‘local self government’ and in certain parts of China this meant rule by powerful, localized descent groups. While some Chinese patrilineages remained small and politically insignificant, others grew until they resembled petty states. These large lineage organizations, which I prefer to call ‘dominant lineages’, made dependents out of neighbours, controlled market centers, and maintained their own militias and local defence corps. In this paper the formation of one such dominant lineage is described in detail.

In the third century, a poet in the ancient Cōḻ capital of Uṟaiyūr, on the banks of the Kāvērī river opposite the island of Śrīraṅkam, looked into the sad face of his lover and said that her face reminded him of the bank of the Kāavērī strewn with stalks of banana plants after the celebration of the Paṅkuṇi festival on Śrīraṅkam island. Although this early reference to the Paṅkuṇi festival being celebrated on Śrīraṅkam island dates from a period when the great Paṅkuṇi temple must have been at most a minor shrine, it seems likely that the Paṅkuṇi festival of today is a direct descendent of that early celebration. When inscriptions were carved on the temple walls between the tenth and eighteenth centuries they regularly mention the Paṅkuṇi festival as one of the main features of the temple's ritual, and references in the temple chronicle also seem to assume a continuous performance of this festival. As other festivals began to crowd into the temple calendar the Pankuni festival came to be known as the Āti festival or the ‘Original’ Festival in order to distinguish it from all others.

The present paper is divided into three parts. Part I describes and analyses the emergence of an indigenous business class in Maharashtra, in western India, during the Peshwa times, and its position under early British rule. Part II discusses the dominance of Brahman savakars in the newly emerged business class. Part III presents an overview and states general observations relating to the subject.

China's early economic modernization in the Late Ch'ing period has attracted a great deal of attention from economic historians who have been trying to find out causes for the failure of this attempt, and to measure the impact of Western imperialism. What they have generally ignored is the fact that China at that time was trying to break free from the growing foreign economic control, and to find an alternative to the foreign capital. The alternative was the overseas Chinese capital which, in the belief of the Ch'ing government, was capable of taking over the role of foreign capital in the economic modernization of China. This paper seeks to examine the measures taken by the Ch'ing government to attract overseas Chinese capital, and to analyse why the policy of using overseas Chinese capital failed.

After revisiting Sind in 1876, Sir Richard Burton wrote, ‘The Hindu's reed-pen is a rod of iron and abjectly the unhappy Sindi trembles before it.’ By ‘Hindu,’ Burton meant the Hindu bania, the trader and moneylender, and by ‘Sindi’ he meant the Sindhi Muslim zamindar (landholder), the perennial debtor. The creditor tyrannized over the debtor, imposing ever harsher and more inequitable terms on him. What is interesting is that Burton scarcely appeared to recognize the Hindu banias as Sindhis at all; he wrote as if they were interlopers on the Sindhi scene. It was a colourful summary of the average British official's attitude towards debt. Twenty years later, Evan James, the Commissioner in Sind, quoted Burton's remark to lend support to his own argument that debt was an intolerable burden on Sindhi Muslims in general and the great zamindars in particular.

In April of 1980 I was received by the Henan Province History Research Institute of the Henan Province Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to begin the first systematic oral political history project on peasant revolution in modern China. The focus of this project is on the problems of livelihood faced by the peasants of Lin county and several other counties in the pre-Liberation period, roughly 1911–49. In May I began an investigation of the history of rural Lin county and the village of Yao Cun, Lin county, Henan. In this essay I will sketch the general social and political history of Yao village in Republican years, and then draw from my preliminary field research to explain the relationship between land rent, the impoverishment of peasant smallholders, and political power in pre-Liberation China in one North China village. This relationship has received minimal emphasis in the literature on peasantry and change in pre-1949 China. One of the many reasons for this has been the tendency of past scholarship to stress the critically important role of the ‘middle peasant village’ in the Chinese revolution. The evidence from Yao cun offers a slight qualification of this middle peasant thesis.

