During the Cold War, when South Korea was under a military dictatorship, the term “collaborator” (ch'inilp'a) often functioned as a kind of prohibition, indicating that a person or certain texts were not worthy of serious scholarly attention. Collaboration was also a politically taboo topic since many of the South Korean political and military elites, including President Park Chung Hee, were former collaborators. Criticism of collaborators could be seen as questioning the legitimacy of the regime. Though some important studies were published during this period, such as Im Chongguk's courageous Ch'inil munhaknon [On literature by collaborator writers] in 1966, it was not until after the victory of the democracy movement and the end of the Cold War that research on collaboration became active. During the past two decades, a variety of approaches to the issue have emerged. There have been, as one would expect, nationalist denunciations, but also attempts, influenced by cultural studies, to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that can produce new readings of their times. John Treat's article is an effort to contribute to this growing literature, and it offers an approach that has some similarities and important differences with recent studies on the topic. Similar to some of the work of younger South Korean scholars, he conceives of collaboration as “a structural feature of modernity” and situates the issue in a broader, more international context through his examination of texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Henry James. Significantly, he also focuses on understanding the basic morality of collaboration. It is an attempt to return scholarly discussion to the basic question, one that has proven to be difficult and painful to face—why did Korean intellectuals collaborate with the Japanese empire?

Through a study of over 1,300 previously unanalyzed Malay Islamic manuscripts, this article examines the role of the Patani community in the construction of transoceanic knowledge networks between Mecca and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century. Set against the backdrop of the destruction of prevailing symbols of authority, as well as the displacement and scattering of the community after 1200/1786, the present study investigates the manner by which scholars established new cultural unities for the community and addressed social concerns by translating and spreading Islamic writings, teachings, and schools. With its spiritual leadership centered now in Mecca, influential members of the community began producing works that were contingent upon political circumstances, but also directed at the problems facing the refugee community. Of foremost importance were the place and definition of the family, and related issues such as inheritance, divorce, and visible social actions, including ritual purity, fasting, almsgiving, and criminal punishments.

Everyone with interests in Chinese studies who has had occasion to become aware of it will agree that within the past two or three years there has been a marked upswing in the quantity and in the quality of publication in Taiwan. The present writer observed some of this new development on the scene in 1954–55, and others both better informed and better qualified to judge report that the trend continues. Although the Journal has on several occasions during the last five or six years reported briefly on publication there, now there is perhaps some value in reporting more comprehensively on recent developments, both because the phenomenon itself is of interest, and because many recently published items will be desired by scholars and by research libraries.

No imperial power, from the Maurya in the fourth and third centuries B.C., to the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries A.D., could really simplify the political geography of the Indie world from the Himalaya to the sea, from the Hindukush to the Brahmaputra. At some stage of their growth and expansion, every great, or imperial, power in this vast land of diverse peoples found it necessary to reconcile themselves to the separate existence of numerous units of polity in various degrees of subordination and dependence to superior powers.