In Treasures among Men; the Fudai Daimyo in Tokugawa Japan (Yale, 1974), Harold Bolitho has discussed the role of the fudai daimyo in the functioning and collapse of the Tokugawa polity, arguing in fine that their conduct during the 1860's was dictated by their concern for the security of their han. This concern, he argues, led them to refuse to assist the bakufu even in its moment of supreme crisis. He sees this outcome as the final expression of an enduring situation in which the interests of fudai daimyo were in permanent conflict with the interests of the bakufu.

In China, as in the West, fiction is a late development in the literary scene and serious fiction criticism is correspondingly a recent endeavor. The similarity goes further in the case of the historical novel, which critics of Chinese and Western fiction alike have either consciously avoided or customarily regarded with critical disfavor. In the Chinese case, the San-Kuo chih yen-i (The Three Kingdoms) is the only historical novel which has received constant serious attention, but many of its features are exceptions rather than rules.2 One will look in vain for anything as essential as a general survey of elements basic to works of this genre.3 For a genre so numerically significant, the unavoidable sketchiness of such a preliminary outline as the present one may be compensated for by a selective coverage. Here the main concerns are the most important themes and certain related contextual characteristics.

Turbulent years before and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 have been one of the most extensively written pages of Japanese history. Much work has been carried out on the revolutionary samurai and the aspiring merchants who implemented the upheaval. Curiously, however, revolts and rebellions which erupted at more popular levels, such as peasant uprisings and urban mass disturbances during this period, have drawn little scholarly attention. According to the literature survey of Irwin Scheiner, no work on Japanese peasant uprisings has been published English since Hugh Borton's study in 1938.

Whether the story about the Ch'ên Kuang-jui, the father of Tripitaka, belongs to the “original” version of the Hsi-yu chi (chapter 9 in modern editions of the novel) is a problem which has occupied the attention of scholars and editors for at least two and a half centuries. If we accept the conclusions of Professor Glen Dudbridge, who has done in recent years the most intensive and impressive examination of the novel's textual history, it would appear that the best textual support is lacking for this segment of the Hsi-yu chi to be considered authentic, as it is not found in the earliest known version of the hundred-chapter novel: the edition published by Shih-tê-t'ang of Chin-ling in 1592. The numerous clashes of details between this version and later ones, most notably the glaring inconsistency found in the later editions which put Ch‘ên Kuang-jui’s assumption of his public career in the thirteenth year of the reign of the T'ang Emperor, T'ai-tsung, the same year when Ch‘ên’s son, Hsiian-tsang, was to have been commissioned to begin his westward journey, further evidence editorial changes and faulty re-arrangements. In the judgment of Dudbridge, chapter nine of the novel may well have been introduced by the late Ming compilerfrom Canton, Chu Ting-ch'ên.

Revolutionary mass upheaval generally weakens the people's respect for authority, law, and discipline; and it brings in its wake social, economic, and political disorders, facilitating the establishment of an authoritarian regime. The French Revolution was based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but the destruction of the old social and political fabric, and the failure to institutionalize the new ideas, led Frenchmen to search for “the man of genius destined at once to carry on and to abolish the revolution.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also followed by several years of civil war, which led to the establishment of the ruthless totalitarian regime of Stalin, itself reminiscent of the Thermidorian Reaction. In Algeria, Cuba, China, and North Vietnam, successful mass armed revolutions have been consolidated only because of their one-party dictatorships.

In 1876 Baba Tatsui, then a young twenty-six year old man who had just completed two years' study of English law in London, published a booklet there called The Treaty Between Japan and England. It was a remarkable work in that it was destined to become the source most frequently cited by many Meiji publicists and later historians who attacked the inequity of the extraterritorial regime in Japan. In this work Baba wrote that it was evidently to the interest of British consuls in Japan “to protect their countrymen rather than to prosecute or convict them,” and that the majority of the English residents in Japan had “strong prejudices against the natives of the country … and … against the native government. …” These facts alone, Baba went on to say, “show that the judges of the consular courts are not impartial, and therefore it is difficult to see how justice can be done in a court of justice where the judges have so much interest for the one and prejudice against the other.” In a similar vein in 1893 the Kaishintō Tōhō, a bi-monthly periodical published by the Kaishintō, commented: “Injustice is the general rule in these [British and American consular] tribunals: justice is rare. Nevertheless, when they render just judgments we applaud their justice, hoping thereby to encourage them in the exercise of that quality.” Thus arose in the late nineteenth century the farreaching generalization that the Western consular tribunals in Japan were so partial—toward Westerners and against Japanese—that they seldom rendered even-handed justice.

