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This article considers the relationship between poverty in Rangoon and the ways in which both an imperial and a post-imperial urbanism helped 'improve', develop, and reclaim Rangoon's urban environment. Examining the actions of the Rangoon Development Trust before and after the Second World War in the context of actions taken by the Bombay Improvement Trust, Bombay Development Directorate, Singapore Improvement Trust, and Hong Kong Housing Authority, it both analyses measures taken in Rangoon and constructs a connective history of urban development in relation to other Asian port cities. Incorporating documents released only in 2014 by the National Archives of Myanmar, this analysis for the first time considers interventions made in Rangoon's post-war built environment of poverty, connecting these actions to policies constructed over the preceding decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the extraordinarily broad advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the First World War. Though often interpreted as politically motivated, it shows above all a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. In this it followed an established pattern of Indian elite concern with martiality. It also reflected anxieties of Indian weakness and effeminacy—something elites indicted themselves for, but which, importantly, they assumed to be more generally prevalent. Sampling calls for enlistment in the public space throughout the war, the article focuses on Bombay Presidency—a region that gave rise to such prominent Indian voices for enlistment as M. K. Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Bombay's recent experience of relative exclusion from military recruitment, and from membership of the 'martial races', was representative of much of India. This article enables us to view the effects of such 'demartialization' away from the classic case of Bengal. It suggests that it helped to inspire the call to enlist, especially as public spokesmen for the 'martial race' ideology explicitly linked martiality with manliness. The concern for enlistment ultimately superseded political calculation even for so hard-nosed a politician as Tilak. And though elites were most obviously concerned for their own martial vigour and leadership, they were also concerned with the manliness of the bulk of India's population, especially in Gandhi's conception of war as a preparation for satyagraha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the issue of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War. Benefitting from archival materials only recently made available, specifically Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries, CIA declassified materials, Taiwanese Foreign Ministry files, and rare publications from the Contemporary Taiwan Collection at the Library of the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, this research examines the cloud of suspicion surrounding the secret contacts between Taipei and Beijing leading up to and during the 1958 offshore islands crisis, elucidating how such a political tête-à-tête, and the resultant tacit consensus over the status of the islands, gradually brought about an end to the conflict between Taiwan and Communist China. In hindsight, the crises over the offshore islands along China's southeast coast momentarily brought the United States closer to war with Communist China, while putting the relationship between Taipei and Washington to a serious test. The end result, however, was that, while these isles were technically embedded in the unfinished civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, they provided, ironically, an opportunity for secret communications and, ultimately, a kind of détente between the two supposedly deadly enemies across the Taiwan Strait. A close examination of the details of these crises, along with their attendant military, political, and diplomatic complexities, reveals an amazing amount of political intrigue at both the local and international levels that has not been fully realized until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After their government's 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japanese internationalists searched for new ways to engage with the world or struggled to accommodate their advocacy of international cooperation to the realities of the wartime empire. The idea of international morality was central to this effort. Ethics textbooks, which presented ideals of international behaviour, provide a particular view of this intellectual and policy endeavour of the 1930s and early 1940s, showing how the concept of morality became a means to reconcile internationalism with imperialism and war. Echoing many of the ideas current in both public discussion and behind-closed-doors decision-making on foreign policy at the time, textbook authors and other educators contributed to a broader redefinition of internationalism that enabled it to persist through a period of imperialism and war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar—Fellow of Trinity College and Reader in History at the University of Cambridge—passed away on 23 April 2006. In addition to a rich legacy of books and articles that were published in his lifetime, he left behind an enormous amount of manuscript material, much of which was ready for publication. A selection of this material was published in his posthumous History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge University Press, 2009), but new manuscripts continue to come to light. His wife, Jennifer Davis, recently found this essay among his effects. There is good reason to believe that Raj felt it was ready for publication. Therefore, we publish this essay almost exactly as it appears in his typescript, only correcting typos and minor errors, and adding a map. The editors would like to thank David Washbrook and Jennifer Davis for proofing this article, Uttara Shahani and Binney Hare for researching and adapting the map, and Francoise Davis for the photograph of Raj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interwar period has recently been described as a highly internationalist one in South Asia, as a series of distinct internationalisms—communist, anarchist, social scientific, socialist, literary, and aesthetic1—took shape. At the same time, it has been argued that the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 drew to a close various opportunities for international association (at least, temporarily). Taking into account both these contradistinctive developments, this article deals with another—and thus far largely overlooked—South Asian internationalism