In spite of the recent flowering of studies on the South Asian diaspora, we are nevertheless left with many gaps in our knowledge and many unanswered questions. The bulk of existing work is still focused on the migration of agricultural labour and the ‘Little Indias’ it spawned in various corners of the world. The recent migrations of educated professionals to the countries of the ‘First World’, particularly the USA, are also attracting increasing attention. The whole field of migration and diaspora studies remains, however, dominated by a host country perspective which tends to obliterate the general picture from the point of view of South Asian history.

The foreign missionary was always a prominent source of Sino-foreign friction. The appearance of Protestant missionaries in China's interior, and their intrusion into Chinese society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, caused strong resistance from the Chinese and many outbreaks of xenophobia. After the Boxer Uprising of 1900, however, this resistance and these outbreaks greatly declined. And the foreign missionary in the second and third decades of the twentieth century had to face new problems: namely, tension between the foreign and Chinese members within the church. In the late 1910s the missionaries found that their well-educated Chinese colleagues demanded equal treatment. Between 1925 and 1928 the missionaries and their Chinese members were involved in a severe conflict between ‘foreign’ Christianity and ‘Chinese’ nationalism, and this created even greater tension. How the missionaries responded to these problems, and how they influenced Christianity in China, deserve further analysis.

It is not always remembered that under British rule some 150,000 Punjabis were notified under the Criminal Tribes Act as belonging to tribes and castes whose hereditary occupation was deemed to be crime. More than any other class these criminal tribes felt the harsh impact of the colonial state, which sought to control, punish and reform them. This paper traces the evolution of a Punjab criminal tribes policy and argues that the British—assisted by the indigenous elite—achieved only partial success in assimilating these people into the wider community by 1947.

A previous work on British Indian Army logistics from 1757 to 1857 called into question the accuracy of labeling Arthur Wellesley ‘The Logistical Architect of the British Indian Army’. As the ‘soldier brother’ of India's Governor-General Richard, Marquis Wellesley, Arthur was bound to have drawn some attention while in India; but secondary sources have tended to be too ethnocentric in their interpretation of his South Asian military experience. Arthur Wellesley's successful command-apprenticeship, during the Dhoondiah Waugh Campaign, led him to the promotional track which culminated in his appointment as the Commander of the Southern Theatre in the 1803 Anglo-Maratha War. However, one should not confuse his prominence with precedence and I have argued elsewhere that East India Company (EIC) logistical policy was essentially South Asian in origin.

China's foreign relations during the Second World War underwent a radical metamorphosis. The Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) earned new international respect by mounting a tenacious resistance against the Japanese enemy. By allying itself with powerful countries in the West for the first time in modern history, China emerged from its involuntary diplomatic isolation. The new Grand Alliance facilitated China's diplomatic initiatives seeking to eradicate the legal stigma of its semi-colonial status through the abrogation of the unequal treaties. In the process China also leaped to the rank of the ‘Big Four’. At a time when the Western colonialism was receding, the Japanese Empire was collapsing and national independence movements were on the rise in many Asian countries, China seemed positioned to achieve a new prominent leadership role in Asian and world affairs.

The partition of India is customarily described in surgical metaphors, as an operation, an amputation, a vivisection or a dismemberment. By extension, the new borders created in 1947 are often thought of as incision scars.

The Subaltern studies project has been a major contribution towards rethinking the role of groups such as peasants, lower castes, labourers or women in forming the course of Indian history. The project has also brought the issues of culture, ideology and consciousness to the forefront of Indian history writing. Although the importance of non-elite action on the historical developments of the Indian independence movement has already been noted by more mainstream historians, the concertedness of the project has created a whole new situation in which the subalternist perspective has become a new paradigm for Indian history writing, indeed, the subalternist perspective has increasingly come to dominate the formation of perspectives and concepts. As Masselos points out, the Subaltern studies has become the establishment.

The district histories should not become [. . .] a series of unrelated facts without any narrative which can be linked with national history, [. . .] the facts that raised problems should invariably come in the gazetteers if they are to be taken as faithful registers of the country. (Chaudhuri, History of the Gazetteers of India, 1964: 163)

After India became free, it was felt that a new edition of the Gazetteers should be brought out. The life of a people never stands still. Any account of a country—and a gazetteer is no exception—must therefore be revised from time to time (Gazetteer of India: Indian Union, 1965: ii).

