The time appears due for a reappraisal of the economic argument in the imperialism debate. For decades the standard procedure has been first to refute Hobson and Lenin on empirical grounds and then to present a non-economic explanation for the European overseas expansion during the era of modern imperialism (1870–1914). Presently a new paradigm is gaining acceptance. It is an approach which puts the emphasis solidly back on the economic side but without its Marxist connotations. Cain and Hopkins took the lead with their theory of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’; they link the landed South and City finance with Imperial policy thus explaining overseas expansion by referring to macroeconomic changes at home. Davis and Huttenback associate the profitability of Empire investments with their ‘two-England hypothesis’ for British business: London investors stood apart, profited more and exerted a greater influence. It is my intention to show that a similar type of non-Marxist economic argument applies also to the case of Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago at the time of modern imperialism.

My choice of subject for this lecture arose from what I think might have been a matter of some interest to Kingsley Martin; as also from my own concern that the interplay between the past and contemporary times requires a continuing dialogue between historians working on these periods. Such a dialogue is perhaps more pertinent to post-colonial societies where the colonial experience changed the framework of the comprehension of the past from what had existed earlier: a disjuncture which is of more than mere historiographical interest. And where political ideologies appropriate this comprehension and seek justification from the pre-colonial past, there, the historian's comment on this process is called for. Among the more visible strands in the political ideology of contemporary India is the growth and acceptance of what are called communal ideologies. ‘Communal’, as many in this audience are aware, in the Indian context has a specific meaning and primarily perceives Indian society as constituted of a number of religious communities. Communalism in the Indian sense therefore is a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as the basis for an ideology. It then demands political allegiance to a religious community and supports a programme of political action designed to further the interests of that religious community. Such an ideology is of recent origin but uses history to justify the notion that the community (as defined in recent history) and therefore the communal identity have existed since the early past.

The notion of ‘banker's trust’ has a paradoxical quality, like ‘burning cold’ or ‘military intelligence.’ Common sense (another paradoxical notion) tells us that bankers have no trust. Perhaps this explains the appeal of Marxist and Weberian assumptions that capitalist economies tend to destroy pre-capitalist social formations based on trust. From the classic perspective, ‘primordial’ social ties mandate relations of trust (or something like them) in kin groups and castes only so long as the members of these groups do not operate directly—as bankers do—within a capitalist economic system.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing knowledge of British and Asian ‘country’ trade to selected parts of Southeast Asia by drawing upon British private papers and the records of Fort St George, Madras. The 1680s marked the peak of international trade in Siamunder king Narai before the wars and revolution there of 1687–88. The decade also saw the elimination of the last great independent entrepot, Banten, on the Java Sea in 1682, as well as the final, ultimately-futile, Dutch efforts to control the Malayan tin-trade north of Perak. The Dutch also began in 1685 and 1689 their intermittent attempts to monopolize key commodities in the Johor–Riau–Lingga sultánate at the southern end of Malacca Strait. In one sense, given Dutch success or at least pretensions, the region from Pegu and Tenasserim–Mergui through certain Malay ports and Aceh to Ayudhya and Tongking constituted what might loosely be called the free-trade zone of maritime Southeast Asia. It was also one in which, with the exception of Perak after 1745, the indigenous monarchies retained complete or extensive independence from European supervision. Into this zone, with occasional ventures to the smaller Indonesian ports, British country traders sailed for over a century, from Bowrey and Dampier in the 1680s to Light and Scott in the 1770s. What were the principal features of the markets they frequented?

This paper examines the arguments whereby the Brahman priests of a Hindu temple in the town of Kalugumalai, South India, claim exclusive rights to perform worship in that shrine. For comparison, it also deals briefly with the priests of a much larger temple in the nearby city of Madurai, whose arguments partly contradict those used in Kalugumalai. This discrepancy will be explained by treating both sets of arguments as strategic statements, which legitimize the self-interests of their respective protagonists.

In significant contrast with Indonesian writing there is in Malay literature a body of work concerned with rural life. That this is the case suggests the degree to which Malay writers even today have their roots in the agricultural cycle of peasant experience. Those who now work in clerical jobs, in publishing, in journalism, in teaching, those in fact who make up the writers of the novels, however divorced and remote their present life-styles and occupations are from their origins, still look back to the village as the world of their formative experience. It is a world with which they are intimate and familiar, a source of spiritual reassurance, of values which they may not endorse, but which they understand fully, in opposition to the alien environment of the modern city where the totality of life is fragmented into exclusive and contradictory domains of experience. And it is precisely because the writers are not so removed from rural life in space and time, that when they do cast a glance backwards they are never tempted to review that life through the distorting lens of nostalgia. On the contrary, there is the realistic acknowledgement that their own moving away from the village has also been an escape. There is, therefore, ambivalence: the village is perceived as the repository of Malay culture, the locus of traditional values, yet at the same time it is a locus of ignorance, frustration and poverty, somewhere to return for spiritual regeneration, but never again for permanent residence.

Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.

This paper attempts to establish broad orders of magnitude for the colonial period as a whole, and the results are necessarily rough and tentative. Nevertheless, this kind of quantitative macroestimation is useful in illuminating the plausible size of the magnitudes which are usually implicit in qualitative assessment.

Being the concluding part of the study on the Chinese in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements, the inquiry has a twofold aim: to construct a social alignment pattern of the Chinese in Penang, and to compare the pattern with those in Singapore and Malacca. Altogether 14,500 names of donors from epigraphic sources were processed.

The Penang Chinese exhibited a rather unique social alignment pattern in that the Hokkiens had been very active in a number of community oriented associations. Cases of cross-dialect-group participation were few, as compared to the other two settlements, for the various dialect groups in Penang, particularly the Hokkiens, were largely attracted to the inter-provincial associations. This was a unique social alignment pattern.

The findings from Penang, together with those in Singapore and Malacca were used to reconstruct an unidimensional scale for measuring the system rigidity of Chinese voluntary associations.

What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-à-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

The debate over the separate and joint electorates as rival modes of election to the various representative institutions by the British began with the Simla deputation of 1906 and remained controversial until 1947. Not only was the issue controversial in pre-Independent India, but it also raises debates among contemporary historians and political scientists. For John Gallagher, the Communal Award was nothing but ‘a sign of [the] determination [of the British Government] to warp the Indian question towards electoral politics’. While looking into the operational aspect of the Award, Anil Seal, too, has affirmed that ‘by extending the electorate, the imperial croupier had summoned more players to his table’. Looking at the Award from the British point of view, both of them thus arrived at the same conclusions: (a) the Award introduced the native politicians to the sophisticated world of parliamentary politics; and (b) as a result of the new arrangement, as stipulated in the 1935 Act, politics now percolated down to the localities. The available evidence, however, does reveal that the Award and the constitutional rights guaranteed to Indians under the Act were the price the British paid for the continuity of the Indian Empire. What thus appears to be a calculated generous gesture was very much a political expedient. The surrender of power into Indian hands, though at the regional levels, was not welcomed by some senior officers who saw an eclipse of British authority in this endeavour.

British Malaya was a very unhealthy place in the early years of this century. Malaria, ankylostomiasis or hookworm, venereal disease, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, beri-beri, cholera and still other diseases accounted for thousands of deaths annually in the 1920s. Typically, persons suffered from two or more maladies at the same time. In the Federated Malay States (F. M. S.) probably more than half of those listed as dying from malaria also suffered from hookworm. Many pneumonia deaths were due to tuberculosis. Chronic malnutrition combined with malaria, hookworm and diarrhea in many, perhaps most, pregnant women to produce high infant and maternal mortality. The majority of the living were more or less continuously afflicted with disease. Most of the diseases were debilitating and slow to kill. Most were preventable although that was imperfectly understood.

While Mao Zedong might still be China's most famous communist, only scholars of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have heard of Wang Jiaxiang and even they have never studied his career in detail. But recent Chinese publications show that there were very few CCP leaders who had such a tremendous impact on the Chinese communist movement in general and Mao Zedong's career in particular. This article will show that Wang not only supported Mao during the power struggles of the 1930s and helped convince Stalin that Mao should be acknowledged as the CCP's leader, but that Wang also played a decisive role in establishing Mao Zedong-Thought as the Party's guiding ideology. The release of numerous Party documents in the last five years also throws some light upon the relations and conflicts between Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders such as Wang Ming, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Shaoqi in the decade between the Long March and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945.

In recent years there has been much evidence of an increasing trend towards the individualization of economic and social relations in Javanese village communities. The Green Revolution has been depicted as the main cause of the acceleration of this process in the present. Observations abound on labour-saving devices in rice cultivation, on the monetarization of wages and agrarian inputs, and on the commercial sale of yields (Aass 1986; Hart 1986; Hüsken 1984; Maurer 1984, 1986; Schweizer 1987, forthcoming). The roots of these monetary and commercial developments in the Javanese village economy reach far back into the past (Breman 1983; Carey 1986; Elson 1984; Knight 1982; Svensson 1983). But in the present these changes gain pace. There is evidence, too, that in the field of political relations the diffuse patron-client ties between village officials and the inhabitants in some places yield to a more rationalized, selfish style of leadership (Keeler 1985).

The rise and significance of the opium trade from India to China are well understood by historians, but the trade's decline and disappearance have received very little attention. This article explores the motives which led Britain to agree to phase out its opium exports to China and the part which the government of India played in determining this policy.