in the form of wartime Indian humanitarianism. In 1938, the Indian National Congress helped organize an Indian medical mission to China to bring relief to Chinese victims of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By focusing on this initiative, this article traces the ideas, the practices, and the motives of Indian political humanitarianism. It argues that such initiatives, as they became part of much wider global networks of humanitarianism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, created new openings for Indian nationalists to establish international alliances. This article also examines the way in which political humanitarianism enabled these same nationalists to perform as independent leaders on an international stage, and argues that humanitarianism served as a tool of anti-colonial emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the historical role and legacy of the foreign establishment in China's temporary capital Chongqing during the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan and the Second World War. This extraordinary episode, lasting from 1938 to 1946, ushered in a new era for China's foreign diplomacy and laid the foundation for its rise to world-power status. Placing Chongqing at the very heart of this epochal chapter in modern Chinese history, this article describes the major events, trends, and actors that directly or indirectly were instrumental to China's wartime transformation from a partitioned, de facto colony to a first-rate global power with a permanent seat among the ‘Big Five’. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, this article presents fresh perspectives on a near-forgotten episode of China's war experience. Moving beyond the traditional typecasting of ‘Chungking’ as a primitive backwater in China's remote hinterland, this article reappraises wartime Chongqing as a major international centre at the spearhead of global change and as an important cradle of the modern power that China is today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Exploring how the history of the Fifteen-year War was dealt with in pre-1982 mainland China is an essential step towards understanding the currently explosive Sino-Japanese History Problem; furthermore, this might shed light on various issues in the post-war history of China and Sino-Japanese relations. However, available research on the pre-1982 period is scarce and problematic. Earlier political scientists argue that the history of the war was ruthlessly manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party regime, while some recent studies believe that the war was conveniently ‘forgotten’ as Sino-Japanese friendship was vital for the government of the People's Republic of China. This article aims at providing an accurate and thorough picture of how the history of the Fifteen-year War was positioned in the diplomatic practice of the Chinese Communist Party regime in relation to Japan during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ways in which rural elite collaborators mobilized recruits for the British Army during the First World War. It thus not only increases knowledge of Punjab's military history, but adds to the understanding of collaboration as a process involving competitive groups in which elites manipulated the process for their own ends. The case study material drawn from the Shahpur district of the colonial Punjab argues that while there may have been a degree of indoctrination into the colonial state's values, it was mainly the desire to use its patronage to bolster family influence or to transform local hierarchies that was the key factor in securing willing collaborators. The competition for local power and influence provided a local dynamic to the collaborative process. The state could of course take advantage of this competition to serve its interests, just as the Punjabi tribal chiefs could utilize state patronage to beat off rivals to their power. Collaboration was thus a dynamic two-way process, rather than, as it is often portrayed, a top-down, one-way relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the decade and a half following Korean liberation from Japan in 1945, a category of men prowled Seoul's back alleys and also its halls of power. These figures might be called street leaders, for they were directly linked on one hand to private agents of violence and on the other to the top state and political elites of the country. The most notorious individuals included Kim Tu-han, a gang leader who became an elected politician, and Yi Chŏng-jae, a ‘political gangster’ who helped party politicians with their dirty work. Street leaders like Kim and Yi were on the scene at key moments in the republic's early political development. An examination of the political careers of Kim and Yi reveals how important cooperation between such actors and elite politicians was to state-building, political mobilization, and design of electoral institutions—processes that created the contemporary South Korean polity. Both the alliances between politicians and street leaders as well as the destruction of those alliances left deep impressions on South Korean politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the late 1950s and the 1960s, a significant community of Indians appeared in Seria, an oil town in Brunei. Most of these Indians were recruited from India by the British Malayan Petroleum Company to staff its company offices in the wake of the rehabilitation of the Seria oilfields after the end of the Japanese occupation of Borneo. However, in official hagiographies of the Sultanate and historical accounts of Brunei, the Indians of Seria are invisible. Juxtaposed against this silence in the historical record, I pose the narrative agency of these Indians in asserting their place in the emergence of the modern state of Brunei and in historicizing their presence in a frontier oil town in Borneo. This article is based on extensive fieldwork in India, where most of these Indians retired to after decades of expatriate life in Brunei. Recalling their work and youth in Seria, they collectively claim an ‘origin’ in Seria while improvising a Brunei-Indian diaspora in India through their shared memories. In the absence of an archival record for the Indians in Seria, this article seeks to affirm the historical value of story-telling and diasporic remembering in recording a partisan genealogy of migration and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Vietnamese were confronted with the harsh realities of French colonialism, while simultaneously engaging with a flood of new concepts and the language that came with them. Among these concepts was that of ‘society’, whose import was enhanced by its linkages with the discourse of social Darwinism. This article explores the Vietnamese neologistic project of the early twentieth century through a close examination of the ways in which the concept and labels for ‘society’ were brought in and understood. I argue that the arrival of ‘society’ in conjunction with social Darwinism profoundly shaped the Vietnamese understanding of the term, implicating it in a notion of struggle and contestation. By illustrating the introduction of ‘society’ through early modernist school textbooks I suggest the ways in which Vietnamese conceptualized it as they embarked on their own struggle with the threats posed by colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using new archival materials, internal publications, and gazetteers as its sources, this article studies the conduct of disaster governance in Tianjin city during the Great Leap Forward famine from 1958–1962. The city was organizationally well able to implement disaster relief efforts, and early on it took a number of measures to control and mitigate the food crisis that began in the city in early 1959. However, Maoist campaign-based disaster management could not work well when other campaigns were prioritized in its stead. Lacking central sanction for a major disaster relief effort, city leaders resorted to strategies that prioritized its residents over suburban peasants and outsiders. The city actively sought resources from outside while trying to prevent their outward flows. The city's own production of vegetables must not be overlooked as one of the reasons for better survival rates among urban residents, but even this policy was hampered by other Great Leap Forward initiatives. In the case of Tianjin, urban disaster governance of the famine was inward-looking and, at the same time, constrained and reliant on the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement across Chinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese. Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations to refer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we can learn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about the wartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic of territorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concerned with the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iteration and practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic with respect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding how the work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic is important because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundational to the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War world order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the Second World War, there were over a million displaced persons and refugees in Europe alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese empire across the Pacific Theater, and many others were similarly displaced when Japan was defeated. Others later fled civil conflicts, in South Asia, for instance, and in China, where thousands left the mainland during the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Among this massive displacement in Asia, unlike in Europe, only a few groups were identified as refugees. One such group consisted of the migrants in Hong Kong who, after 1949, were understood to be refugees fleeing communist oppression in the People's Republic of China. This article examines the critical role that surveys (population studies designed to account for, and define, refugee groups) played in shaping particular, Westernized Cold War understandings of the refugee experience in Hong Kong. These surveys were organized by non-state interests and undertaken with financial support from major American philanthropies. In examining the objectives and methodologies of the refugee surveys conducted in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, in contrast with studies undertaken contemporaneously in Europe, this article observes that, although at the time the flaws in the surveys were recognized and regularly disregarded in the pursuit of broad political objectives, scholars have failed to adequately recognize the subjective nature of the surveys' supposedly empirical evidence. As a result, the dominant European-based narrative about modern refugees has obfuscated the distinctive aspects of the refugee experience in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with the Sino–Soviet conflict of 1925–26 over the Chinese Eastern Railway, with special attention given to its background and consequences. In 1924, the Chinese Eastern Railway became a joint venture between the Soviet Union and China, creating fresh friction between the joint Soviet and Chinese managers which culminated in general manager A.N. Ivanov's prohibition on transporting military cargoes and troops, and Ivanov's arrest by Manchurian warlord-general Zhang Zuolin. Some scholars and diplomatists have viewed Ivanov's prohibition and the simultaneous rebellion by Chinese general Guo Songling against Zhang as a Soviet attempt to replace Zhang with a more manageable warlord. But this article argues that although the prohibition—a typical instance of back-and-forth Soviet diplomacy—was a coincidence, it was primarily the result of Soviet ambassador Lev M. Karakhan's tough stance and his rash decision-making, undertaken without seeking advice from Moscow. Zhang's victory in the 1926 clash convinced the Chinese that they had the power to take repressive measures against the Soviet Union's citizens and institutions, which led to the Sino–Soviet conflict of 1929 and exacerbated Japanese alarm over the Soviet's increasing strength in the region. This was to be a factor in the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 by Japan's Guandong Army, which eventually led to global war. This article, therefore, deals with the origins of world-changing events and thus is interesting to Modern Asian Studies’ wider readership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper supplies the historical context to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's (1861–1941) first visit to the city of Chicago in January 1913 when he spoke at the University of Chicago and established life-long friendships with some of the literary personalities of the city. By focusing on how Tagore came to be received by the University authorities and on his friendship with Harriet Vaughan Moody (1857–1932), the widow of the American writer William Vaughn Moody, it also seeks to trace the role that the themes of ‘empire’ and ‘civilization’ played in