Drawing on the literature of networks and marginality, this paper explores the social history of the small trading port of Com on the northeast coast of Timor. Com's marginality, as I define it, is constituted as a remote outpost of inter-island and trans-local trade networks of the Indonesian archipelago, and reproduced in its contemporary isolation from centres of economic power and processes of the global market. The paper draws on narrative traditions and documentary evidence to chart Com's fluctuating historical fortunes and contemporary cultural practices. In the fragile post-independence environment of Timor Leste, the resident population of Com is once again looking towards a creative engagement with external others in the hope of renewed prosperity.

The history of composite religious cultures in India has over recent decades attracted much more consistent attention than the history of syncretic political and intellectual cultures. During the 1970s and 1980s, when the study of pre-colonial India drew greater numbers of scholars than has been the case more recently, a number of historians of the Mughal north concerned themselves with the means by which Akbar and his political allies were able to draw into imperial service a very disparate range of ethnic groups—Irani, Turani, Afghan, Rajput, Indian Muslim, high-caste Hindu scribalists—and to generate for them a new corporate and inclusivist ideology of service to emperor and state. John Richards has described how a powerful dynastic ideology, formulated by Akbar's close friend and servant Abu'l Fazl in his monumental history of the empire the Akbar-Nāma, and given dramatic public expression in the ceremonial of the imperial court, glorified Akbar as the living embodiment of the Empire itself, and focus for the direct personal devotion of the imperial nobility. Stephen Blake has drawn out the importance of patrimonial themes in the techniques which Akbar and his successors devised to maintain the sense of a personal familial bond between the emperor and his servants. Historians of Mughal administration such as M. Athar Ali have explored the ways in which the systematisation of mansab grants and appointments to offices under Akbar provided a common framework within which imperial servants from different backgrounds could seek advancement. With a different emphasis again, Mughal art historians have drawn attention to Akbar's intense interest in the power of images as a means of communicating new understandings of the nature of kingship and its place in the natural and social worlds, particularly through the dazzling illustrations for the Akbar-Nāma produced in Akbar's imperial atelier. S.A.A. Rizvi and Peter Hardy have focussed on the role of Abu'l Fazl in helping to project, through the massive illuminated history of his Akbar-Nāma, a new and more inclusive style of rulership for Akbar, which drew on sufi and medieval ishrāqī theories of the divine illumination of kingship. This presented Akbar as insān-i kāmil, ‘the perfect man’, whose inner virtues of justice, self-control and renunciation of worldly attachments enabled him to attain the divine blessing of sulh-i kull, an attitude of universal concord and toleration.

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed joy.

Judith Brown, in her Epilogue to Volume IV of The Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE), states that of the legacies of the British Empire, the ‘most significant of all is the legacy of the school and the university’, and in particular the role of English as an international language. Brown's acknowledgement of the importance of colonial education renders all the more striking the lack of attention given to this subject in the OHBE as a whole. For example, while Volume IV contains chapters on ‘Gender in the British Empire’, ‘Critics of Empire in Britain’, ‘The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain’, and ‘The British Empire and the Muslim World’, education receives barely two dozen references, buried in the text of other chapters. These offer glimpses into the development of literacy in parts of Africa, the expansion of state educational provision in Ceylon, and the concern of Nigeria's colonial authorities regarding the socially and politically destabilizing effects of the spread of Western education; but taken together they provide no overall analysis of colonial education policies, systems of schooling or curricula. Notwithstanding what some have criticised as its ultra-orthodox overall approach, with regard to this particular field the OHBE more-or-less accurately represents the current state of research. Despite a number of interesting forays on the periphery, the history of colonial education remains a vast and largely unexplored field of enquiry: the dark continent of imperial historiography.

The history of the Shaw enterprise in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, is a history of Chinese cinema in a century of business evolution. The Shaw industrial model of “vertical integration”, which combines production, distribution with exhibition, keeps pace with the technological developments and manages to expand its retail outlets from the stage to cinema, television, DVD and the Internet. Although the Shaw organization embraces a western industrial model to expand its business, it retains the very nature of a traditional Chinese family business. The issues surrounding the cultural and institutional evolution of the Shaw enterprise over the past 80 years are profound indications of its time.

‘Who is stealing electricity’ at Tis Hazari?—the principal magistrate's court for the city of Delhi. The mystery, it turned out, had a simple solution. It implicated a large proportion of the 1500 lawyers' chambers in the court buildings. According to the Vice-President of the Delhi Bar Association (Criminal), the problem arose because the Delhi Vidyut Board ‘had installed electricity junction boxes in the premises and has not given any regular connection to individual chambers. Hence, most lawyers had to make their own arrangements’. By this, he meant that the lawyers resorted to tapping electricity from the board's supply lines to run their lights and fans, their refrigerators, air-conditioners and computers. Speaking on behalf of the criminal lawyers, and lending a certain adjectival force to their professional description, their Vice President admitted that it was true that ‘earlier, we were stealing electricity. … But now we have taken up the matter with the DVB and have shown our eagerness in seeking regularised connections’. It was almost as if he expected that their eagerness could be entered as a plea in mitigation.

