Civilization, it has been said, is the management of complexity. One ingredient of complexity is the plurality of social groups divided by language, race, religion, caste, and class. The political arrangements that enable plural groups to live together is one aspect of civic management.

There is a sense in which urbanization recapitulates civilization. More than seventy per cent of Bombay's people came from outside the city, most of them probably from rural villages. When they arrived, they found their old affiliations and loyalties supplemented, sometimes challenged, by new ones. The important village affiliations—it would be misleading to call them memberships or associations—were made at birth and sanctioned by ritual and long usage. Urban affiliations, including the vital ones of job, union, and “brotherhood” (for men without families sharing the same tenement room), are made by choice and derive their rightness not from faith but from their serviceability to the city dweller. Traditionally, it has been the intrinsic problem as well as the opportunity of cities to bring hitherto isolated tribes, religions, and trades into interaction. Both V. Gordon Childe and Ralph Turner declare that the resolution of this problem yields civilization. In a limited sense, it is always being solved in big cities: one can study it in caste interplay in the managing agencies of the Bombay textile industry, in the system of the Catholic church, or in the precinct organization of Boston. In this study, I will call this aspect of urbanization the competition of loyalties.

Violence, non-violent civil disobedience, and mass demonstrations have been a part of Indian politics since independence; indeed, even before 1947. Occasionally these outbursts are truly spontaneous, and, when they are, they may be accounted for by the hypothesis that more discontent exists in Indian society than has been expressed by organized groups. But such anomic movements have been rare in India since 1947, although mob violence during the days of partition may be an illustration par excellence of this phenomenon in Indian life.

The Indian Municipal Elections of 1959 raised in compelling form the question of the relationship between urban life and political radicalism; radical parties of both the left and the right gained ground in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. In Calcutta, radicalism already had a long history. The Madras results, when put in the context of the state's political history, raise further questions: is urban life an experience or a location; are city and village two different and separate worlds whose politics are discontinuous; or do the politically salient experiences of urban and rural people in some measure overlap?

The immediate purpose of this study is to describe an interesting and rather bizarre episode in nineteenth century Chinese-British relations. It concerns the so-called “Canton City Question” of the 1840's, and I hope to show that the traditional accounts of this incident may have been misleading and, in some cases, inaccurate.

The institutional foundations of the Tokugawa daimyo have been obscured by the lack of insight which historians have traditionally shown into the history of the Ashikaga period and, in particular, into the late Ashikaga, or Sengoku, age. Like the Dark Ages in Europe, this chapter of Japanese history has been accepted in historiography as a dark and formless era of war and trouble. Japanese historians have dismissed the Sengoku period as a time of ge-koku-jō when the political order was capriciously turned upside down by unworthy leaders. The colorful Western historian, James Murdoch, has heaped his most caustic invectives upon the main figures in Ashikaga history. Of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate he claimed, “Takauji may indeed have been the greatest man of his time, but that is not saying very much, for the middle of the fourteenth century in Japan was the golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities.”1 To Murdoch the Sengoku period was a “vile” age when the Japanese people showed, as he put it, a “lust for war and slaughter … utterly beyond human control,” and only the timely arrival of the “great trio” of daimyo, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, saved the day for Japan.

In recent years, the Philippines, along with numerous other “developing” nations of the world, has experienced an accelerated change in many of its basic social institutions. To put it simply, we can describe these changes as part of the transition from a traditionalized, agriculturally oriented socio-economic structure to one more in line with the goals and institutions of a modern industrial society. The actual situation, however, is more complex, and a number of other factors not necessarily related to industrialization have been involved. These include changes in the demographic structure, shifting loci of political power, and the “demonstration effect” of numerous external agencies which have widened both taste and aspiration horizons.

Despite the recurrent ravages of fire and earthquake and the devastation of the Pacific War, a sizeable volume of documentary material survives from Japan's Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Although its government archives may not be as large as those of the older centralized states of western Europe, the written record of the daily life of the Japanese people compares favourably with that of any other people over the same period. Several factors have counterbalanced Japan's unusually high incidence of natural calamities. At the time, literacy was more widespread than in most other countries and paper was plentiful and reasonably cheap. The “Tokugawa system” was effectively designed to reduce social, occupational, and geographic mobility to a minimum, so that, particularly in rural areas, a given family occupied the same station and fulfilled the same role for a long period. To a lesser extent, this was true even of commercial families. The popular idea of the impermanence of trade as a vocation was true only relative to the ideally almost immutable situation in agriculture. Strangely enough, it was the daimyo, members of the highest class, who, at least in the earlier period, were most mobile. Because of the continuity of family roles over long periods, records of, say, the late seventeenth century still had some relevance for descendants in the mid-nineteenth century, and so they tended to be preserved. Particularly in cities and towns, the rapid changes associated with the breakup of the Tokugawa system were undoubtedly accompanied by the loss of many records.