The Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, at the northern extremity of the Krishna delta, rose to prominence as a major centre of maritime trade in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Its growing importance after about 1570 is explicable in terms of two sets of events: first, the consolidation of the Sultanate of Golkonda under Ibrahim Qutb Shah (r. 1550–1580), and second, the rise within the Bay of Bengal of a network of ports with a distinctly anti-Portuguese character, including the Sumatran centre of Aceh, the ports of lower Burma, of Arakan, as well as Masulipatnam itself. Round about 1550, Masulipatnam was no more than a supplier of textiles on the coastal network to the great port of Pulicat further south, but by the early 1580s its links with Pegu and Aceh had grown considerably, causing not a little alarm in the upper echelons of the administration of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa. The ‘Moors’ who owned and operated ships out of Masulipatnam did so without the benefit of carlazes from the Portuguese captains either at São Tomé or at any other neighbouring port, and while developing an intense trade within the Bay of Bengal, strictly avoided the Portuguese-controlled entrepot at Melaka. The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased, enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade. the port was no more than a minor nuisance, and in the engagements that ensued, the Portuguese frequently had the worst of it, subsequently negotiating to recover prisoners lodged at Masulipatnam or at the court in Golkonda.2 However, by about 1590, the tenor of the relationship between the viceregal administration at Goa and the court at Golkonda had begun to show signs of change

In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent events became known as ‘The Bahubali Affair’ (Marathi bāhubalīprakaran).

A compelling vignette of the use of political influence for private gain in the expansion of the British empire is provided by the way King Thebaw' s legendary ruby mines in Upper Burma were acquired by British speculators in the late 1880s. The details of how the ruby-mine concession was awarded to a syndicate soon after Upper Burma was annexed to Britain in 1886 are not well known, although the concesion-mongering created a furore in the India Office and the House of Commons. There was even, at the time, a suggestion that the rubymine affair infleunced Lord Dufferin's decision to resign as Viceroy in 1888.

Most economic theories of land rent determination relate to capitalist agriculture. This is true also of the theories of Ricardo and Marx, which were formulated primarily in the context of nineteenth-century English agriculture. These theories share two crucial assumption: cultivation solely for profit and free mobility of capital between agriculture and other sectors. In the Ricardian scheme these assumptions enable land rent to be determined as a residual after wages and profits have been simultaneously determined, because capitalist cultivators will pay rent only as a surplus over the socially average rate of profit.

Kim Yôn-su (pen name Sudang 1896–1979) was among the few widely successful Korean entrepreneurs during the years of Japanese colonial rule on the peninsula.1 He served as managing director and later as president (1935–1945) of the Kyôngsông Spinning Company (Kyôngsông Pangjik Chusik Hoesa), the largest of the Korean-owned industrial enterprises. He also founded, managed and owned the Samyang company, the largest indigenous agricultural company of the period.2 What distinguished Kim was not merely the extent of his investments and administrative responsibilities, but the continuity of indigenous ownership and management in his ventures despite strong Japanese dominance of the colonial Korean economy.

‘The Pontiff has engulfed the Emperor, has joined in his pontifical staff the imperial sword. And the result: both Empire and Church go ill because united in one hand they cease to fear each other’ (Kantorowicz, ‘Dante's Two Suns’, 218).

The historical literature on Indian Ocean trade has now come to recognize the importance of food-grains as an ingredient of that trade. In the western part of the Ocean (the Arabian Sea), its eastern part (Bay of Bengal) and within the Southeast Asian mainland and islands, there is every evidence of a substantial movement of food-grains from surplus areas to deficit areas. Though the scale and frequency of this trade may not be relatively as important in the regional economy as Braudel has outlined for the Mediterranean (with the assistance, it must be admitted, of superior quantitative evidence), it was nevertheless one of the commodities that entered into the commercial processes of different regions of the Ocean. The evidence for the study of the grain trade is, as with all Asian trade in the early modern period, fragmentary and episodic. As intrinsic to the sector of trade embracing Asian merchant shippers and consumers, it shares the disadvantages of paucityof evidence of that whole sector. Again, as with Asian trade as a whole, the grain trade comes into view only when Europeans have entered into that trade and have left glimpses of it in their records.The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased ,enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade

After seven years, the care-and-maintenance network sustaining an estimated three million plus Afghan refugees in Pakistan functions with remarkable efficiency. There have been no epidemics, no starvation, little malnutrition because of insufficient intake of food, and no major outbreaks of violence.

Pieter Laurens Phoonsen, son of Bernard Phoonsen, a distinguished servant of the Dutch East India Company, was born at Gale in Ceylon in 1691 and probably never saw the Netherlands in his life. He was enrolled as a common sailor on a ship of the Dutch Company at Batavia in the year 1707. The peak of his career in the service of the Company was reached when he succeeded Herman Bruinink as the directeur of the Dutch council at Surat late in the year 1728. The papers produced at the Dutch lodge at Surat throughout the 1730s show Phoonsen as an efficient servant of the Company, an upright man keen to uphold the honour of the white race in an alien environment and, on the whole, aloof from the fearful complications of these years in the city of Surat. Phoonsen's colleagues in the council at Surat carefully emulated their chief and the official papers give no ground to suspect that the Indian world enmeshed in any way with life as it went on behind the walls at the Dutch lodge or that the Company, whatever the directors might say, had any well-founded reason for complaint. True, such upright men were not universally admired even at the time. Apart from the distant suspicion of Amsterdam, there was scepticism closer at hand. Writing an ordinary business letter in the early 1730s, Henry Lowther, the chief of the English factory at Surat, noted: ‘The Dutch have sold their cargo, that is the Chief and Council have bought it underhand but at what price no one knows.’ The prolix correspondence from the Dutch lodge at Surat was not, however, tainted with such meanness.

India has had a remarkable tradition in cotton textiles, but that in silk is not of an equivalent order. The purpose of this article is to define the different categories of silk worms and determine their regional diffusion in India within some chronological framework. The question also needs to be raised whether silk was brought to India from China or whether it was indigenous to this country.

A new chapter was opened in the history of the Portuguese overseas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the publication of Professor Boxer's Mary and Misogyny(1981). It dealt with the relations between the Portuguese men, freshly arrived from their homeland and the local women, their relationships, adventures and the formation of Mestizo communities. As Dr Geneviève Bouchon in her review article of the book says, it ‘served as a source of inspiration and of indispensable sources’: