In light of the emergent “history of capitalism” field in Euro-American history, this article reviews and critically situates how the category “capitalism” has been debated within the historiographies of China and South Asia. In discussions paralleling European historiography, Sinologists and Indologists explored whether the “prime mover” of capitalism was changes in production or in circulation. The example of South Asian studies shows how, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the dominant production-centered approach—drawing upon Marxist theory—produced stories of economic “failure” in Asia. The example of Chinese history since the 1990s points to the resurgence of a Smithian circulation-centered approach that challenges the Eurocentric story of failure. Each of these approaches emerged out of distinct eras of capital accumulation in the twentieth century: mid-century state-supported industrialization and late-century deregulated globalization. The tension between these approaches points towards a more integrative reinterpretation that sees the core dynamics of capitalism as a cyclical process of “capital accumulation,” one that integrates both production and circulation-centered approaches and also challenges Eurocentric histories of capitalism. This article's conclusion provides speculative thoughts on writing the histories of capitalism for China and South Asia today.

Lack of agreement on basic definitions has often bedeviled the anthropological study of Indian society. A case in point is “caste,” which has enjoyed almost as many definitions as there are students involved in its study. This multiplicity undoubtedly promotes a broadened investigation of caste phenomena, and thus ultimately increases our knowledge. But it also leads to the danger that competing definitions will masquerade as factual explanations, or that theoretically valid distinctions are lost in the rhetoric of definitional arguments. Especially in studies of the breakdown and reconstitution of caste institutions, the absence of a firm, explicit definitional base impedes evaluation of the nature, direction, and novelty of social structural change.

With the publication of Kaze no Uta o Kike (Hear the Wind Sing; 1979), Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) found himself more or less at odds with well-known members of the Japanese literary establishment. If one takes Murakami at his word, this was not the result of conscious effort on his part, but rather a matter of his own individualism, a certain indifference (feigned or not) toward the conventions and opinions of professional critics in Japan's literary community. He commented to journalist Kawamoto Saburō in a 1985 interview that “[i]t never occurred to me to resist the paradigms of existing ‘pure’ literature, or to offer some kind of antithesis to it…. I don't think I worried about whether existing types of works would go on existing, so long as I could write what I wanted, how I wanted” (Kawamoto 1985, 39–40). Such a statement might be taken as a reflection of the author's anxiety not to be labeled “anti-bundan“or otherwise standing against the proliferation of so called “pure“literature, or junbungaku. And yet, given the general trend of Japanese literature from 1980 onward, beginning perhaps with Tanaka Yasuo's plotless novel Nantonaku, Kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal; 1980), Murakami appears to belong to a growing new set of contemporary authors who do precisely that: resist the concepts and definitions of “pure“literature, redefining the term to suit their own needs.

The authors examine the actions and motivations of the Japanese who remained in China following Japan's surrender in August 1945. A large part of the Japanese Army in China became involved in the civil war there, and it appears that both sides, but especially the Nationalists, benefited from Japanese assistance. Although frequently the victims of circumstance, the Japanese also deliberately intervened in the fighting in the hope of continuing to influence the course of events in China. Such involvement may have significantly affected Japan's subsequent relationship with both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan.

The standard view of excommunication as severe, unusual punishment in India is shown to be inaccurate regarding a caste in Maharashtra. An alternative concept, centering on suspension from caste as an inevitable response to the pollution always incurred with any violation of caste rules, fits the particular caste in question and also fits the published descriptions of outcasting as well as or better than the standard view. By applying the alternative concept, it can be seen that panchayats are not like Western courts in the nature of the tasks they perform and that to view them as analogous to courts is seriously misleading.