Japan's involvement as a donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA) can be traced back, historically, to post-second world war arrangements for war damage reparations. At that time, the late 1940s, early 1950s, Japan was itself a low-income country, whose industries had suffered widespread dislocation and ruin due to war. Yet, the new post-war Japanese government, eager to work its way back into the comity of nations, undertook to make reparation for the destruction of economic assets in the territories that had been fought over. The reparations agreements concluded in the 1950s involved many of the developing countries on the Asia/Pacific Rim—reflecting the pattern of wartime conquest—some of them independent, others still under European colonial rule. Thailand and the People's Republic of China were excluded from reparations, the former due to its wartime co-belligerent status, the latter since it was unrecognized by Japan, ironically in view of their subsequent emergence as the largest recipients of Japanese bilateral ODA by the 1980s. In the event, by the time Japanese reparations had become available, reconstruction assistance had already begun to give way to post-reconstruction support for public sector economic growth. A greater part of these reparations consisted of deliveries of Japanese capital goods and equipment, e.g., cargo ships, through transfer mechanisms designed to match Japan's re-emergent industrial export capabilities with the import requirements of Southeast Asian economic development.By way of contrast with the contemporary Western orientation in development assistance to Asia, driven by a 'Big Push' syndrome towards relatively large-scale infrastructure projects through such mechanisms as the Colombo Plan, the Japanese experience with reparations provided from the outset a closer strategic integration between Japan's international donor obligations, on the one hand, and its export strategy and dynamic competitive advantages in international trade, on the other.

In the wake of their rapid advance into Southeast Asia after 8 December 1941, the Japanese began to implement a new monetary policy in the region to replace the long-established Western financial order that was being swept away. The purpose of this article is to discuss aspects of this monetary policy, in particular how it was carried out in regards to Thailand during the first year of the war, the period during which Thai–Japan wartime relations became established. In the wake of their rapid advance into Southeast Asia after 8 December 1941, the Japanese began to implement a new monetary policy in the region to replace the long-established Western financial order that was being swept away. The purpose of this article is to discuss aspects of this monetary policy, in particular how it was carried out in regards to Thailand during the first year of the war, the period during which Thai-Japan wartime relations became established. With the outbreak of war the most urgent need of the Japanese in their relations with Thailand was to convert that country into a suitable rear area for their campaign in Malaya and for the one upcoming against Burma. To this end the Japanese and Thai governments signedon 8 December an agreement permitting Japanese forces to pass through Thai territory to attack Malaya; but equally important the agreement also stipulated that Thailand would afford the Japanese forces all necessary convenience for their passage through Thailand. This stipulation was the key that opened the way for the Japanese to pursue their plans towards Thailand. By passage, of course, the Japanese did not simply mean the travel of their army through Thai territory to attack Malaya and later Burma (although superficially this is what was implied).

In 1874 Itagaki Taisuke and other critics of the newly established Meiji government submitted a petition demanding a popularly elected national assembly. This is said to be the origin of the Liberty and People's Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō). Around the same time a number of local political leaders intensified their campaign for the creation of village assemblies. Although the demand for local autonomy in the early Meiji period was both deep-felt and widespread, only a few scholars, notably Neil Waters, have diverted their attention from Itagaki and other political activists and thinkers at the center. An examination of Meiji local politics is nonetheless essential to understand Japan's modern political development.

The completion in 1986 of the Documents diplomatiques français, 1932–1939 permits a review of French Far Eastern policy during that troubled time characterized by J.-B. Duroselle as ‘la décadence.’ This massive documentary collection, however, still dose not provide a full picture of the forces which shaped French East Asian policy in the years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Understandably focused upon European developments, it begins and ends, from the Far Eastern perspective, in medias res; that is, after the outbreak of the Manchurian crisis and before the Japanese occupation of Indochina. Moreover, like other compilations of what statesmen and diplomats said to each other, this one slights economic factors and, though to a lesser extent, the role of public opinion. Even taken in their own terms, the documents perhaps reveal more about what others said and did to the French than about what they themselves accomplished. That points to a more fundamental problem, for one can question whether anything so gelatinous as the French responses or lack thereof to developments largely beyond their control can even be described as ‘policy.’ Still, although much more work in archives and private papers will be necessary before the entire story can be pieced together, these documents do shed light on what passed for French policy in East Asia during the years before the outbreak of World War II.

The ‘downward sweep’ of Japan after Pearl Harbor has been widely noted for its long-term effects in Southeast Asia. The rule of the established colonial masters was shattered, and those failing to escape disappeared into the camps of the Kempeitai. In Burma and Java, in particular, Japanese rule promoted local organizations, local administratiors, the indigenous language and, in Burma, a ‘national’ government and a ‘national’ army, under Japanese supervision: the one thing Japan did not bring was freedom and independence. Yet the greatly-increased social mobility and political, military and administrative experience had long-term consequences: none of the post-war attempts at colonial restoration proved viable.