Too often the thought and scholarship of Huang Zongxi (1610–95), a prominent Chinese intellectual and political activist of the Ming-Qing transition period, are treated in isolation, as though the man stood in a sphere above and apart from most other thinkers of his day. The greatness of his scholarly achievements and the incisiveness of his ideas are stressed, with little attempt to relate those to the accomplishments and ideas of his mentors and contemporaries. This approach has created the widespread impression that Huang was one of only three or four figures who had anything very original to say in the seventeenth century. But the more we study seventeenth-century thought, the more we recognize that Huang Zongxi's forte was less in originality than in a keen awareness, examination, and articulation of issues that were current in his time. The perpetuation of notions about Huang's creative singularity obstructs our understanding not only of his intellectual milieu but also of the man's own attitude toward progress in learning. I do not wish to challenge the idea that Huang was an outstanding intellectual of the later imperial era in China but to urge that he be viewed differently: as someone who placed in bold relief ideas that emerged in the late Ming period and brought to fruition in writings of enduring value various approaches to scholarship that had been gestating since the latter part of the sixteenth century.

This article traces the development of ethnic relations in West Java during the period of transition from local government to Dutch colonial rule. Changes in relations between Javanese and Chinese-origin elites provide its subject matter, the West Javanese principality of Cirebon its locale, and the half century preceding the massacre of the Chinese in Batavia by the Dutch East India company in 1740 its period.

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.

An estimated seven and a half million people died of starvation and related diseases in China, Vietnam, and India during the last half of the Second World War. This death toll reflected the severity with which the poor were affected by the combination of natural disaster, military imperative, political conflict, economic dislocation, and corruption that caused these famines. But famine mortality is also a function of the effectiveness of the relief system. The famines in China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, occurred in times of administrative disruption. During the Bengal famine of 1943, however, the central and provincial administrations were intact, if under strain, as the Japanese army tested the eastern defenses of India. Moreover, the Bengal government had recently revised the instructions for bringing relief to those affected by famine. The possibility of an ordered administrative response to the crisis means that the analysis of this operation provides an opportunity to make a contribution to the general understanding of famine relief.