Let me say at the outset that although I am an admirer of Weber, yet in my view the relation between kinds of religious ethic and economic (and political) activity is more open than Weber made it out to be. It is also my view that it is time we went beyond Weber because we have exhausted his ideas, and because we now have more and better evidence than he had.

Malayan labor and trade union policy at the eve of Merdeka (Independence) bore the indelible imprints of past crises and uneven development. Prior to the Second World War trade unions were outlawed in British Malaya, where labor policy limited itself to protecting workers from the more blatant social and economic evils as a means of encouraging immigration of needed manpower.1 By the end of the war and Japanese occupation, however, the hitherto transient Chinese and Indians had become transformed into a domiciled labor force, conscious of their organizational power and prepared to defend their interests.

Why did European countries abandon colonies after the Second World War? No acceptable theory exists to help us with this question—theory neither in the sense of conceptualizations which ‘map out the problem area and thus prepare the ground for its empirical investigation’, nor in the sense of a set of interconnected hypotheses about the specific reality of the end of colonialism which can be validated or refuted by empirical research. Lenin's classic work on imperialism develops powerful theoretical insights regarding the establishment, growth and nature of imperialism, but it does not refer directly to the end of the specific form of imperialism which concerns us here, namely colonialism, although one may infer from Lenin's work the very general proposition that imperialism disappears when capitalism is replaced by socialism. Imperialism as a consequence of capitalism is still with us today, yet colonies have been abandoned. Lenin's theory is not refuted, but at the same time it does not help us directly with an explanation for the end of colonialism.

Nationalism postulates the existence of a people and declares its right to take over an old state organization or establish a new one. A nationalist movement attempts to do this in the name of the people so postulated. Usually, the leaders of such movements come from the centre, or more precisely, the large urban areas of the envisaged state.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, foreign residents in China observed a noticeable change in the temper of the Chinese people. It was more than a change in mood, but a wave of activities, a dynamic force aimed at the recovery of China's sovereign rights. The movement was so intense that Japanese diplomats in Peking called it the ‘rights recovery fever’. Sir Ernest Satow, British minister in China, remarked that the movement was a manifestation of ‘the consciousness of national solidarity, which is entirely a new phenomenon in China’.