One of the central choices that confronts designers of direct taxes is that of the precise combination of equity and administrative ease. Both equity and administrative ease are normally accepted as desirable objectives in the design of taxes. But the objectives conflict with each other. Equity requires a tax sufficiently flexible to adjust the size of the tax payment to the individual taxpayer's ability to pay. Administrative simplicity, by contrast, requires a tax where the due payment can be quickly and simply calculated, and promptly and conveniently collected. Thus tax designers face the painful dilemma of being able to achieve improvements in equity only by increasing the difficulty of tax administration, or, alternatively, of being able to reduce these difficulties only by accepting additional inequities.

Historical accounts of the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–53) emphasize national bias, monocausality and events immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities. Asian historians find Europeans culpable. Governor-General Dalhousie ‘was an imperialist of the deepest dye, who longed to extend his Indian empire at the cost of the Burmese.’ The East India Company in its unquenchable ‘thirst for conquest’ coveted Burma. ‘There was a desire for war on the part of the British trading community in Burma … as it would permanently safeguard commercial interests in the country.’ Anglophile historians blame the Burmese. The ‘intransigence and xenophobia which radiated from the court of Ava… drove [Dalhousie] into war.’ Dalhousie himself blamed an unrestrained military officer whom he labeled the ‘combustible commodore.’ Despite imperial apologetics, critical Englishmen felt unease at the ‘double government's’ Blue Book coverup and sought with mixed success to disclose the ‘whole ugly truth.’

A Recent conference of specialists on the study of Muslims in South Asia identified as one of the neglected areas of their field the study of traditional religious institutions in the modern period. Such institutions as the sufi orders, the religious schools, and the system of pious endowments have been treated, if at all, only in their relation to political developments. Thus the leading theological academy of modern India, the Dār ul-'Ulūm of Deoband, has been studied because many of its ulama played an important role in nationalist politics in India and opposed the foundation of Pakistan. That motive for study has seriously distorted the treatment of the nineteenth-century history of the school, endowing it with an anti-British and revolutionary character when, in fact, the school's concerns were totally a-political. An investigation of the early history of the school suggests many other significant historical themes, notably an important incipient trend toward a formal bureaucratization of the ulama and their institutions. Studies of religious institutions outside India such as Gilsenan's study of the Hamidiya Shadhiliya order in modern Egypt and Roff's study of the Majlis Ugama in Malaysia4 suggest that successful functioning in the modern period has required such a transformation in organizational structure. This article describes the organization of Deoband in its initial decades.

Overseas investment by developed nations in the less industrialized economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America is an important part of modern international economic history. Such investment has long been recognized as a potent force in integrating the international economy. It has also been placed at the heart of most theories of the expansion of European empires in the nineteenth century and it is seen as a major part of the ‘neo-colonialism’ that is widely thought to have characterized the world economic and political structure since 1945. This article will examine private foreign investment in India in the first half of the twentieth century, spanning the gap between the ‘imperial’ and the ‘neo-colonial’ epochs.

It has long been accepted that in the imagination of man certain images occur again and again to represent the elements of existence. As an individual finds these images in the myths of his culture, he knows their symbolic meanings intuitively, although he may not be able to articulate those meanings. In literature, which is a play of two constructive principles, system and creativity, the presentation of these mythic images is very common. The images themselves serve as a semiotic system and their presentation, usually unconscious, in art is the creative principle. A study of such archetypal images contributes to the understanding of a piece of literature. In Sakhārām Binder, a Marathi play first produced in the spring of 1972, we see that Laxmi, one of its main characters, represents the archetypal figure of Sāvitri, the heroine of a mythical episode in the Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata.

From before the turn of the century, the great powers held large commercial, industrial and technological exhibitions to show off the fruits of progress and to give their citizens a glimpse of where civilization was headed. World fairs thus provided one window into the future. But it must be remembered that such events also constructed monuments to their own era—an age when jingoism and a paradoxical recognition of the shrinking nature of the globe coexisted before the road to war. In the final analysis, the grand exposition, with its curiosity about other peoples and nations and its faith nonetheless that mechanical invention would soon make everyone much the same, was a place where imperialists met in thinly disguised competition. How strange it must seem, then, to learn that the last Chinese dynasty, having just discovered the power of nationalism, attempted an international exposition of its own in the summer of 1910 at the same time that the ‘Festival of Empire Exhibition’ was booked into London's famed Crystal Palace.

The description provided by John Foster Fraser, a British journalist wandering through Siberia and Manchuria in the autumn of 1901, is of Khabarovsk, a town of some fifteen thousand people. Such scenes were not peculiar to Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, but could be witnessed in other towns throughout the Russian Far East such as Chita, Blagoveshchensk, Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii, and Vladivostok. Who were these ‘weak, withered-faced’ Chinese that one was likely to encounter? What were they doing within the boundaries of the Russian Empire? What were the attitudes of the Russian population towards the Chinese and what policies did the provincial and central authorities adopt with respect to them?

One of the most common themes in the literature on political development is the assumption of an elite—mass gap based on differing educational, occupational, income and social class backgrounds. The saliency of such differences are presumed to be more important in developing than developed nations because of an overlay of Westernization to be found in the elite sectors and a strong traditional orientation among the masses, particularly the rural masses. Urban dwellers are often thought of as residing in a transitional limbo between the old and the new, between a disintegrating traditional self-identity and an emerging modern one.