The only Welshman to occupy 10 Downing Street, David Lloyd George, stood well above his contemporaries as the most dominant figure in British politics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He was unconventional in behavior for he did not fit in any obvious category. One biographer described him as a “rogue elephant among British prime ministers” and there was undoubtedly a highly adventuresome, almost buccaneering quality about him. He seemed larger than life, with political abilities that entranced and dazzled as well as deep failings that aroused controversy and outrage. No one, it seems, can be entirely neutral on the subject of Lloyd George. He is, as sometimes happens, a historical character who polarizes opinion. Regardless of how he is viewed, he is undeniably one of the most interesting and colorful politicians of the last century. In comparing the two best-known war leaders of his era, Lord Beaverbrook remarked that “Churchill was perhaps the greater man but Lloyd George was more fun.”

The length, diversity and controversial nature of Lloyd George's political career explains why he continues to be the object of scrutiny and review. The number of biographies or monographs dealing with aspects of his political career are so numerous that they would easily fill a volume. Yet, curiously enough, his work between 1916 and 1918, although invariably praised by recent scholars, has generally received only superficial investigation.

Asia, a pivotal region in the world economy, is at an important cross-road in its development path. Having successfully integrated into the global economy over the last five decades through outward-oriented development strategies, the region has embarked on a process of closer regional cooperation and integration. Several factors–the spread of production networks, improvements in infrastructure, falling trade barriers, and technological progress–have spurred the process. One key challenge for an interdependent Asia remains how to strengthen and spread the benefits of the process of regional cooperation and integration. An essential element is effective national strategies for regional cooperation and integration.

The way Asian economies develop and implement effective approaches to regional cooperation and integration is insufficiently understood. Using a set of country cases based on a similar framework, the study examines how each country's integration with its neighbors and more distant regional economies might be improved. Five of these cases are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three are from East Asia (the People's Republic of China, Thailand, and Singapore). The country cases illustrate the diversity of Asian development experience and offer lessons for other countries and regions interested in developing national strategies to foster regional integration.

The study indicates four important lessons: (i) integrate with a large neighboring economy, (ii) emphasize market orientation in regional strategy, (iii) tailor the policy mix to fit national circumstances, and (iv) involve the private sector in developing regional strategy.

Born into a wealthy Edinburgh family, Fraser travelled in the East for both business and pleasure. Connected with India through his brother who was an employee of the East India Company, in 1821 he visited Persia on the way home to England. Arriving in Isfahan he proceeded to Meshed with the intention of continuing to Bukhara, but was prevented from doing so by the political situation in Central Asia. Instead he journeyed along the Caspian shores, thence from Tabriz to Baghdad via Kurdistan. These journeys provided material for two books of travel: Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in the Years 1821 and 1822 (1825) and Travels and Adventures in the Persian Provinces on the Southern Banks of the Caspian Sea (1826). Fraser returned to Persia a decade later to gather political intelligence, publishing A Winter's Journey from Constantinople to Tehran in 1838, and Travels in Kurdistan, Mesopotamia etc in 1840. George. N. Curzon praised Fraser for his ‘admirable books of travel’ that displayed ‘broad acquaintance with and faithful portraiture of every aspect of modern Persian life’ (1892: 1. 22, 24). However, in pointing out the critical view he took of the Qajars, especially the Princes he met on his journeys through the Caspian region, Denis Wright counts Fraser an early exponent of the ‘jaundiced view of the Persians [which] helped to sow seeds of resentment and misunderstanding between the two countries’ (1977: 154).

Fantasy Feasts; or, The Divine Irreference of Images

In a review essay published several years ago in the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick, the premier historian specialising in Stalinism, declared, ‘While the Soviet regime may be said to have discouraged consumerism by keeping goods scarce, it was not ideologically on the side of asceticism. On the contrary, future socialism was always conceived in terms of plenty; according to the regime's Socialist Realist perception of the world, the meager supply of goods in the present was only a harbinger of the abundance to come.’ Like the Utopia of universal egalitarian happiness, however, abundance remained in the ever-receding radiant future, rendering imposed asceticism an empirical reality for the overwhelming majority throughout the Soviet era. That prolonged deferral is eloquently signaled by the ubiquitous slogan K kommunizmu! as well as by K izobiliiu! (‘Towards Abundance!’), the title of the introduction to the 1953 edition of A Book of Tasty and Healthy Food/Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche, and countless other instances of ‘K + x’, which all invoked the Soviet rhetoric of ‘en route to’, ‘moving towards’, and similar circumlocutions that for more than six decades promised without delivering.

