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Characterizes the early modern period in world history (roughly 1500-1800) as one marked by worldwide processes of change unprecedented in scope and intensity. Argues that the society of the Indian subcontinent shared directly in the massive processes of change that influenced societies throughout the world. (MJP)

This article examines the report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895, a massive document on the Victorian inquiry into the Indian Empire and displaying the cultural tensions between the colonizers and the colonized. The author discusses the Indian export of opium to China during the 19th century, the licensure of peasant cultivators to grow poppy through an official state agency established by the Governor-General Lord Cornwallis, and other methods of economic regulation employed by the British and the government of India to maximize profits from the opium trade. Also discussed is the refusal of the Chinese Qing dynasty to authorize opium consumption, which led to the British attack on China in order to force it to legalize the drug.

David Kummer's quantitative study of deforestation in the Philippines demonstrates the need for careful scrutiny of published and unpublished statistical forest data. For the first half of the twentieth century, [...]