From the time when Southeast Asia first rose above their horizon, Europeans—the infinitesimal number of them who cared about such matters, that is—tended to treat that vague and insubstantial region beneath the sunrise as simply a more distant part of India. This practice went back at least to Claudius Ptolemy or, possibly, one of his redactors, who subsumed a good part of the region under the rubric “Trans-Gangetic India.” Subsequently the whole area came to be identified with one of the “Three Indies,” though whether India Major or Minor, Greater or Lesser, Superior or Inferior, seems, often to have been a personal preference of the author concerned. When Europeans began to penetrate into Southeast Asia in earnest, they continued this tradition, attaching to various of the constituent territories such labels as Further India or Hinterindien, the East Indies, the Indian Archipelago, Insulinde, and, in acknowledgment of the presence of a competing culture, Indochina. As recently as 1884, a German ethnographer saw nothing incongruous in designating the archipelago as “the Indian Islands,” a term that with the cultural predilection of his age, he Hellenized as Indonesia. Although the powerful and pervasive influence of the “most divine and wise Ptolemy” furnished impeccable authority for this nomenclature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is no doubt that the practice also signified the recognition of South Asian cultural forms and institutions in the lands beyond the Bay of Bengal. Despite these forms differing subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—from those in India proper, they were so conspicuous that it was readily inferred, given the intellectual predisposition of the day, that they were the result of Indian colonization, if not conquest, in ancient times.

“The study of ancient China, particularly from the historic period on, requires A the collaboration of historians, archaeologists, palaeographers, as well as specialists in other disciplines.“

Isolated phenomena of a dualistic nature in various Shang institutions have long been recognized (see below), but their interrelationship and their possible relevance to a coherent dualistic system generally prevalent in Shang society cannot be clearly understood unless the various specialists on ancient China break disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with vigor and mutual understanding. This paper attempts to bring attention to some of these phenomena and to define the probable areas of research for a highly important problem in Shang studies. To begin, let us examine some interesting features at the archaeological sites of Hsiao-t'un and Hsi-pei-kang.

The articles presented here grew out of a year-long discussion of the spatial dimensions of historical and cultural change in various parts of Asia during the early modern and modern periods. Each essay engages the ways in which geographies—here defined as visual and verbal discourses about space—perform political and cultural work. That is, we examine how geographies in Asia were deployed strategically, whether to map, narrate, frame, relocate, or dislocate particular places, regions, “homelands,” or nation-spaces. In recent centuries, these Asian geographies have necessarily coexisted with Western (principally European) geographies, whether in the colonial or postcolonial context. As these essays show, such coexistence has taken many forms, from conflict to emulation to apparent disinterest.

The political integration of British India and princely India is generally assumed to be an accomplished fact, but in contemporary Indian states that contain both ex-British and ex-princely territory and population the different legacies of British and princely rule remained influential long after independence and merger. Analysis of the de facto political integration of Gujarat between 1943 and 1969 reveals five stages of bargaining between ex-British and ex-princely nationalist elites. At each stage the interests of these elites—schooled in contrasting historical-political traditions—had to be consulted and compensated; the results can be discerned in the differential electoral behavior of the ex-British-dominated Mainland and ex-princely Saurashtra regions. Eventually, the political resources and training of Mainland politicians proved more appropriate for universal franchise politics than did those of the exprincely Saurashtrians. However, as of. 1969, the objective of an integrated political community in Gujarat was still to be achieved.

This article uses an important Sri Lankan Supreme Court case concerning religious sound as a starting point for thinking about the intersections of Islam, law, politics, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that Sri Lankan Muslims find themselves in three interlacing legal “environments” at the present moment: in an environment of general laws governing religion, in an environment of special laws and administrative bodies for Muslims, and in a broader constitutional environment that grants special recognition to Buddhism. These environments offer differing opportunities and imperatives for expressing Muslim identity, religious equality, diversity, rights, and freedoms in contemporary Sri Lanka. Through a consideration of these legal environments and the way they affected the case, this article illuminates ongoing questions about the legal and political status of Muslims on the island and provides a snapshot of the legal debates and discourses that have flowed into and fortified recent anti-Muslim sentiments on the island.

The period since the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan has seen a number of attempts to reverse several Occupation policies. Some, such as the revoking of administrative decentralization of education and the police force, have been successful, while others, such as constitutional revision, have not. In general, the period since the 1950s has seen a pattern of conservative social change backed by the Liberal Democratic Party. An area that illustrates this trend is that of language policy, specifically the policy toward script. The partial revision of the immediate postwar script reforms that occurred over a twenty-year period from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, most notably the revision of the 1946 list of recommended characters, is an example of a policy that, while not imposed by the Occupation authorities, had been arrived at during the Occupation and was later reversed to some extent in a conservative direction through direct LDP intervention.