They order these things differently in England. Such comment on the relevance of the British political and economic experience to postsurrender Japan has been overlooked by students ofthe occupation period. The explanation for this neglect appears to vary on national lines. Research interest into Britain's postwar foreign policy in east Asia has been limited until recently by the availability of government material, while American and later Japanese scholars following in their wake seem reluctant to recognize that in name and sometimes in reality the occupation was an allied venture, since this goes against the grain of American unilateralism. Where there has been note of allied contributions to the occupation the references have tended to be perfunctory. Two recent publications might be cited as representative of this trend among American historians. John Dower's voluminous work on Yoshida Shigeru has little on Yoshida's contacts with British occupation personnel despite frequent references to the premier's anglophilia. Justin Williams's version of the occupation is equally Americocentric. The author regards the Far Eastern Commission's role in Japan's enforced democratization as reactionary ‘because SCAP dealt with the real Japan and the FEC with an imaginary Japan. Long after SCAP became immersed in constructing the democratic Japan of the future, the FEC was still preoccupied with teaching a lesson to the Imperial Japan of old.’ As a challenging quotation useful for those setting examinations on the subject it may bear repetition but not a few British and Commonwealth diplomats might be forgiven for suggesting that the remark could be profitably reversed. The distance between the United States' image of Japan and the truth behind the rhetoric remained a persistent theme of despatches from the British mission in Tokyo (UKLIM) to the Foreign Office throughout this period.

This paper represents an attempt to throw more light on the problems faced by developing countries in their efforts to industrialize, through an examination of the recent economic history of a particular case, the scientific instruments industry in India. Since many of these problems are connected with technological matters, particular attention is paid to the relations between ‘science’ and ‘production’, broadly defined, and to how these relations affect prospects for industrial development under present-day conditions. The paper's other focus is the role of'planning’ in the industry's development, and the gap between what the planners envisaged and what happened in actual practice.

Guru cults are an increasingly prominent feature of Indian religious life today, especially in the towns and cities, and among the urban middle classes. Many of these gurus are actually worshipped by their followers, who believe that they have magical powers; and in most cults the devotional element is strong. Since independence there seem to be more gurus in India; more of them have a more than local following; their followings are growing rapidly, and the cults are receiving more publicity, which reflects their discernible impact on the Indian scene. The godmen, as they are called, are often somewhat ostentatious; their travels, by air, road or rail, are widely reported in the press, and their followings are known to include numerous high ranking and well known figures in the worlds of politics, business, the professions and academia. Courted and feted, they preside over anniversary functions, commemorations, and installations, and their pictures and books are to be found on bookstalls throughout the subcontinent. In part, the publicity given to the gurus and godmen of India reflects the growing popular interest in them among western followers: the antics of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, in Oxford Street or in Berkeley, California; the Transcendental Meditation Movement of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with a following of as many as four hundred thousand in the west; the powerful vogue in America for the boy Guru Maharaj; and the ecstatic cult of Bhagwan Rajneesh, which attracts hundreds to Poona, are just a few of the more notorious examples.

For many reasons the June election was unusual. To begin with, it was the first time in twenty-seven years that a general election was called due to the passage of a ‘vote of non-confidence’ in the House of Commons.Moreover, it was a ‘double election’ as the regular triennial election of the House of Councillors was scheduled for the same time. Most uniquely, it was also the first time in Japan's electoral history that an incumbent Prime Minister died in office while in the course of the campaign. Finally, it was seen as the first serious opportunity for the combined opposition forces to terminate the uninterruped one-party rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (hereafter referred to as the LDP) since 1955. Results of the election and the subsequent choice of Suzuki Zenko as the Prime Minister surprised not only observers but also the ‘insiders’ ofJapanese politics. This paper attempts to: (1) elaborate on the background that led to the election; (2) illustrate and analyze the electoral facts; and (3) examine their implications for Japan's party politics in the 1980s.

In 1947 the fabric of Bengali rural society woven together by a common language and a syncretist popular culture was torn asunder on lines of religion. During the final two decades of colonial rule in India the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Jamuna deltaic tracts of east Bengal increasingly became the scene of tension and violent conflict between a Muslim peasantry and a predominantly Hindu landed gentry. The conflict between rival élites in a plural society over government jobs and positions of vantage in the legislative arena has been a subject of scholarly studies in twentieth-century Bengal. Successive ‘legislative attacks’ of one status and interest group upon another have been carefully identified and documented, and their significance assessed. The inner dynamics of the struggle in the countryside and the periodic outbursts of ‘communal’ fury that rent rural Bengal during this period have not come under the same systematic investigation. Yet, without the agrarian dimension to the Hindu–Muslim problem in Bengal, the politics of separatism would in all likelihood have proved ineffectual and been washed away by the strong tide of a composite nationalism.