In the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

The main focus of this article is the Haiphong shipping boycotts of 1907 and 1909–10, which were conflicts over freight rates on rice which arose between several Chinese rice hongs in Haiphong (Hải Phòng), the main port in northeastern French Indochina, and three European tramp shipping companies. When these companies set up a joint agreement in 1907 unilaterally increasing the freight rates for shipping rice to Hong Kong, the affected merchants felt unfairly treated and boycotted the companies’ ships. Furthermore, in 1909, they formed a rival charter syndicate and set up a steamship company chartering the vessels of other companies to apply additional pressure on the firms to return to the previous rate. Although the Chinese suffered direct financial losses due to their insufficient expertise in this business, they were successful in achieving a considerable decrease in the freight rate on rice, which shows that boycotting, even when costly, proved to be an effective means to push for reductions and better arrangements with shipping companies. In contrast to a similar incident in the same trade—the shipping boycott of 1895–96 when the French government intervened with the Chinese government on behalf of a French shipping company—the later boycotts did not provoke the intervention of Western powers. This case suggests that growing anti-imperialism and nationalism in China, expressed in public discourses on shipping rights recovery and in the use of economic instead of political means, had an impact on the boycotts. Economic, not imperial, power determined the outcome of this struggle.

This article demonstrates how the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–1944 and relief activism during it fed the politics of the Hindu right, a development that has not previously received much scholarly attention. Using hitherto unused primary sources, the article introduces a novel site to the study of communal politics, namely, the propagation of Hindu communalism through food distribution during a humanitarian crisis. It examines the caste and class bias in private relief and provides the first in-depth study of the multifaceted process whereby the Hindu Mahasabha used the famine for political purposes. The party portrayed Muslim food officials as ‘saboteurs’ in the food administration, alleged that the Muslim League government was ‘creating’ a new group of Muslim grain traders undermining the established Hindu traders, and publicized the government's failure to avert the famine to prove the economic ‘unviability’ of creating Pakistan. This article also explores counter-narratives, for example, that Hindu political leaders were deliberately impeding the food supply in the hope that starvation would compel Bengali Muslims to surrender their demand for Pakistan. The politics of religious conversion played out blatantly in famine-relief when the Mahasabha accused Muslim volunteers of converting starving Hindus to Islam in exchange for food, and demanded that Hindu and Muslim famine orphans should remain in Hindu and Muslim orphanages respectively. Finally, by dwelling on beef consumption by the army at the time of an acute shortage of dairy milk during the famine, the Mahasabha fanned communal tensions surrounding the orthodox Hindu taboo on cow slaughter.

The judicial and summary punishment of whipping—absent from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860—was passed into law through Act No. VI of 1864. This legislation, tacked on as an appendage to the IPC, invested the judge with wider discretionary powers to administer violence across Indian society. In this case what emerged was an evolving attempt to enlarge the colonial state's capacity for quotidian violence, targeting certain bodies to reaffirm, manage, and police the social hierarchies upon which colonial sovereignty depended. In the context of a slow imperial movement away from the cast-iron distinctions that had been made between groups in the early nineteenth century—distinctions that had, among other things, supported a legally enforced system of slavery—new methods to mark the value of different bodies were created. The events of the 1850s, in particular the rebellion of 1857–1858, saw the re-emergence of the colonial idea that certain bodies could withstand violence, and that violence itself could be used to create economically productive colonial societies, in debates around penal law and punishment. This article will trace this history through formal legal restrictions and informal legal-cultural practices in relation to corporal punishment in colonial India. Over the course of the period under study, this legislation introduced into law what one official termed ‘the category of the “whippable”’.1 Charting the changing shape of this legal category along lines of race, gender, caste, class, and age, the article will argue that a logic of exceptionality, channelled here through the application of judicial violence, attempted to structure and manage Indian society in complicated ways.

One of the challenges of global history is to bridge the particularities of individual lives and trajectories with the macro-historical patterns that develop over space and time. Italian micro-history, particularly popular in the 1980s–1990s, has excavated the lives of small communities or individuals to test the findings of serial history and macro-historical approaches. Micro-history in the Anglophone world has instead focused more on narrative itself, and has shown, with some exceptions, less interest for ampler historiographical conclusions.

