Few documents in recent history have provoked such controversy as the so-called ‘Tanaka Memorial’. ‘Document’ is perhaps a misnomer, for the original (assuming that there was one) has never been seen by anyone willing to admit its existence. The memorial is said to be a 13,000-word secret petition presented by Prime Minister Baron Tanaka Giichi to Emperor Hirohito on 25 July 1927 outlining a program of economic penetration into Manchuria, China, and Mongolia that would prepare for Japan's subjection of Asia and Europe. Exposed by the Chinese in 1929, the document gained global notoriety during the 1930s. Over vehement Japanese objections and disclaimers, it was translated and circulated in Europe and the United States. Grandiose designs expressed in a language that might have aroused incredulity or mirth in calmer times sounded uncomfortably authentic in the context of Japanese behavior in East Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945.

Until very recently, scholars of nineteenth-century India have tended to dismiss the role of urban government and politics as trivial or inconsequential. Most have reached their conclusions by studying the formation of policy in London or Delhi, using the private papers of high officials or reports prepared by the Government of India. A standard authority on British policy of this period states that local self-government ‘proved to be a tree which never took firm root. Local self-government never gained major significance in the political history of modern India.’ Local self-government failed, according to another scholar, because ‘… a rigid system of supervision was created, which ran from the smallest municipality up to the Secretary of State for India.’ In his opinion, this control and shortage of funds can be held responsible for the lack of development in ‘… the scope of public services, which were confined to the bare essentials.’ A dreary picture of petty quarreling in municipal government and stagnation in urban services prevails, alleviated only by the appearance of Lord Curzon as Viceroy in 1899 and his efforts to instill some ‘dynamic influence’ into local government. Although the policy of local self-government satisfied neither official aims nor nationalist aspirations, its importance for local politics and administration is now undergoing a major reassessment.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal administered the largest province in India. In addition to the Bengali-speaking area, it included parts of Orissa and virtually all of Bihar. Nearly two-thirds of the population were Hindus, and just over one third were Muslims. However, the Hindus predominated mainly in Bihar, Orissa and west Bengal, while the Muslims lived mainly in the east. In Bengal Proper there were, by 1901, more Muslims than Hindus. The province was ruled from Calcutta, the only large city in the region. Until 1912 Calcutta was also the capital of India itself. The city was a great economic, political, administrative and educational centre, and few other towns exercised such an influence over their surrounding districts as Calcutta did over Bengal.

A Substantial body of literature argues persuasively that Indian towns were often founded by local political-military rulers to serve as fortress-headquarters. In order to enhance their personal prestige, improve the efficiency of their administration, and provide market facilities for their small kingdoms, the rulers later invited merchants, artisans, administrators, and professionals to the fortress capitals. These invited, non-landed groups then formed courts, markets, and temple establishments which were dependent on the ruler for protection in an often violent atmosphere. The headquarters towns have been seen as the geographical locus and political nexus, or hinge, at which village levels of polity were linked with regional or state levels of government in a predominantly agrarian society. The most explicit and sophisticated presentation of this ‘hinge’ view is in Richard Fox's ‘Rajput “Clans” and Rurban Settlements in Northern India.'

During the twenty years after the First World War, Indian politics were moulded by two main forces, each of which drew strength from the other. Important constitutional changes devolved a range of powers to Indians. But the British did not plan these reforms of 1919 and 1935 as stages by which they would quit India, bag and baggage, but rather as adjustments in the methods of keeping their Indian connection while retaining intact most of its fundamental advantages. At the centre of government in India, the powers of the Raj were increased; in the provinces more and more authority was entrusted to Indians. This system canalized much of Indian political action into the provinces. Moreover, by placing the new provincial administrations upon greatly widened electorates, it gave the Raj a further range of collaborators, selected now for their mastery of vote-gathering. The reforms of 1919 provoked another seminal development. By widening the functions of local government bodies in municipalities and the rural areas, which were to be chosen by the same voters who elected the new provincial councils, they linked the politics of the localities more closely to the politics of the province.

The slow growth of railways is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing features of the history of modernization in China. The Chinese government often gave as its reasons for opposition to railway development the fact that improved communications would facilitate foreign military expansion, that railways obstructed the feng-shui, that mandarin and peasant alike were opposed to the railway, and that railways destroyed the livelihood of the common people. But, until recently, these explanations have never been given serious consideration, despite the fact that Ch'ing officials discussed railway-policy in these terms in a major debate in 1866–67. This is partly because historians have found it difficult to accept Chinese objections to railway development at their face-value, and partly because Chinese officials themselves, seeing that foreigners were unimpressed by Chinese arguments against railway construction, offered others which they thought would be more acceptable to the Western mind.

If one wishes to understand something about the political mobilization of Chinese communist society, then it is necessary to concentrate primarily on the aims behind that political mobilization. The ways in which the Chinese try to direct matters so that those aims may be attained, determine the content and character of the mobilization. An analysis which is mainly concerned with such dimensions of the phenomenon ‘political mobilization’ as intensity, globality, tempo, structuring, organization, etc., is not suited to the Chinese situation, simply because these dimensions are to a large extent determined by, and can be explained by, the meaning and content of the underlying values and aims.

Central Luzon is a fertile plain directly to the north of metropolitan Manila. This region, thoroughly colonized and densely populated, has been a centre of agrarian unrest for decades. In the forties and fifties Central Luzon formed the nucleus of a peasant movement which produced the strongest anti-Japanese guerilla-army in the whole Southeast Asia, the Hukbalahap (an abbreviation of Anti-Japanese People's Army) or in short Huks. The strength of this army came primarily from the fact that the struggle against the national enemy could be combined with the pre-war conflict between the peasants and the landowners.