Before expounding the fundamental provisions of my report, I deem it necessary to make some preliminary remarks. In my opinion, they will help bring to light some reasons for the situation that took shape in the foreign trade of Russia and Britain with Asia in the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries.

The British Empire's colonial possession of India for many decades of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century largely determined the Empire's economic and political pattern. Numerous books and articles on this subject have been written and still more speeches have been delivered, but the most clear-cut and all-round assessment of the significance for Britain of all-out exploitation of the Indian subcontinent and its population was given by Lord Curzon.

Soviet writers have often claimed that there was no Russian threat to India. They have pointed, correctly, to the circumstance that no invasion attempt was ever launched and have stated that those projects which were canvassed were no more than the ideas of hotheaded generals and the like, were never adopted by the Russian Government and cannot be taken seriously. Further, they have pointed to the rejection of approaches made to Russian authorities by discontented Indians who sought Russian assistance in overthrowing British rule in India. Talk of the defence of British India, with its implication that there was a genuine Russian threat to be warded off, they argue, is more than misleading; it was a deception practised by nineteenth-century British rulers of India to disguise expansionist British aims in India and, beyond the Indian frontier, in the Persian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkestan, and it is now a device employed by modern British historians to conceal the true nature of British imperialism in India and to blacken the reputation of Russia. They do not accept that British statesmen and military officers could genuinely have believed in the possibility of a Russian invasion of India; and they suppose that British historians are not so incompetent as to think that nineteenth-century Britons did believe that the threat was real.

As Britain saw it, trade was not the prime motivating force for Russian expansion in east Asia or, put another way, the Russian frontiersmen were not driven by the actual amount of their trade there or its future potentialities. While Russia was primarily concerned with the tea trade over land frontiers, Britain was concerned with the seaborne commerce of China. The customs revenue paid to China in the year 1894 worked out as follows:

Judging from the returns of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Organization, British ships carried 83.5% of China's total trade. But Britain's commercial dominance affected her political stance because she wanted to preserve China's stability for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. This was at the root of the political tensions between Britain and Russia which emerged in China after 1860 and especially those which derived from the spate of railway building which took place from 1890 onwards. It would be foolish to deny that intense rivalry did exist in the area from time to time or that detailed observations of the actions of the one were regularly conducted by the other—what we should now call ‘intelligence operations’. But what I shall suggest in this paper is that, despite all the admitted antagonism and suspicion between Britain and Russia in east Asia, Britain regularly made efforts to reach accommodations with Russia in north-east Asia.

In a recent and thought-provoking article, Dr Lakshmi Subramanian has forcefully made the case that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the history of the West Coast of India in general and the history of the city of Surat in particular are explained by the rise of what she terms the ‘Anglo-Bania order’, namely ‘a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay’.More specifically, Dr Subramanian claims that the rise of the Anglo-Bania order is at the roots of the first Hindu—Muslim communal clash about which a reasonably good documentation has survived, namely the ‘great tumult’ of August 1795, when ‘the lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books’.

Untouchable agricultural servants in the Indian countryside are among the lowliest people on earth. Such illiterate folk leave no written record to enable historians to comprehend their world from their own angle of vision. To write their history from below, historians have to search for contemporaneous observations which—even though made by an outsider—show some degree of empathy with their consciousness. The gifted novelist is able to enter recesses of the mind which elude the most acute scientific investigator. Among the several Bengali novels which have taken for their theme the wretched of the earth, perhaps the most empathetic is the Kahar Chronicle of Tarashankar Banerjee which thankfully avoids painting their life in unrelieved black. In Hansuli Banker Upakatha, the novelist, a small landlord in Birbhum district, descends to the bottom of rural society to give us—as far as possible for a gifted novelist of gentry origin—a view from within.

Though local and international trade is a main point on the agenda of any government and though economists build elaborate models around trade statistics, the social consequences of trade have hardly ever been explored in full by social scientists. This is particularly the case in Thailand where only a few studies of limited scope exist on traders, businessmen and markets. There is a reason for this lack of attention to trade. The series of post-war village studies, carried out mainly by anthropologists in isolated villages, stressed intra-village relations and neglected as a consequence larger networks of trade. The most important study on trade during that time was probably the work of Skinner (1962, 1967) on the Bangkok Chinese in which, however, ethnic relations rather than trade and business constituted the main theme of the study.

Although often well-written and carefully researched, many recent studies of the political history of Colonial Malaya seem dated. This is not to say that they are generally pro-British; nevertheless, when considered alongside historical work on many other areas of Southeast Asia, the ‘British Malayan’ histories appear ‘colonial’ in their preoccupations and perspectives. Why does so much Malayan history have this character? One cannot point to a lack of talent.

The movement to abolish the unequal treaties was the cause célèbre of Chinese nationalism after the First World War. It was an extension of the late Qing movement to retrieve the rights and interests (shouhui liquan yundong) that had been lost to the powers over the decades. Whereas the quintessence of the late Qing campaign was economic nationalism and the means it employed peaceful, the post-war drive was highly political and at times accompanied by a degree of violence. The Chinese determination, strengthened by Germany's and Austria's relinquishment of their treaty status, was a bond that united the whole nation from Beijing to Guangzhou (Canton) despite their domestic political differences.