This essay argues that too much of scholarship on state formation in late pre-colonial India has displayed an elitist bias and focused exclusively on the activities and concerns of upper-caste ruling groups alone. Building upon recent trends that have brought into view the roles of a greater diversity of groups, this article explores the agentive role of the crafts and artisan communities in the state formation of Jodhpur during the eighteenth century. This was a period when the Rathor rulers of Jodhpur were unable to rely on the external support of the Mughal Empire and felt compelled to forge alliances with new groups who, perhaps, were previously marginal to political processes in the region. This, of course, did not dissolve the difficult and often exploitative conditions under which artisans worked, and though their agency was more reactive than creative, it did serve to define and limit the levels of state appropriations in revenues and labour.

From late 1956 onwards, British colonial officials spoke of the postwar influx of Chinese refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong as a ‘problem of people’, with serious consequences on housing, social services and even political relations. The problem was also one of an international concern: both Communist and Nationalist China and the United States saw it in the wider context of their Cold War struggles. At first, the Hong Kong government was ambivalent about providing massive relief for the refugees, either by itself or by the United Nations. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political importance of turning potential rioters into responsible citizens, and the Cold War implications of great powers' involvement convinced British colonials that the only lasting solution to the problem was not overseas emigration (with outside aid) but full local integration (through trade and industrialization). The international history of the Chinese refugee problem epitomizes the local history of the Cold War over Hong Kong.

The Tiger Balm Gardens or Haw Par Villa, built in the 1930s by overseas Chinese pharmaceuticals tycoon Aw Boon Haw, has been and remains a symbol of the positioning of Singapore's Chineseness. In the colonial era, it marked the success not only of one man but also of the Chinese migrant community. In the later period of nation-building, it was initially considered as a challenge to multiracialism and nationhood. However, as state policy shifted towards an ethnicized cultural identity as prompted by the rise of Asia as a major economic force, especially China, the Villa was renovated first into an orientalized theme park and then resuscitated as the repository of diasporic Chinese entrepreneurship. Amidst these state initiatives, the history of the Villa and its founder were sidelined.

Brahmin identity and community—these are the essentials. Melody cannot be understood except by the notes and spaces that constitute it. So too with the group. To know it, we must understand individuals and their interactions. Failure to do this sacrifices accuracy for simplicity; realities get replaced with poor simulacra of themselves. Consider caste names; are they contested? A common assumption is that they are not.

British expansion in Sri Lanka was halted by the mountains in the centre of the island. The kings of Kandy guarded knowledge about topography and this led in part to the British army's defeat of 1803. Within the Kandyan kingdom, boundary books and verses provide evidence of a vibrant tradition of oral knowledge about the land, linked with piety and history. When the British took control of the interior in 1815 Governor Barnes urged the necessity of a road to Kandy in order to open up the hills. Surveys were vital to this road and surveying was posited as a rational and heroic science. However, the British continued to rely on local knowledge in planning public works; they surveyed ruined tanks in the north-central provinces. British expansion therefore witnessed both competition and cooperation between different orders of knowledge. There were multiple encounters between knowledge, empire and the land.

In tracing the history of the concept of race, this article revises the conventional view that race acquired significance only after the mid-nineteenth century in colonial India. Instead, it situates the history of race in the connected realms of enlightenment science in both the metropolitan and colonial worlds and in the public sphere of Indian print culture. From the 1770s onwards the emerging ‘science’ of race was intimately related to orientalism and was salient for civilisational concepts, above all, religion. Precisely because it was a capacious concept that encompassed both cultural and biological ideas, race became an inescapable category for world-comparative distinctions between human types and religions, but it also held implications for the role of empire. Phrenology was a popular dimension of this set of ideas and found votaries among both imperial and also Indian literati of radical, conservative and liberal political opinions. The Calcutta Phrenological Society became an active site of debate on these issues. Yet in the popular realm of vernacular print culture analogous notions of physical typology and distinction (particularly samudrikvidya) remained distant from such concerns. As a form of ‘insurgent knowledge’ samudrikvidya was part of the techniques for the reconstitution of an Indian selfhood. Race then was not only a powerful concept, but also one that was remarkably mutable in its meanings and uses from the eighteenth century onwards.