determining how the poet was received, understood, and admired by his foreign friends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The arrival of Indian sipahis (or ‘sepoys’) to fight alongside soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in October 1914 was both a victory and a source of concern for the British Raj. It proved to be the zenith of martial race fantasies that had been carefully codified from the 1890s, and birthed fears about the effects that Europe and the rapidly intensifying conflict on the Western Front would have upon the ‘best black troops in the world’. The situation resulted in the appointment of a special military censor to examine the letters sent to and from Indian sipahis and compile a fortnightly summary of Indian letters from France for the duration of the First World War. This paper investigates a portion of the letters contained in these reports. More particularly, it investigates the life of a single chain letter and the effect its chiliastic message had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the First World War. As the letter was read, rewritten, and passed on, it served as a rejoinder to missionary efforts by the Ahmadiyya Movement, reinterpreted as a call for soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships, before, finally, being used as a critique of the British war effort against the Ottoman empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, classically trained Muslim scholars (`ulama) of the influential Deobandi school of North India issued a number of immensely popular, mass-printed ‘primers’ on Islamic belief and ritual practice. Now ubiquitous in the Islamic bookshops in South Asia and elsewhere, these primers sought to summarize the rudiments of an Islamic education for a nascent lay Muslim reading public. Focusing on three Deobandi `ulama—Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952), and Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997)—this paper explores how their primers advanced the Deobandi school's well-known critique of popular piety even as they claimed to address Muslims generally, and how their authors negotiated the subtle dynamics of print. Understanding the potentially subversive power of print to open a space for readers to form their own interpretations of minute doctrinal matters and the threat of mass-printed religious texts to their own authority, these `ulama implored readers to refrain from forming their own opinions of the primers’ content and to consult the `ulama throughout the reading process. Thus, even as they took advantage of print's possibilities, they remained deeply suspect of its ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications—depending on one's wider social positioning—of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy, and nostalgia. The refugees or, more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This paper explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, which was designed to integrate refugees into the socio-economic fabric of India, or eulogizes them as heroic protagonists who successfully battled overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee as both victim and victor obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this paper will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This paper interrogates refugee reminiscences to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to both popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how China and Japan fought for supremacy in China's treaty-port English-language press during the Jinan Incident of 1928. It argues that China's defeat in this media battle was a result of the long-term, unsettled political conditions the country was experiencing. The constant changes of government thwarted China's official and non-official efforts to establish a national news network. The threat from the northern warlords and China's intricate relations with the imperialist powers deterred the Nanjing regime from formulating decisive foreign propaganda policies. In contrast, Japan, with a strong news network in China, quickly installed its version of the event in the media. Its response was fast, consistent, and intensive. Japan also took advantage of the Nanjing Incident to justify its actions in Jinan. Press opinion in the treaty ports towards the Jinan Incident was split, with the British press supporting the Japanese and American papers favouring China's case. However, Japanese accounts, with the endorsement of the British treaty-port papers, still dominated the reports in The Times of London and influenced the views of the Manchester Guardian and The New York Times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In May 1949 the Chinese Communist Party seized Shanghai. Rather than being elated at the prospect of harnessing the economic power of China's largest city to complete the revolution, the Communists approached it cautiously. How would the Chinese Communist Party set about transforming this free-wheeling port city with a ‘semi-colonial’ past into an orderly and socialist city? How would it balance ideology and pragmatism in reshaping Shanghai? This paper uses the takeover of two British companies as case studies to explore these issues at the ground level. It is argued that the means by which these companies were transformed tell us much about the Party and its state-building policies. When cadres entered foreign companies, their priority was not radical change and anti-imperialism, but rather fostering a sense of stability and unity to avoid disrupting production. Their gradual approach was due in large part to the Party's awareness of its own limited skills, resources and manpower, but also to its leaders and cadres recognizing that before they could remake Shanghai anew they had first to deal with the material and human legacies of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), the colonial authorities resettled an estimated half a million rural dwellers, mainly Chinese, from the fringe of the jungle, to cut them off from contact with armed members of the Malayan Communist Party. The re-location led to political alienation among many resettled in the nearly 500 New Villages. Winning their support against the insurgency therefore was urgent. At this juncture, foreign missionaries were forced to leave China following the communist takeover in October 1949. Many of these missionaries were Chinese-speaking with medical or teaching experience. The High Commissioner of Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney, and his successor, Sir Gerald Templer, invited these and other missionaries to serve in the New Villages. This paper