A strong and responsible opposition is a prerequisite to the viable functioning of parliamentary democracy, which is based on a party system. Benjamin Disraeli noted as far back as 1844 that ‘no government can be long secure without a formidable opposition’. The role of the opposition in a parliamentary system of government should be not just to act as a ‘government-in-waiting’, but also check any arbitrary tendencies of the government in power. An effective opposition performs a restraining role vis-à-vis the party in power, preventing it from transgressing its functional limits and simultaneously posing a constant challenge by promising a practical alternative. What should be emphasized is that the opposition should be a responsible one to be truly effective. In some well organized democracies, the role of the opposition is sometimes reduced to a mere tokenism as a result of long-term dominance by a single party. In others, particularly in post-colonial Third World states with long legacies of authoritarian rule, the opposition is deliberately kept weak by the dominant party, which perpetuates its power through unfair means while keeping up a semblance of electoral rule. Historically, parliamentary opposition has appeared to function better in systems where there are two major parties. In multiple party states, there may be more than one opposition party, and such parties may have little in common and therefore, a minimal desire to unite. When coalitions occur, these could prove fragile because of different aims and objectives of the constituent parties.

Thomas emerged from humble origins to become in 1930 the first Westerner to cross the Empty Quarter in Arabia. He fought on the Western Front in 1914–15 and survived. Transferred to Mesopotamia in the last two years of the war he caught the eye of Arnold Talbot Wilson, then acting civil commissioner in the Persian Gulf. Wilson – to whom he dedicated Arabia Felix – was the inspiration behind his later travels in Arabia. As a traveller Thomas acted on his own initiative, dressed like the locals, and spoke the native tongue. Working in the sultanate of Oman he was able to make his extensive journeys into the interior of Oman ‘that contributed substantially to the geographical and ethnological knowledge of the region’ (DNB). Thomas sustained a successful career as a colonial officer: he was later a public relations officer in Bahrain, 1942–3, and Director of the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies.

From:

Arabia Felix (1938)

The issue as to who was the ‘real’ Bedouin and what his racial characteristics were exercised a number of European travellers such as Burton. The ethnological ‘research’ of skull-measuring which Thomas details in the following extract from Arabia Felix unfortunately cannot be disconnected from the practice of the pseudo-science pursued in Nazi Germany at almost the same time. But the piece also highlights interesting cultural differences between the African slaves and their Omani masters.

Stanley Cavell has repeatedly affirmed that in the example and teaching of John Austin he found his philosophical voice or “the track of it” and that this new-found voice was itself pitched toward “[bringing] the human voice back into philosophy.” Drawn down this path in his philosophical calling, Cavell soon found himself attracted to a body of romantic literature, in the breath of whose being he, in turn, heard an aspiration toward “the recovery of the (of my) (ordinary) (human) voice.” Cavell's “sense that the voice [had] become lost in thought” eventually led to his remarkable contention that the splendors of especially the female voice in opera perform a fervent act of thinking, whose provoking condition is the Emersonian difference between “the world I converse with in the city and the farms…[and] the world I think,” and whose plight is to be “stretched” between the (actual) world from which one is “to be seen” standing amid all our sad circumstance and the other (perfectionist) world “from which to be heard” and “to which one releases or abandons one's spirit.” On the strength of his long investment in the thinking Emerson preaches and practices as an “abandonment of and to language and the world,” Cavell dares to call opera an arena of thoughtful struggle where we “[stop] to think (say not for action but for passion), as if to let our needs recognize what they need,” and where “the most forbearing [and perhaps the “most thoughtful”] act of thinking…is to let true need, say desire be manifest and be obeyed.”

Among the most vulnerable citizens of the new Soviet state in its first decade were its children: abandoned by their families who for various reasons were not able to care for them, displaced from their homes by the Civil War, or simply lost in the constant migrations (the rural population going into big cities in search of a better life, or people leaving the cities for the villages, hoping to find food), these ‘little comrades’ became the first targets of the Soviet project that sought to make the ‘new man’. Two fictional works of Soviet children‘s literature-both of which confirmed the success of revolutionary rebirth-became testaments to the struggle of the street children in the early days of the Revolution: SHKID Republic (Respublika SHKID, 1926), by Grigory Belykh and Leonid Panteleev; and Pedagogical Poem (Pedagogicheskaia Poema, 1933,1936), by Anton Makarenko. The first, written by two former delinquents, describes the rigorous life in the school for young criminal offenders that bore Dostoevsky‘s name (the abbreviation SHKID comes from the Russian shkola imeni Dostoevskogo-‘Dostoevsky School’). It was a highly romanticized picture of life in the ‘republic’ where self-governance and trust were integral parts of human existence, and it celebrated the freedom and creativity of its young citizens.

What Vikram Seth says of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can be said with equal justification about his book The Golden Gate – ‘like champagne/Its effervescence stirs my brain’ (5.5). This wonderful artefact, ‘tour de force of tour de forces’ (John Hollander), ‘the Great California Novel’ (Gore Vidal on dust-jacket), ‘the perfect book of the 1980's’ (publisher's blurb)–in 594, fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter – is certainly, to use a phrase from The New York Times review, ‘a splendid achievement’ (quoted in Leslie, 4). Indeed, The Golden Gate has generally received high praise as a zesty, trendy, scintillating and warm portrayal of modern Californian life, ‘an up-to-date tale of San Francisco's “Yuppiedom'‘ (Ionnone, 54).

