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The Chinese fought better on land than at sea but they traded well wherever they went. Losing repeatedly to foreigners in all their wars in the nineteenth century was a traumatic experience from which China has yet to recover fully. Learning to trade efficiently in a capitalist system was easier, but the political partners whom Chinese merchants have had both inside and outside the country were difficult to please. When we come to the words, “to convert”, however, the picture is different again. Meeting with a powerful and persistent alien religion was an experience the Chinese had not had for a very long time. When Buddhism captured their imagination nearly 2,000 years ago, it brought a spiritual rhetoric that filled their lives and, by enriching the Chinese language as well, stimulated their minds and earned their admiration. Digesting that body of texts and their wealth of ideas for the next millennium seemed to have satisfied most Chinese until recent times. They themselves remained without an indigenous tradition of religious conversion. Chinese elites felt a duty to bring their civilisation to non-Han minorities from time to time, but the idea of converting others to a Chinese religion was not something they readily understood. It is interesting to note that China, apart from some pantheistic beliefs, did not develop a religion of its own. This is unusual for a continuous historic civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's national day is 26 January; Indonesia's 17 August. They point to a difference. 26 January derives from the Indian National Congress' decision at its Lahore Congress in December 1929 to launch a Civil Disobedience movement against the British Government in India. Jawaharlal Nehru as Congress' President arranged that the first step would be for thousands of Congress rank and file to join together on 26 January 1930 to take the Independence Pledge. This declared that since ‘it is the inalienable right of the Indian people … to have freedom, … if any government deprives a people of those rights …the people have a … right to … abolish i t … We recognise, however, that the most effective way of gaining freedom is not through violence. We will, therefore, prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government and will prepare for Civil Disobedience.’ From that moment onwards 26 January has been India's Independence Day, though when it was first held India's independence still stood 17 years away. The celebrations have thus come to link post-independent India with the feats of the Indian national movement which for so many years pursued the strategy of civil disobedience, and which, despite a series of intervening fits and starts, is seen to have been crucial to its success. For India the heroics of its freedom struggle lie, that is, in its elongated pre-independence past, of long years of humiliating harassment and costly commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great arc of Asia, from India through South-east Asia to China, has seen during the greater part of the twentieth century the working out of something akin to a ‘general crisis’ of immense proportions. The term ‘general crisis’ was made familiar as a description of a series of occurrences in western Europe in the seventeenth century, where (so it was argued) there was a far-flung rising of ‘the country’ against ‘the court’. The greater part of Monsoon Asia has passed through a not dissimilar ‘general crisis’ in the twentieth century, born of a conjuncture between an intensifying revulsion towards continuing imperialist domination and a deepening exasperation with the inefficient, inequitable structures of society with which it was seen to be lumbered. There is a widespread assumption that the histories of the various countries of this region are quite adequately understood in their own terms. Certainly there has been little inclination to look beyond their own borders. Whilst each country has had its own superabundance of particularities, an over-rigorous concentration upon these does seem, however, to have been at the expense of allowing for the highly significant similarities that in a range of very important respects many of them have at the same time experienced. The briefest of glances at the twentieth-century history of the greater part of the countries of Monsoon Asia will immediately reveal that they have passed through a number of comparable political upheavals, sometimes palpably during the same few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]