After a decade in power, the Chinese Communists have had enough time to change the past as well as the present. Voluminous documentary collections, monographs, and general treatises on modern Chinese history have been published. Many of these works are designed to tell how socialism was victorious over evil and oppression, why the Communists deserved to inherit the mantle of heaven. Modern Chinese history is being reconstructed, with one eye always focussed upon those impersonal and inexorable forces of dialectical materialism and economic determinism, while the other is fixed upon the very personal if enormously heroic qualities of Chairman Mao. In the opening stages of a Communist revolution (and perhaps of most revolutions), a cult of personality comes so naturally and serves so many strategi c purposes, it is difficult to avoid, whatever the logic in second generation criticisms.

Few notions are so widely held among students of Japanese economic history as the view that the land tax during the Tokugawa period was cruelly oppressive. It is thought to have left the peasantry no significant surplus after production costs, and moreover to have become heavier as time passed. I propose in this paper to examine certain evidence bearing on this view, which strongly influences the interpretation of modern Japanese history.

Until recent times, and to a certain extent, even at the present, most historians have spoken of the movements which led to the Meiji Restoration as lower samurai movements. It is my aim in this article to show that they were not. First, negatively, I hope to show by a consideration of what is meant by the term “lower samurai” and by the application of this to the Chōshū scene that the early Restoration movement or sonō jōi (Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian) movement cannot be described as a lower samurai movement. Second, positively, I will attempt an alternate characterization in terms of the different groups participating in this movement in Chōshū from its inception in 1858 until its culmination in the Chōshū Civil War in 1865.

This paper is a study of entrepreneurial problems in nineteenth-century China as seen in two types of enterprise—foreign enterprise under the treaty system and Chinese enterprise sponsored and controlled by government officials. These two types existed in different institutional environments; their capacities for efficient operation and growth were therefore also different. Case studies of both types are conveniently found in a field of modern transport—the steamship business which arose to serve the trade in the treaty ports. After 1860 a large number of foreign firms began to operate steamships in Chinese waters, and between 1862 and 1881 the following specialized “steam navigation companies” were established in Shanghai.

It seems impossible anywhere in this century of the common man for history to remain a mere matter of recording and analysing the deeds of uncommon men. The most traditional of historians finds himself obliged to assess not only the influence exerted on the course of events by individual statesmen and generals, but also the collective influence of the wishes, the fears, the interests, or the prejudices of large numbers of anonymous individuals, grouped generally, for purposes of convenience, under such rubrics as “the urban middle classes,” “the city,” “the workers,” “the farmers,” “the discontented intellectuals,” or “the electorate.” Sometimes the statistical implications of such terms are recognised, as by the English Namierites, in the use of openly statistical methods of approach. Other historians use less tedious, and it must be admitted less convincing, means of summation. In any case, the business of writing history has become more complicated. The purpose of this paper is to give some account of the treatment Japanese historians have afforded one such large category of individuals who can no longer be ignored in recounting the history of Meiji Japan, namely “the landlords.”

Early discussions of the process of industrialization in underdeveloped countries were frequently concerned with what was called “impact,” presumably viewing the intrusion of the factory into a non-industrial society as a sort of shock or disruptive influence which tended to break down the older social system. Moreover, the nature of the shock and some of its necessary consequences were generally conceived in the Western model. To be sure, allowances were made for some features of the indigenous society such as the lack of skill and education of the labor force, entrenched stratification systems, the extended family, and, in general, the village nexus. This approach focuses upon the surrounding society in which the factory is an irresistible catalyst and is either concerned with transitional social problems or with long-term changes such as declining fertility, increasing standards of living, and the displacement of traditional social organization. Most of the data for the “impact” approach have been drawn from cases where the greatest contrasts occur–the most rural elements of the population caught up in large extractive industries or repetitive machine operations; they have confounded the effects of rapid, slum-producing urbanization with the factory situation itself; they have dealt with relatively new factories that have not as yet had time to become imbedded in the local institutional framework; and finally, they have selected situations in which the area was eidier exclusively or predominantly industrial.

Takechi Zuizan was born in 1829, the eldest son of a gōshi in Nagaoka A district in Tosa. By 1856, when he was 27, he had become known as a leading master of fencing (kenjutsu) in Tosa. He then travelled to Edo, where he met and cooperated with fellow spirits from Mito, Chōshū, and Satsuma. H e returned home the undisputed leader of Tosa loyalists. For a brief period in 1862 and 1863 he controlled, as much as any one controlled, the turbulent extremists in Kyoto and Edo. But at the point of his greatest success he overplayed his hand. His lord, Yamauchi Yōdō, proved to be unsympathetic to Takechi’s goals, and on the national scene the excesses of the Chōshū loyalists swung the balance temporarily in the direction of moderation. Takechi was restricted in his movements, imprisoned for his complicity in political assassination and his clear guilt in a presumptuous forgery, and he was finally ordered to commit hara-kiri in the summer of 1865. His career provides a useful close-up for the study of the loyalist movement in Tosa.