Sino-Western interactions in the early modern period offer a particularly fruitful field of investigation, ripe for a synthesis of the global and the micro-historical. Cultural, social, and economic phenomena can be traced in economic and statistical series, unpublished correspondence, and other non-institutional sources, in part thanks to the survival of detailed records of the activities of East India companies and missionary agencies in China. Recent scholarship has started to offer new conclusions, based on such Western records and matching records in the Chinese historical archive.

In this article, I offer a methodological reflection on ‘global micro-history’, followed by four micro-historical ‘vignettes’ that focus on the economic and socio-religious activities of the Roman Catholic mission in Beijing in the long eighteenth century. These fragments uncover unexplored facets of Chinese life in global contexts from the point of view of European missionaries and Chinese Christians in the Qing capital—‘end users’ of the local and global networks of commerce and religion bridging Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America.

This article focuses on performing artists at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1801–39), the last fully sovereign ruler of the Punjab and leader of what is termed the Sikh empire. After Ranjit's death, his successors ruled for a mere decade before British annexation in 1849. Ranjit Singh's kingdom has been studied for the extraordinary authority it exercised over warring Sikh factions and for the strong challenge it posed to political rivals like the British. Scholarly exploration of cultural efflorescence at the Lahore court has ignored the role of performing artistes, despite a preponderance of references to them in both Persian chronicles of the Lahore court and in European travelogues of the time. I demonstrate how Ranjit Singh was partial to musicians and dancers as a class, even marrying two Muslim courtesans in the face of stiff Sikh orthodoxy. A particular focus is on Ranjit's corps of ‘Amazons’—female dancers performing martial feats dressed as men—the cynosure of all eyes, especially male European, and their significance in representing the martial glory of the Sikh state. Finally, I evaluate the curious cultural misunderstandings that arose when English ‘dancing’ encountered Indian ‘nautching’, revealing how gender was the primary axis around which Indian and European male statesmen alike expressed their power. Ubiquitous in the daily routine of Ranjit and the lavish entertainments set up for visitors, musicians and female performers lay at the interstices of the Indo-European encounter, and Anglo-Sikh interactions in particular.

Based on fieldwork conducted in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2007–08, this article demonstrates how scripts about money, value, and indigeneity are used as exclusionary discourses by development state officials and caste Hindus to portray Indian tribals as failed citizens of the Indian development state. These discourses are used not only as a means of disciplining tribals as indigenous citizens, but also to elide other contradictions within the development state such as corruption, thereby sustaining ‘modern development’ as a project of perpetual deferral. However, this article also shows how Kandha tribals, in turn, appropriate these scripts to display their understanding of the shifting contours of indigenous citizenship and its mandates for entitlements from the development state and indigenous political agency. In so doing, this article demonstrates how historical discourses of money and indigeneity inform contemporary indigenous claims to citizenship. By attending to these discourses, it argues for indigeneity as a site to observe the folding-back of state power onto itself, as indigenous citizenship reanimates historical constructions of the adivasi as indigene but subverts these constructions by using a language of indigenous entitlement.

The sociologist Edward Shils (1910–95) is a neglected commentator on modern India. Best known in a South Asian context for his involvement in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Shils also produced an influential study on Indian intellectuals, published in 1961. He was one of the few non-Marxists to write about the role of intellectuals during the era of decolonization in Asia and Africa. His book appeared in the same year as Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) and a year before C. L. R. James's Marxism and the Intellectuals (1962), just as Pan-Africanism was finding its ideological voice. This article recovers Shils’ work on the Indian intellectual. It describes his Indian interlocutors, his methodology, and his claims about the isolated and ineffectual character of the Indian academic elite. The article concludes with an examination of the longer-term influence and validity of Shils’ critique of the Indian intelligentsia.

At the turn of the twentieth century, foreign bankers viewed China as one of the up-and-coming markets for international banking. This led to a rapid influx of foreign banks into the banking sector of the China coast. Consequently, foreign banks became a major presence in the treaty ports, where they financed China's foreign trade, provided loans to the Chinese government, and supplied Chinese banks with credit. However, their operations in the Chinese banking sector were always dependent on interaction with Chinese banks. Previous scholarship has largely portrayed the relationship between foreign and Chinese banks in terms of the former dominating and controlling the banking sector of China's treaty ports. This article challenges this view and shows that the relationship between foreign and Chinese banks was one of interdependence rather than one-sided control. It demonstrates how foreign banks had to adapt their business practices to the Chinese business environment and how they were integrated into existing Chinese business networks. Moreover, this article reveals how Chinese entrepreneurs could use their relationship with foreign banks for the benefit of their own business networks and exploit information asymmetries between foreign and Chinese banks to generate profits. The result of the development of this interdependent relationship between foreign and Chinese banks, and of the integration of the former into existing Chinese business networks was the formation of Sino-foreign business networks, which played an important role in making possible the operations of financial markets in China's transnational treaty port economy.

This article looks at how globalization in the nineteenth century was inextricably entangled with localization in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau nexus on the southern fringe of China by tracing the growth of its unique medical culture. It explains the ‘glocalizing’ process by tracing the development of this medical culture, which consists of knowledge construction and institution building, in the context of highly volatile epidemiological conditions aggravated by increasingly heavy inter-regional trade and migration. It traces the dynamic circulation of people, materials, ideas, and practices in this southern edge of China, which was traditionally connected to southeast Asia and shared ecological backdrops that produced similar epidemiological experiences. The Canton nexus in the nineteenth century saw the growth of native medical knowledge that focused less on theoretical innovation than on the efficacy of therapeutic strategies. These ideas were likely to have been informed or reinforced by new anatomical knowledge disseminated by Western medical missionaries on the ground early in the century. The medical culture in the region was also marked by the formation of a series of local institutions that were fusions of Western-style hospitals and native merchant-run charity halls where diseases were studied and treated, and new public health management negotiated and implemented by experts from different traditions.

This article offers a comprehensive set of explanations for why people vote. Based on evidence from Indian elections, where voter turnouts remain consistently high—and rising—despite voting not being compulsory, the article shows that two broad sets of reasons exist. First, a set of transactional factors, labelled ‘money’ here, encompass within it the instrumental and coercive reasons that propel people to vote. Secondly, evidence shows that people also attribute ‘meaning’ to the act of voting itself so they vote for the sake of performing the act itself. Drawing from the wider literature and the author's own ethnographic work, including comparative ethnographic research conducted by a team across India, this article brings together these diverse set of reasons to propose a holistic explanation for why people vote.

As the Qing state launched its full-scale educational reform at the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of new schools mushroomed all over China. Their urgent and enormous demand for textbooks created a thriving new market that attracted both Chinese and foreign publishing firms. Nurtured in China's traditional book trade, Chinese print capitalists had local knowledge of distribution networks and cultural politics, but not a real command of producing educational Western knowledge. To keep up with Chinese students’ increasing demand for Western knowledge, they pirated textbooks published by foreign companies. Meanwhile, leading American and British publishing corporations were expanding their international business by targeting developing countries that had recently established a modern general education system, like China. Drawing from government and company archives, as well as personal papers and legal documents, this article traces the multinational competition, copyright disputes, and business collaborations between a leading textbook provider in China and their Anglo-American competitors between the 1900s and the 1930s. It illustrates an unexpected and uneasy partnership some foreign publishers formed with Chinese pirates in order to gain better access to China's textbook market. Chinese publishers, on the other hand, used piracy and their local knowledge to bargain for better import credit and deals with their foreign rivals. Both sides were dependent on each other to gain the advantage in their transnational business operations in the globalizing Asian textbook business.

In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered ‘other’ by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental ‘other’. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and role has been transformed, while in other cities entirely new Chinatowns have emerged. This article discusses how Chinatowns today are increasingly contested sites where older diasporic understandings of Chineseness are unsettled by newer, neoliberal interpretations, dominated by the pull of China's new-found economic might. In particular, the so-called ‘rise of China’ has spawned a globalization of the idea of ‘Chinatown’ itself, with its actual uptake in urban development projects the world over, or a backlash against it, determined by varying perceptions of China's global ascendancy as an amalgam of threat and opportunity.