The foreign relations of Iran from 1800 to 1921 have on the whole been discussed in terms of diplomatic relations between states, of ‘Great Power’ policy, and of the impact of the world economy upon a comparatively weak and traditional society. A brief survey of the existing literature reveals that Iran's lack of progress has been attributed among other factors to her form of government, foreign interference and to her predicament as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires. The traditional power structures of Iran, as dominated by an absolute monarchy intent on personal interest with a concomitant lack of realism when engaging in war, was, in Ramazani's view, the origin of the country's weakness. Kazemzadeh saw the subject from the point of view of Anglo-Russian rivalry at the highest levels, and argued that both powers sought to impose hegemony on Iran by a variety of means, including, putting pressure on the Shah and chief ministers, using commercial concessions and exercising intimidation. The competition of Britain and Russia was so intense that each was determined to undermine any plan of development proposed by the other, opportunities were numerous, as, for example, in the introduction of railways. Yapp, to some extent, questioned this argument by pointing out that British interests were more complex than those of the Russians; on the one hand a stronger Iran was a more efficient buffer-state, but on the other hand it could undermine British influence in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Yapp also noted that the British and Russian presence gave advantages to Iran in terms of the development of international trade, the control of internal disorder and in the imposition of regional security. Greaves saw Britain's diplomatic connections with Iran as dominated by her preoccupation with the defence of India, and believed that its attitudes to Iran were neither consistent nor strong. Issawi, in his study of economic development, also presented a more complex picture which emphasises the variety of the factors involved, and also the fluctuations in the economy over the period. He pointed out that trade did grow steadily, that the country benefited from new technology, for example the telegraph and the construction of the Suez Canal, and that it lived within its means. On the other hand, involvement in the international economy from 1890–1914 led to rapidly increasing foreign financial and political factors, which undermined the county's independence. Wright provided a different approach in that, while acknowledging the baleful effects of aspects of Anglo-Russian rivalry on Iran, he was more concerned with the experiences of a variety of ‘English’ amongst the Iranians, and thus offered a study of interaction between foreigners and Iranians at a level below that of international politics.

Tanjore in South India during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832), is a hitherto unexamined episode of both colonial science and of ‘Enlightenment’ in the non-western context. If Joseph Banks, a product of the English Enlightenment, was a metropolitan ‘centre of calculation’ directing and controlling a collecting network in India between the 1770s and 1820, it is argued that Raja Serfoji was his native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge. This case study demonstrates strongly (among other things) the weaknesses of the centre-periphery model of scientific practice. It shows how the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not determined by virtue of the geographical location, but by the nature of practice, which is a combined effect of social, scientific and power relations. Thus, this article examines the ways in which it became possible for a small quasi-Indian state in early nineteenth-century South India to leap onto the threshold of modernity, by generating an intellectual ferment of the kind that it did, as a unique native response to the western encounter.

Inhabitants of the Mongolian Plateau have been staunchly nomadic. Cities rarely existed before the Russian hegemony, and at that point they first attached themselves to pre-existing Buddhist monasteries. The exception to this general pattern was the Uighurs, who had an empire in the eighth and early ninth centuries. They built several cities, extended and maintained a flourishing trade network, established sufficient agriculture and developed urban manufacturing. Although historians have pointed out these significant distinctions, few have fully considered the thoroughly revolutionary impact of this Turkish group on steppe culture. One result in the Orkhon Valley was the foundation for Karakorum, the only permanent seat of the imperial Mongols in the thirteenth century. That city occupied the same site and, in the early seventeenth century, served as building material for the major religious centre of Erdene Zuu accompanying the re-introduction of Buddhism. Therefore, the Uighurs affected the physical heartland of their empire for a millennium and the habits of the people to this day.

On 20 February 1582 when Alessandro Valignano, Visitor to the Jesuit missions in the East Indies (the geographical area from Goa eastwards, to Japan, and southwards, to the Indonesian archipelago) left Japan, the country had been in a state of civil war, (the sengoku jidai) for more than a century. That was about to change. Oda Nobunaga had succeeded in uniting the central and western parts of Honshu under his rule and was intent on imposing his rule over the rest of the country. The Jesuits considered him if not quite a patron, then certainly someone sympathetic to Christianity and their mission in Japan. Yet on 22 June Nobunaga died, the victim of an attack by an ambitious rival, and ironically, considering the previous esteem in which he had been held, unlamented by the Jesuits who believed that during the final months of his life he had transformed himself into a megalomanic tyrant, a Nebuchadnezzar.

Dr Mildred Archer who died on February 4th 2005 aged 93 was the wife of Dr William “Bill” Archer OBE, MA (Cantab), D.Litt who died in 1979. For several decades she had been Curator of the Prints and Drawings Department at the old India Office Library before it amalgamated with the British Library. It was through her pioneering work on cataloguing those diverse and unknown collections that a new branch of art history came into being, an art form she called “Company” painting; art that had been drawn by European or Indian artists during the time of the East India Company.