The decline of the central authority of the Mughal empire during the first half of the eighteenth century resulted not only in a change in the power relationship between the center and the provincial government of Bengal, but also in changes in the relationships between the leading military, administrative, and economic groups within Bengal. Shortly after 1700, Murshid Quli Khan, first as Diwan and later as Nawab of Bangal, began a series of revenue and administrative reforms. By increasing revenue collections, he was able to satisfy the demands of the central government for more money from Bengal, and at the same time to pay adequately his mansabdar followers within Bengal and Orissa. He also began to ehnahce his control by acquiring many of the most important official positions in the provincial government for himself and his relatives, and by retaining within Bengal a following of mansabdars who were loyal to himself.

Since many of the smaller and/or less efficient zamindars were unable to pay the increased revenue demand, they lost their zamindaris. Consequently, the pattern of many relatively small zamindaris was replaced by one of relatively few and much larger zamindaris. The result was that the more powerful zamindars tended to become more influential, and to act increasingly ai partners in the Mughal provincial government.

A third element, the bankers, also became important within the ruling group of Bengal after 1700. The Jagat Seths became bankers for the provincial government, and also supplied loans to zamindars to cover their revenue payments.

Thus, by 1739, Bengal was ruled by a loosely organized coalition of military, landed, and monied interests, who provided a reasonably stable alternative to the centralized Mughal government of earlier days.

The marketplace and the temple: traditionally, Western scholars have been nervous and ambivalent about bringing these two spheres into too close a proximity. On one side, historians of religions trained in the lineage of Joachim Wach or Mircea Eliade have long warned that “reductionism” is the cardinal sin in the study of religion, which is claimed to be a sui generis, or irreducible phenomenon. Hence, “economic reductionism” or “vulgar economism” would be the most heinous crime of all (Wach 1958; Eliade 1958, xi). On the other side, those trained in Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions have typically wanted to explain religious myths and rituals either as ideological screens masking deeper material forces or as symbolic expressions of misrecognized social interests. As Pierre Bourdieu—one of the most sophisticated recent representatives of this tradition—explains his own method, he wishes to “utilize the economic model to extend materialist critique into the realm of religion and to uncover the specific interests of the protagonists of the religious game, priests, prophets and sorcerers” (1990, 107).

Analyses of Japanese political development during the period 1868–1900 have for the most part obscured the fact that the kind of problems faced by the Restoration leaders played a major role in shaping the governing structure they created. Perhaps the most significant of these problems in the years immediately following the restoration of the emperor in 1868 was that of leadership succession. The total replacement of Bakuhan leadership in the decade 1868–78 raised serious practical questions as to how the new leadership could insure their authority and legitimacy. Such questions were not peculiar to the Japanese situation; they are questions all organizations face when they undergo total or partial replacement of leadership. However, the application of such conceptual categories as “tradition” and “modernization” has made it difficult to distinguish between those features of political development that were the consequence of being forced to deal with problems that arise in all organizations as a consequence of leadership succession and those that can be attributed to continuing social and cultural patterns.

We study the propensity for protest in the context of individuals’ alternative choices in urban China. Depending on the number and quality of social ties (or guanxi in Chinese), individuals may resort to one of two alternatives: to engineer life-changing events through personal connections or to join others in labor protest. We call one “adaptation” and the other “voice.” As our working hypothesis, we first expect them to be mutually exclusive. That is, adaptation through guanxi networks may help diffuse the will to protest, as those who enjoy better guanxi networks would advance their class status through such networks. With data from a national survey, our analysis rejects this working hypothesis. Those who are better connected are not only more likely to adapt but also more inclined to voice, and the effect of social ties on protest is significantly smaller for those who are connected to people with power. The implications are twofold. First, our data not only confirm the well-known effect of social connections on protest, but also specify the effects caused by high-class versus low-class connections. Second, in a comparative vein, the individual decision making on adaptation and/or voice offers a glimpse into the intertwining domains of social space in contemporary China.