Bali has long been reputed for its capacity to maintain a distinctive social and cultural “Balineseness” in face of sweeping change. One persistent component on anthropological lists of Balinese institutions has been the island's “ancestor cult,” often presented as a static custom of principally theological significance. This paper portrays some complexities in the formulation, maintenance, and recent intensification of ancestor lore in a particular group through time. Our subject is a large Sudra group in Tabanan district: how its members explain the origin of their house in the classical era, account for its trials and accomplishments during the Dutch colonial period (1906–1948), and with little sense of discontinuity justify its role in modern Balinese politics, from Indonesian independence through the national elections of 1971. We first detail legends, rituals, and stories—cultural forces in their own right–celebrating central ancestors and leaders from the group's classical, colonial, and modern history. We then describe practical social, political, and economic matters indirectly involved in these traditions. Finally, general conclusions are drawn regarding the significance of ancestors in Balinese society, where legends and rituals commemorating specific deceased leaders are no mere antiquarian escape from the present nor a pale reflection of more practical realities, but an active commentary on, and a contributing force to, a group's internal dynamics and self-esteem.

Recent studies of peasant rebellions in colonial countries have tended to focus attention on the persons who rebelled. The egregious conditions that aroused their indignation, the social and economic transformations that gave them the capacity to act, the leaders who came forward to mobilize them—these are the questions most commonly asked to explain peasant militancy and rebellion.

This perspective can yield only a partial view, for it leaves in the shadows one of the two major actors in such a confrontation; the regime. It is too easily assumed that the fate of traditional or colonial regimes is sealed, and need elicit little interest except as a source of grievances. Yet comparing regimes that have experienced rebellion with those that have not reveals that some have dealt much more successfully with modernization than others. While the attempts of some to modernize institutions only exacerbated the grievances of their restless populations, others have developed new capabilities for ruling. Indeed, the capabilities of political systems are probably more various than either the grievances or the capabilities of the groups challenging them.

It seems almost axiomatic to state that the 1970 elections in Pakistan produced a revolution through the ballot box. In the Punjab and East Pakistan, large victories—in terms of seats won—were given respectively to two political parties (the People's Party and the Awami League) which based their platforms on essentially secular issues and which were able to rout those groupings rooted largely in religiopolitical programs. In the other provinces of West Pakistan the picture was less clear. While in the Punjab traditional land-based elites were defeated, the People's Party win in the Sind appeared to be an amalgam of secular, economic issues with traditional strengths of the landed wadera class. In Baluchistan and the Frontier, both the results and the means by which they were attained were mixed.

Though there have been in China since 1949 occasional deviations in the policy regarding family life, some ideals enunciated at the start of the revolutionary regime have remained constant. The dominant policy has been that the family should be retained and its strengths used. However, family commitments should not interfere with commitments to the state or the collective, and within the family feudal customs should be eliminated. The parents' stranglehold over the lives of their children should be broken. Children should be able to marry without parental interfence. There should be no buying and selling of brides, and big, ostentatious and wasteful wedding feasts should be stopped. In an effort to limit births, marriages should be delayed to age twenty-three for girls and age twenty-five for boys in rural areas. As part of the program for more equal treatment of women, parents should show no favoritism towards boys. Women like men should work in the fields, and nurseries should be established so as to help women join in productive work. At more sporadic intervals, young children have been urged to teach their parents about the thought of Mao Tse-tung in order to rid them of old feudal ideas.

In recent years, several empirically based studies of blue collar and white collar Japanese workers—notably by Taira, Hazama, Marsh and Mannari, Cole, and Evans—have resulted in a substantial “revision” of our understanding of Japanese labor markets.2 These studies have disputed previous claims that Japanese workers commit themselves irrevocably to their employers and have shown that familiar economic and non-economic incentives affect marketplace behavior. Moreover, while these studies recognize the importance of paternalistic practices in shaping employment relations, they prove that these practices are not simple reflections of traditional values.

When teaching Tokugawa intellectual history, I consistently encounter a question that is at once deceptively simple yet so difficult to respond to in a convincing and substantial way. Why do Japanese historians argue that Confucianism had an important impact on Tokugawa society, when geographical, political, and ethical realities in Japan were so vastly different from those in China? There is, of course, good reason to be perplexed, I reply, and offer a generalization or two. Tokugawa society clearly was not “Sinified” as is sometimes implied; but, on the other hand, the imprint of Confucianism on Tokugawa thought and culture was undeniably deep. Although the picture is sometimes overdrawn, Japanese historians constantly refer to Confucianism as the “rationalizing” force that transformed Japan from a religious and ascetic culture to a bureaucratic and secular one. The same historians continue to debate the intellectual merit of Tokugawa Confucianism in Japan's modern culture, for while the precise ramifications are still controversial, there is little doubt as to the depth of the Tokugawa intellectual engagement with Confucian thought and of the profound legacy of that engagement for the modern history of Japan. Unfortunately, these generalizations, although helpful, do not add up to convincing historical instruction, a realization that has invariably left me searching for more cogent lines of interpretation and more detailed characterizations of Tokugawa thought.

Study of China in the Soviet Union has just experienced a decade of rapid growth and fundamental change. Until the early 1960's the overwhelming reality for Soviet specialists was the fact that the Chinese revolution had succeeded—China had joined the camp of Soviet allies building socialism. Under these conditions, interpretations of the society which emerged after 1949 and of the historic circumstances which gave rise to revolution reflected both a need to reaffirm doctrinal principles about the uniformities of history and a hesitancy to contradict official Chinese communist positions. By the mid-1960's these limitations had been removed. Soviet sinologists repudiated the previous period for the “uncritical use of tendentious Chinese materials” and switched abruptly to demonstrating what had gone wrong in China, i.e., the abnormalities of history. The search was begun for those exceptional qualities of China's past which had deflected its advance to socialism and before that to capitalism.