Karachi is a city of migrants and an important commercial hub, which provides Pakistan with a window on the world. But Karachi is also a deeply fragmented city, plagued by an acute urban crisis that takes roots in the failure of the development plans that successive Pakistani governments have delegated to foreign experts. The transnationalisation of the Afghan jihad, in the 1980s, also fuelled social and ethnic antagonisms in the city and contributed to the proliferation of violent entrepreneurs and ethnic parties. Both criminal elements and ethnic activists contributed to the ever-increasing fragmentation of urban space in the city, and to the multiplication of ethnic enclaves controlled by private militias. This extreme fragmentation of the city has benefited local jihadis and foreign terrorists who have taken shelter here since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. However, Karachi will never be a “sanctuary” for jihadi militants, due to the hostility of local ethnic parties, whose activists see themselves as enlightened secularists at war with the most retrograde elements of their society and their foreign allies.

This paper addresses one of the important dimensions of the experience of youth in contemporary urban Vietnam; that is their sexual practices, behaviour and attitudes. Within a conceptual framework that focuses on sexuality and social change in a modernising and increasingly open society, and based on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi from 1999 to 2004, this paper describes an emerging sexual culture among urban youth. It highlights the emerging trends, issues, and activities which constitute youth sex culture in present-day urban Vietnam. It further argues that the emerging trends in youth sexual culture are reflective of rapid and diverse changes in Vietnamese society as well as the impacts of market reforms on its moral codes, values, and perceptions. There has been a continuation of the ‘traditional’ perceptions of gender roles (particularly the expectation of women to uphold propriety and chastity) and, at the same time, a recognition of the increasingly assertive role of young women in ‘modern’ sexuality and hence of increasing gender equality in this regard. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese nowadays form heterosexual relationships based on both the grammar of love and the grammar of the market.

Environment and sustainable development have been accorded great emphasis since the last quarter of the twentieth century. In India, the environmental protection is enshrined in the Constitution of India (42nd Amendment) under the Directive Principles of State Policy in 1977. According to Article 48A, ‘State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife in the country’. Article 51A(g) enjoins upon the citizens ‘to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes and rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for the living creatures’.

Indigenous communities find themselves at the losing end of socio-economic changes taking place in diverse contexts of development. Changes in property rights to land and related resources such as forests and water have universally had adverse effects on their livelihoods, which are almost absolutely dependent on these resources and the ecosystems to which they belong. The historical processes behind these changes have their political, economic and cultural specificities. A deep understanding of transitions in property rights in the traditional habitations of indigenous communities is crucial in capturing these specificities and the socio-economic consequences of the changes. Property rights could be described as the set of economic and social relations that define the position of each individual with respect to the utilization of a resource (Furubotn and Pejovich 1972).

This article engages with a long critical tradition, particularly amongst historians of India but also more generally within environmental and economic history, which describes the modern West's hubristic scientific domination of Asian environments. Confidence in the universal applicability of scientific knowledge, such critiques argue, justified one-size-fits-all technical schemes being exported across vastly different climates and societies, and landscape and communities reshaped to fit the rational visions of planners and engineers. The article examines the actual procedures of Indian canal engineering, whose protagonists ostensibly portrayed precisely this scientific hubris. It finds that even the most ‘scientific’ canal construction and management, borrowing ideas and procedures from steam engines and astronomy, involved precisely the sorts of local knowledge and social reliability evident in opposing forms of flexible, administrative irrigation management. While these two types of water management attempted literally to engineer two different political economies into India's agrarian landscape, in practice their management styles differed little. Both enlisted social and racial prejudice, rather than scientific knowledge, to defend the administrative superiority and actions of British officials. Instruments for economic governance and administrative control, it argues, thus derived as much from the colonial limits of ‘universal’ European science as from its global applicability.

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again.

- Attributed to Aurangzeb

There is no safer way to blacken a person's reputation in the estimate of following generations than to attribute a wanton holocaust of wasted beauty to him.

- Antonia Fraser on Oliver Cromwell

In September 1950, the Government of West Bengal dispatched 500 Hindu refugee families to the village of Jirat in Hooghly district. It intended to build a camp there permanently to house these refugees, who had fled from East Bengal in the turbulent aftermath of the partition of India. Some forty miles from Calcutta, Jirat was situated on the west bank of the River Hooghly. It had once been a substantial and prosperous village, significant enough to earn a mention in Rennell's Atlas of 1786, where wealthy people built large homes and temples. Indeed the ancestral home of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee—educationist and politician, founder of the Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party, and ironically, one of the most vociferous champions of the Hindu refugees in Bengal after partition—was situated in the village. In the 19th century, however, the river had changed its course and Jirat's population was ravaged by a particularly virulent strain of the dreaded ‘Burdwan fever’. By 1950, when the refugees arrived at Jirat, the village had long since been abandoned, its waterways choked with silt, its ponds filthy and overgrown with water hyacinth, its great buildings crumbling and derelict. A rare ‘empty’ corner in crowded West Bengal, the Government of West Bengal deemed it to be an appropriate place to house and rehabilitate two and a half thousand refugees: men, women and children.

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.