The name of Liang Sou-ming is perhaps most familiar in connection with his controversial published lectures of the early 1920's, The Cultures of East and West, and Their Philosophies. It is less well known that Liang had an extensive career in the field of rural reconstruction during the 1930's, that he was one of the prime movers of the political coalition which ultimately became the China Democratic League, and that, more recently, he has been under severe attack by communist thinkers for his continuing rejection of Marxism-Leninism as applied to China. Particularly during the time when he was active in rural reconstruction and in national politics, Liang represented movements which stood, or seemed to stand, as alternatives to both the Kuomintang and the Communist solutions to China's problems. The failure of these movements to prevent antagonistic polarization and civil war in China raises some of the most important problems to which a study of Liang Sou-ming gives entry. Here we shall be concerned primarily with the first of these efforts—rural reconstruction.

Of major significance both to the political history of the Meiji period and to the career of Ōkuma Shigenobu was the series of events known as the 1881 political crisis. This upheaval involved principally the problems of establishing a national parliament or Diet, of selling government colonization properties in Hokkaido, and of dismissing Okuma from the government. Although the crisis concerned nearly everyone in the government at some point and shook the political world, Ōkuma was more closely connected with these issues than any other single individual in the government. The crisis presents many problems which are still being debated by Japanese historians, and no concensus has emerged.

The fourth of January 1958 was significant in Burma for two reasons; it marked the tenth anniversary of the nation's independence and it also denoted the end of the constitutional limitation on the right of a state to secede from the Union. While the anniversary of independence caused rejoicing throughout the country, the right of secession caused many of the leaders to worry and wonder whether or not this date would become significant as the beginning of the breakup of the Union. Since the right of secession is a unique right, not found in any other modern federal constitution save that of the U.S.S.R., it is useful to examine the background and the contemporary situation in order to see what opportunities there are for a state to secede from the Union of Burma, and what limitations exist to keep it from exercising its right.

The Federal Government is the largest collector and “consumer” of materials from Communist China in the United States. Its post–1949 programs of acquisition and utilization of information from the China mainland grew out of earlier World War II intelligence and radio monitoring operations which covered Communist as well as Nationalist and other affairs.

In the transition of Japan into the modern world, the role of those who first introduced the techniques, institutions, and ideas of the West deserves special attention. Performing the service of what Toynbee has called “the human counterpart of the ‘transformer,’” these were the men who learned the secrets of a foreign civilization and adapted them to their own community to enable it to adjust its life to the intrusive Western society. To some degree the whole leadership of Meiji Japan carried out this function, for soon after the Restoration the pursuit and application of knowledge from the West was made official policy. For the most part the military and political leaders were concerned with the mastery of Western military techniques and administrative and economic forms. But among the intelligentsia there were those who performed the broader task of learning and teaching the manners and morals, customs, and beliefs of European society. As advocates of Westernization they were important agents of change before as well as after the Restoration.

On the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Association for Asian Studies, it is appropriate that we should pause to analyze both the role which Asian studies should play in our institutions of higher learning and also the responsibilities which we as individuals and as a learned society have in the challenge which confronts contemporary American education. On April 2, 1948, about two hundred specialists on Asia gathered at Columbia University to complete the organization of a new scholarly, non-political, non-profit, professional association and to elect Dr. Arthur W. Hummel as the first President of the Far Eastern Association. In this decade, we have been singularly fortunate in the widespread interest and support which we have received. Fortunately, other newly established groups having scholarly interest in Asia have joined us, and last year the name was officially changed to signify better the area of our interest. As the Association of Asian Studies, we have a bright future ahead if we are willing to rise to the challenge that is before us.

This list is intended as a selective guide to bibliographies which deal exclusively or primarily with Southern Asia.1 A complete list of such bibliographies would be very long indeed; and of course no selection can be guaranteed to contain all or only bibliographies of permanent and general utility. It seems to the compiler likely, however, that a large proportion of the bibliographies which the student of Southern Asia will find most useful are listed here.

The Anglo-Indian community of India is one of several hybrid Eurasian populations which have found themselves in precarious social positions in some of the newly independent Asian nations. Eurasian populations originated in early periods of colonial domination when European women were scarce, and grew over the years through natural increase and occasional mixed contacts. Their original size relative to the indigenous populations and policies of both governing European and native populations have determined whether they: (1) have been submerged in the numerically dominant local population (e.g., White Russians in China); (2) have attempted to return to the European countries of their male progenitors (e.g., Indos of Indonesia); or (3) have been forced to attempt the maintenance of social and cultural solidarity as permanent minorities (e.g., Ceylonese “Burghers” and the Anglo-Indians). Events of the contemporary nationalist revolution in Asia have increased public awareness of the problems of these minority groups.