Madras City, founded in the mid-seventeenth century, was the earliest colonial port city established by the British in India. Like the other port cities of Asia which were the creation of European powers, Madras functioned primarily as a base for overseas trade. As it grew and developed, its morphological and spatial patterns were dictated by the presence of a western population which at first was exclusively trade-oriented, but over the centuries became involved in banking, business and administration. As the British shifted from their role as traders to rulers of the Indian Subcontinent, they added a new dimension to the cities they created—a municipal apparatus to monitor urban growth, to regulate the use of land, and to insure that certain areas, especially those where they resided, would receive adequate urban facilities. The cities they founded had certain characteristics: each contained a large indigenous populace, far outnumbering the colonial elite that was effectively in charge of urban development. The residential areas of these urban dwellers were spatially segregated from those of the Europeans, and more densely populated. Indigenous and colonial life-styles determined the nature of settlement patterns and, in turn, molded the form of the built environment.

The establishent of the Chinese rural people's commune in 1958 as a new political and economic organization has aroused considerable interest among observers. One important question in this regard has been the role the commune has played in China's modernization. Since China is committed to both “socialist transformation and construction,” modernization in China involves two tasks: revolution and development. As for China's rural problems, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards the commune as the best organization for achieving these two goals during its transition to communism. Yet the commune has undergone a series of changes as a result of interactions between the Party's revolutionary goals and its development requirements, presenting a microcosm of Chinese communism. This article is an attempt to account for changes and continuities in the political economy of the commune.

All forms of nationalism profess belief in the uniqueness and value of their particular national quintessence. But not all nationalist sentiments germinate in the decay of a tradition convinced of the cultural superiority and universality of its values. Chinese nationalism did. It developed, moreover, in a context in which the bungling monopoly of power of the alien Manchus as well as foreign aggression constantly tempted its exponents to appeal to racial distinctiveness. And it matured amidst the frustrations of prolonged political and societal chaos surrounding the Republican period, which provoked many nationalists eventually to resurrect the old assumption that a country's greatness should be defined in cultural terms, and to reassert the conviction that Confucian values were cosmic. Tai Chi-t‘ao was such a pioneer nationalist, whose career in politics was spent trying to create national unity through revolution, and whose efforts as an ideologue were directed at defining national unity in terms of Confucian universals. This made him a “conservative revolutionary,” whose commitment to nation found expression alternatively in militant action and in rationalizations for action in the name of traditional values.

On February 19, 1934, Chiang Kai-shek inaugurated the New Life Movement in Nanchang, Kiangsi, with the express goal of “revolutionizing” Chinese life. The Kuomintang leadership, holding the material and spiritual “degeneration” of the people responsible for China's continued crisis, decided at this time to launch a movement for hygienic and behavioral reform to revitalize the country. The movement was to signal the start of a new phase of Chinese history, one that was to be both conserving and revolutionary in spirit. It would achieve the most fundamental goals of the Chinese revolution without sacrificing native traditions. Nevertheless, the stress on the revival of native morality was the most striking aspect of the movement with its historical context, and endowed it with an aura of conservatism that overshadowed its revolutionary claims and has dominated its image since then. This image is somewhat misleading in its implication that the New Life Movement was the expression of a traditionalist upsurge in the Kuomintang during the Nanking Decade (1928–1937). The present study attempts a close analysis of New Life ideology—used here in the sense of a world view that underlay conceptions of politics and society—to demonstrate that the conservatism and the revolutionary claims of the New Life Movement must be taken equally seriously. The movement was conservative, but conservative in a very specific sense: far from being a reaffirmation of traditional Chinese political conceptions, it was fashioned by and in response to the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Its underlying spirit had greater affinity with modern counterrevolutionary movements than with political attitudes inherited from China's past. It was, in short, not a traditional but a modern response to a modern problem.

Socialization is “the process by which someone learns the ways of a given O society or social group so that he can function within it.” Socialization occurs in many different groups and settings, but in all societies, the first and usually the most important of these is the family. For this reason, family socialization has been of interest to scholars in several different disciplines using a variety of conceptual frameworks.

At the time of the Revolution of 1911, as many as ten million Chinese lived abroad. The great majority were poor coolies but a minority had already moved into the business pursuits for which they are well known today. Within this group, particularly in Southeast Asia, could be found a stratum of very wealthy merchants. Because few individuals viewed their expatriation as permanent but rather sought to identify with the homeland and its culture, there had been considerable interest in the events of the late Ch'ing period. It is widely assumed that the multitude actively opposed the Manchu regime and gave its support to the reform and revolutionary movements encouraged by K'ang Yu-wei and Sun Yat-sen. This traditional conclusion is, however, unfounded. Although most overseas Chinese had lost faith in Manchu leadership by 1909, only a small percentage took political action. In fact there was a time, forgotten by some historians, when prosperous merchants abroad wanted closer relations with the Ch'ing dynasty.