In the decade preceding the consolidation of All India Radio (circa 1936), there was an alternative model for broadcasting in India. It rejected the premise that there was a national audience, a national culture, or a national politics, or that radio's key function was to create them. In these negations of broadcasting's nation-statist implications, this model for Indian radio departed from the standard of the 1930s for the mass medium in the Western democracies and authoritarian states alike. Decreeing that discrete local services were the natural correspondent to the subcontinent's fractured social landscape, the model affronted the legitimacy of Indian nationalism. In this it mirrored the conservative face of colonial rule.

The past twenty years have seen the rapid growth of a new branch of international history, the serious academic study of secret services or ‘intelligence history’ with its attendant specialist conferences and journals. Two main causes for this development can be identified. The first was conceptual, namely the increasing recognition that the study of international history was greatly impoverished by the reluctance of academic historians to address a subject which appeared capable of shedding considerable light upon the conduct of international affairs. Two leading historians underlined this during 1982 in a path-breaking collection of essays on the subject, suggesting that intelligence was the ‘missing dimension’ of most international history. The second development was a more practical one, the introduction of the Thirty Year Rule during the 1970s, bringing with it an avalanche of new documentation, which, within a few years, was recognized as containing a great deal of intelligence material. In the 1980s historians had begun to turn their attention in increasing numbers to the intelligence history of the mid-twentieth century. They were further assisted in their endeavours by the appearance of the first volumes of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War.

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the ‘second city’ of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.

It has long been noticed that there is a lack of comparative studies of the economies of China and India. Bardhan (1970) points out that, in numerous textbooks on comparative economic systems, the reader can hardly find any mention of a China-India comparative study, which should be a very important part of any discussion on comparative economic systems in the present world. One reason for this may be the unavailability and unreliability of data, particularly from China. This situation is now changing. A statement prepared by a Delhi-based China Study Group in 1988, clearly points out that ‘it has become possible to secure more reliable data on China, data that can be checked from various sources and collected through field observation’ (Bhattacharjea, Deshingkar, Deshpande, Gupta, Huang, Mohanty, Rao, Tan and Uberoi, 1988).

Since the end of World War II, the ever-increasing role of government in advanced democratic nations has resulted in a massive organizational growth in the public sector. The impact of the welfare state provides an explanation for changes in traditional patterns of central–local government relations. The era of the welfare state has witnessed the rapid emergence of an intermeshed system of making and implementing policies, which necessitates integration between central and local government.

Our image and knowledge of the Vietnam war come predominantly from American sources, which all stress the unusual character of that war. From the despatch of the first combat units to Vietnam in 1960 to the fall of Saigon and the takeover by the North Vietnamese in 1975, it was America's longest war. American literature from Vietnam depicts the war as being waged not only against the enemy (particularly as it was often difficult to determine who and where the enemy was) but also against the elements — heat, rain, jungle, mosquitoes, leeches, dust and mud. The moral confusion surrounding this war and the disillusionment among the soldiers are well documented and portrayed in numerous films and stories. In examining, therefore, Japanese writing on the Vietnam war, it seemed sensible to concentrate on those aspects which were different, not only in order not to repeat the obvious, but also in the hope of bringing into focus the different perspective on the conflict which this writing offers.

A distinctive feature of the late Victorian capital market was the volume of investment in overseas countries, and this was clearly reflected in the dominant position occupied by overseas securities on the London Stock Exchange. By 1913 these amounted to approximately £5.5 billion, some 60% of the nominal value of all quoted securities. The attraction for home investors was the prospect of relatively high rates of return, along with the opportunity to diversify the range of assets held in private and institutional portfolios. In terms of geographical distribution new British investment in Asia ran at an annual average of £16.5 million in the 1890s, increasing to £19.25 million in the 1900s, and reaching a peak of £33 million in 1910.