looks at colonial initiatives and mission response amidst the dynamics of domestic politics and a changing international balance of power in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Mantetsu Employees' Association, founded in 1926 by a group of elite university-educated employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company, was an organization of unprecedented scope and vision which provided for the development of a limited form of self-government by the Japanese in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone during Japan's occupation of northeast China. Its founding principles resembled the ideological tenets of the metropole's movement of Taishō Democracy which had since the post-Russo-Japanese War energized supporters of widened popular access to the job of national governance. This paper traces how the Mantetsu Employees' Association reflected the political zeitgeist of post World War I metropolitan society whilst simultaneously developing in response to heightened Chinese nationalism in the northeast throughout the 1920s. It shows how the Association encompassed a wide range of employee ambitions—from increased involvement in imperial decision-making to labour advocacy on behalf of the Company's lowest-ranking Japanese workers to a critique of colonial policy as dictated by Tokyo's political parties. The paper introduces key Association players and their ideas as a means of questioning the nature of democracy in an imperial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the wide domain of finance, taxation is one of the issues to which public opinion is most sensitive. This paper explores why tax reform was hotly debated in Japan throughout the 1920s, focusing on the policies of the two main political parties. Though a topic rarely treated by historians, this controversy reveals a wealth of information on the concerns that lay behind policy choices in years that were marked by economic instability and social unrest; it shows, in particular, how the ruling elites tried to attenuate class conflict by enhancing the redistributive function of taxes, which had thus far been subordinated to the encouragement of rapid economic growth and the financing of state investment. While these attempts deserve attention as tentative steps towards the development of a welfare state, their limits indicate that the parties, in spite of extending the suffrage during this period, retained strong links with a restricted network of established constituents. This paper dwells especially on the earliest and least studied phase of the dispute on tax reform, in order to prove that the emergence of distinct party platforms did not stem simply from tactical considerations, but was rooted in broader policy visions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to see how a particular labour market (domestic service), a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in the post-partition Indian state of West Bengal, and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. It argues that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independent West Bengal, accompanied by the large scale immigration of men, women and children from bordering East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), led to a general decline in wage rate for those in domestic service. Poor refugee women, in their frantic search for a means of survival, gradually drove out the males of the host population who were engaged in domestic service in urban West Bengal by offering to work for a very low wage and often for no wage at all. As poor males from the neighbouring states of Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces constituted historically a substantial section of Calcutta domestic workers, it was mainly this group who were replaced by refugee women. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service since the 1970s in urban West Bengal was arguably set by migrating girl children from different parts of the state to Calcutta city in search of employment. This is probably why West Bengal had the highest girl children's work-participation rate in urban India in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with the establishment of the Department of Public Health in 1912, the implementation of public health policies became an integral part of city management in Republican Guangzhou. Yet the cholera outbreak of 1932 fully exposed the weaknesses of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the city. Due to the Guangzhou government's inaction, the Fangbian Hospital, a local charitable hall founded in response to the bubonic plague of the 1890s, involuntarily took over the major responsibility for providing medical services for cholera patients in the early stage of the epidemic. Only after the death of hundreds of patients and Guangzhou being described as a ‘world of horror’ in the local press did the government-run hospital start to take a more active role. Epidemics have always served as catalysts for change in public health perceptions and practices. This paper attempts to explain how the cholera epidemic of 1932 changed the role of public health in the urban administration of the city. Emphasis is placed on analysing how the people of Guangzhou began to fight for a supply of clean drinking water once they came to realize the link between water and the spread of the fatal cholera epidemic in 1932. Clean water, which used to be seen as a commodity enjoyed by the privileged few, was now increasingly regarded as a citizen's right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While establishing a framework for colonial governance in the Philippines, American policymakers had to confront the issue of opium smoking, which was especially popular among the Philippine Chinese community. In 1903, the Philippine Commission proposed a return to the Spanish-era policy of controlling the opium trade through tax farming, igniting outrage among American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines and their supporters in the United States. Their actions revived a faltering global anti-opium movement, leading to a series of international agreements and domestic restrictions on opium and other drugs. Focusing mostly on American policy in the Philippines, this paper also examines the international ramifications of a changing drug control regime. It seeks to incorporate the debate over opium policy into broader narratives of imperial ideology, international cooperation, and local responses to colonial rule, demonstrating how a variety of actors shaped the new drug-control regimes both in the Philippines and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]