“Arirang” is known worldwide as the quintessential Korean folk song. Its iconic status in contemporary Korea derives from its perceived role in strengthening Korean resolve to resist the cultural violence of the Japanese colonial occupation (1905–45). A musical “skeleton” capable of countless improvised variations and interpretations, some “Arirangs” explicitly assailed the Japanese and thus were censored by colonial authorities. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, precisely the time when assimilationist pressures in colonial Korea were intensifying, Japanese songsmiths, singers, and recording companies released “Arirang” renditions in prodigious quantities, sometimes in collaboration with Korean performers. “Arirang” became the most familiar song in the Japanese empire: Its persistent theme of loss spoke to Koreans of their lost sovereignty and to Japanese of the ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways. For both peoples, it served as a mirror for self-contemplation and an “ethnographic lens” for gazing upon the other.

Among their fellow Bengalis, the Bauls, who constitute a religious sect, are esteemed because their iconoclasm, disregard of caste, and merger of Hindu and Islamic traditions gives them an enviable freedom to confront life as individuals outside the prevailing social and religious confines. They are loved, too, because they do not preach but rather woo with charming poems set to irresistible tunes that may compel them to dance.

In Bangalore, late in the summer of 2014, I listened to many animated conversations. There were political debates: the right-wing Hindu nationalist party had, earlier that summer, won national as well as state elections, evoking disparate reactions across society, sowing dissension even among the technological elite. There were technological arguments: should Bangalore continue to be an outsourcing haven for software services, or did India need a new model of development? Technology itself no longer seemed to unite people and offer exciting futures, as it had a decade ago. In Basavanagudi, a neighborhood named after twelfth-century social reformer Basavanna, part of the South Bangalore constituency where Tom Friedman's friend Nandan Nilekani had just lost the local election to the Hindu nationalist BJP candidate, I noticed a growing buzz around a social media campaign for a new documentary on climate change. Facebook, Twitter, and chats excitedly shared news of the upcoming global release of a film seeking to unite the globe in a social movement to stop climate change. Software engineers and social justice activists might, it seemed, be able to come together on this topic, if not any other.

On May 25, 1895, amid a festive atmosphere at the governor's yamen in Taipei, China's island province of Taiwan (Formosa) was declared a republic. News of this extraordinary event was received in Peking and elsewhere with reactions of dismay and skepticism. Most Ch'ing authorities and foreign observers suspected that the creation of a republic was merely a desperate scheme to keep Taiwan from being ceded to Japan as an outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Nevertheless, to a few witnesses the unprecedented move of establishing a republic in an area of imperial China suggested at first more hopeful signs for the future. James W. Davidson, then a Taipei news correspondent, initially surmised, “If it has been conceived and carried out altogether by Celestial minds we are emboldened to believe that there is, after all, a new China in the nursery from whom great things may eventually be expected.”

Before the opening of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (July 19–August 7, 1920) [which met on the first day in Petrograd but subsequently in Moscow], Lenin prepared a draft thesis on the national and colonial question. M. N. Roy, a young Bengali attending his first international Communist gathering, eagerly responded to Lenin's request for criticisms. As a result, Lenin invited him to write an alternative thesis. Both theses were modified as a result of discussions within the National and Colonial Commission, and both were subsequently adopted by the Congress. After his encounter with Lenin, Roy rose rapidly in the Comintern hierarchy. In 1922 he was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924. It was in the year 1926, however, that Roy attained the peak of his influence in the Comintern. In February of that year he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Communist International, and in the following December he was reelected to the Presidium and joined the Political Secretariat of the ECCI. At the time of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI (November 12–December 16, 1926), Roy became Secretary of the Chinese Commission, a post he held jointly with Petrov, and a member of the Agrarian Commission. The Plenum, convened for the purpose of considering the China problem, adopted a thesis on the question and Roy was sent to China as a representative of the Comintern to carry it out. Following the events in China in 1927, Roy's influence declined precipitately, though he was not formally expelled until December, 1929.