How does a nation ‘imagine itself into existence’ (Anderson 1983), particularly after it has been subjected to colonial rule? How does it (re-)appropriate its history, and what are the means at its disposal for creating and asserting an identity or specificity of its own? India has since independence achieved some political and ideological unity: from north to south and from east to west of the peninsula, although they have contested it in a number of cases, people have developed some consciousness of being Indians, ‘sons of Mother India’.

Japan, in contrast to other industrialized democracies, has enjoyed a falling or steady crime rate for much of the post-war period. This has been despite the potentially adverse effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The low crime rate and high clearance rates shown in the official statistics are seen as both a result and a reflection of the development of successful policing techniques in Japan. Even allowing for the dark figure of unrecorded crime, this record is impressive, and it is claimed that it has been achieved using fewer resources in manpower terms than those available to European and North American forces. Explanations for this phenomenon of a relatively low crime rate and high clearance rates in Japan have focused on three main areas of concern. The most popular approach has been to examine the organization and intelligence-gathering activities of the Japanese police at a local level through studies of the system of satellite police boxes: the kōban in urban areas and the chūzaisho (residential police boxes) in rural districts.

How could relative underdevelopment pose a constraint to the harnessing of technological change and increased output productivity due to technological developments? In this paper one possible chain of causation in the understanding of this question is suggested. It is argued that fragmentation of markets and the absence of industrial deepening, both factors characteristic of developing country markets, could constitute important barriers to the adoption of firm strategies that promote technological efficiency in producer goods sectors. The fragmentation of markets (due to poor infrastructure) prevents specialization and thus impedes technological learning through this route. The lack of industrial deepening implies that a large proportion of demand for intermediate producer goods emerges from households in the economy rather than firms.

Since independence (1947), foremost among the issues related to the growth of Bombay has been the decision to build New Bombay, a new city on the mainland across from Bombay island. In this paper, I examine first, the emergence of the idea of New Bombay and the interest groups who influenced the planning process. Secondly, I examine the actual achievements of the New Bombay project and the disjuncture between planning and reality. The New Bombay case shows clearly the way the political environment can influence the planning process. Confronted with the demands of different interest groups, the state in its urban planning opted for a solution which would accommodate all of them. In the process, many of the original objectives of building the new city have remained unfulfilled.

As is well known, Islam arose in Arabia, which, alongside the pagan Communities, had a large number of tribes and groups which professed Judaism and Christianity. So far as we know, the relations between the Jews and Christians and their Arab neighbours in pre-Islamic times were cordial, or were not at any rate adversely affected by differences of faith. In its self-view Islam represented both a continuation and a supersession of the two earlier Semitic faiths. The Jewish Gospel as well as the New Testament had originally represented divine messages, and so those who follow them were ‘People of the Book’, to be distinguished from the ‘Infidels’. But the Gospel texts, the Quran itself had claimed, had suffered from unauthorized deletions and insertions; and this claim, of course, created a fundamental point of disagreement between the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. Nonetheless, early Muslims seemed fairly well familiar with both the earlier Semitic religions.

In this paper, we explore some ways through which the adoption of specific consumption practices enables members of a South-Indian ex-untouchable community, Izhavas within Kerala, to objectify and redefine their self-perceived and other-perceived social position, and to concretize and make sense of their attempts to achieve generalized upward mobility. Located within individual, familial and group mobility strategies and developmental cycles, consumption assumes a long-term dimension, oriented towards present and future. Consumption practices also take on a normative aspect: youthful orientations towards transience and ephemerality should be replaced by a mature demeanour directed towards duration and permanency, and achievement of householder status. ‘Householders’ negotiate their paths through a complex consumer culture where values of transience and durability articulate with a local/foreign continuum. The labouring poor, whose consumption is severely limited, remain unable, in the eyes of the majority, to attain mature householder status. While Dalit castes withdraw into virtuosity in arenas such as fashion, labouring Izhavas struggle unsuccessfully to maintain distinction and join the mainstream.