In this chapter I shall look at the early reception of the novel to argue that The Golden Gate, much more than these things, is a sort of enquiry into the meaning of life in the contemporary world; that it is, above all, a book about love, pacifism, tolerance and compassion. What emerges is not a celebration of Yuppiedom, but a severe critique and rejection of it. In short, I find the book anti-materialistic and, ultimately, ‘spiritual’ in the values that it propounds.

Democracy and democratic governments have been the subjects of much scholarly attention both in India and elsewhere in the world. This focus on democracy may be due to the success of democracy both as an ideal, and as a set of political institutions in a large number of countries, including underdeveloped countries of the world. Whether as an ideal or as a set of institutions that enables the realization of ends, it is the ability of the democratic political process to allow political principals to participate, directly or indirectly, in shaping their destiny, that accounts for the popularity of democratic governance. Even in countries where democratic forms of government do not exist, there is an aspiration among citizens to realize it. In fact, in the recent Freedom House Survey, about 123 countries have been categorized as partial or complete democracy. At the same time, there is disillusionment with the practice of democracy – a gap between the expectation and the outcome of democratic governance.

In actualizing the ends of democracy, political institutions play a pivotal role. In most post-colonial societies like India, the process of social change and transformation has been initiated through institutions. Political institutions are thus both agents and representatives of societal transformation. As such, institutional composition and functioning provide a good indication of the extent of democratization. In this context, three aspects of democracy – permeability of institution, representativeness and efficiency need to be understood as separate categories.

India adopted Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in 1991; since then economic growth rocketed and, according to the Planning Commission and the World Bank, poverty indicators drastically declined. This ‘official’ decline contradicts the figures on agricultural crisis, hunger, food consumption and undernutrition, which are undoubtedly worsening. This paper gives an explanation for this apparent contradiction through an analysis of poverty figures and an assessment of the related methodologies. The aim of this paper is to show why consumption-based measurements are not fully reliable to measure poverty in India.

This paper is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the decline of official poverty figures in the world and India in particular as a consequence of liberalization. The second section illustrates India's agricultural crisis and its dramatic consequences for the country's food security. The third section explains the technical errors of poverty measurements while the fourth section analyses the theoretical shortcomings below these methodologies. Finally the fifth section, showing the results of field work in three villages of rural Tamil Nadu, demonstrates that consumption-based methodologies are inaccurate to measure the real trend of poverty.

THE DECLINE OF POVERTY

The Apparent Decline of Poverty in a Globalized Economy

Since 1990, poverty – measured as the percentage of people living in families which earn or consume less than $1 per day – has drastically declined. Between 1990 and 2004, the poverty rate in developing countries fell from 31.6 per cent to 19.2 per cent, while the total number of people living in poverty fell from 1.25 billion in 1990 to 980 million in 2004 (UN, 2007).

Introduction

As in many other contemporary developing countries, Sri Lanka's economic policy regime in the 1960s and 1970s saw a gradual shift toward inward-looking dirigiste policies, prompted by deteriorating international terms of trade for its primary export commodities (tea, rubber, and coconuts). However, the country witnessed a marked shift in economic policy thinking from the late 1970s, when it adopted an outward-oriented liberal market economic policy regime, becoming the first country in South Asia region to do so. The policy program included many of the standards reforms of a structural adjustment program, including liberalization of trade and payments, rationalization of public expenditure, dismantling of controls on prices and interest rates, promotion of private sector development, promotion of foreign investment, and financial sector reforms.

The structural transformation of the Sri Lankan economy following the reforms—moving it away from a predominantly agricultural economy to one driven by industrial and services sector growth—set the pattern for its trade and investment links with the rest of the world. The emergence of an export-oriented garment industry strengthened Sri Lanka's trade and investment links with East Asia—as a major source of imports and foreign direct investment (FDI)—while its export interests were primarily focused on the developed countries in Europe and North America. Apart from the early emergence of the garments industry, industrial transformation has remained limited in the two decades of reform because Sri Lanka's investment climate has been hurt by unfavorable political and policy developments.

Calcutta has, for the past hundred years or more, been looked upon as the city to which thousands have travelled for education and employment. The founding of the Calcutta Madrassa (later Alia Madrassa) in October 1780 and the Calcutta University on 24 January 1857 by Warren Hastings, by the incorporation of an Act of the Legislative Council, established Calcutta as the centre of education in the east. These institutes of higher education attracted students from all over Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Orissa and many other states. Education, in the changed context of the post- Mutiny period, was the route through which many discovered the tools to create a new, and more desirable, identity. It was the key of access to employment, and thence to privileges that had been till then closed to many. With its numerous schools and colleges set up by either the Christian missionaries or the native wealthy landlords and later the government, with its mercantile promise and its colonial institutions of power, ‘no other Indian city dominated its hinterland as completely as Kolkata dominated Bengal’. People from the far-flung rural regions of Bengal journeyed to this distant centre of power, braving the terror of thugs and enduring the lack of proper inns along the way, the extremes of weather, the discomforts of transport.