This paper focuses on the administration of Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippine Islands, 1965–1986, with particular emphasis on economic policy, fiscal abuse and monopolization during a period of martial law. The paper traces the resultant grave social consequences for the impoverished country, the consternation of the international banking community, and the eventual election to the presidency of Corazon Aquino in February, 1986.

The history of “area studies” as an academic discipline remains to be written. When it is, it will have to begin with a little known, historically important Japanese institution in China. That institution, Tōa Dōbun Shoin (East Asia Common Culture Academy or, after 1939, College) in Shanghai, 1900–1945, was established to train young Japanese for business and government service related to China. The author focuses upon the area studies dimensions of this pioneering institution's training and research program. After identifying five requisites of area studies training and research, he moves on to examine the origins, raison d'être, and meaning of Tōa Dōbun Shoin's program and to chart the phases of that program's development through each of the five requisites. In important ways, the center's curriculum, facilities, research, and publications equalled or surpassed the best American post–World War II language and area programs.

This article is a pioneering effort to analyze the establishment and consolidation of the T'ang dynasty in processual and systemic terms. The author argues that the extension of dynastic power over the North China Plain was a much more gradual process than hitherto thought, and he reinterprets early T'ang policies in this light. He then examines the structure of the dynasty, using the analytical framework developed by Amitai Etzioni. In the final section, the author considers the mature dynasty under Hsüan-tsung and suggests comparisons with the Roman Empire.

This article is a preliminary exploration of the impact of the world depression of the early 1930s on the rural populations of Southeast Asia. The first section of the essay considers some of the statistical evidence relating to living standards and economic welfare in rural Southeast Asia during the depression. The second section examines a number of factors—the alleged coercive power of the colonial state to secure its tax revenues and of rural capitalists to enforce debt and rent payments during a period of severe deflation—which would have had a major direct influence on levels of peasant consumption in the region in that period. The final section considers three indirect indications of changes in economic welfare in Southeast Asia during the depression: Indian immigration and repatriation rates; the import level of cotton piece goods; and mortality rates. The author advances two principal arguments: the sharp deflation of the early 1930s brought varying degrees of economic distress in the major export-oriented rural districts of Southeast Asia; but that even in those districts more severely affected by the crisis the decline in peasant welfare was markedly more modest than has hitherto been widely accepted.

Several studies of health and population dynamics in India are reviewed. The perspectives of the various authors include anthropology, public health, demography, and economics. The review focuses on how the studies contribute to the understanding of two areas of inquiry: the major social factors leading to continued ill health and high rates of population growth in India, and the major social factors constraining the use of available health and population programs. The argument presented in the conclusion is that, without simultaneous attention to social and gender inequality in relation to population and health, neither full understanding of their dynamics nor workable policies will eventuate.

Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, edited by J. F. Richards, is a courageous attempt to survey late medieval and early modern monetary history on an appropriately global scale, while simultaneously representing the fragmentation of the present state of knowledge on the subject. Asian history has been particularly subject to an a priori compartmentalization that has hindered comparison and prevented appreciation of the elaborate connections and dependencies developing among different regions during this period; Moreover, the various ways in which flows of precious metals have been explained merely confirm this compartmentalization, both by neglecting other, central aspects of monetary history and by ignoring the wider historical questions to which it is inseparably linked. By supplementing the approach to precious metals with a parallel focus on the vigorous trades in less precious monetary media, it becomes possible to rephrase the problem in terms of infrastructural societal conditions in different regions, which in the first place permitted trade flows to take place. In this respect, we need to dissolve the hard frontiers separating the conventional units of discussion and to see international commerce, and a wide range of different regional developments, as part and parcel of an increasingly complex, many-levelled web of interactive stimuli, which now needs to be reconstructed, debated, and researched.