Peasants have confused us. We have in our discussions of them, imposed a structure on their lives, defined their behavior and denied their consciousness. We believe their actions to be predictable, but their irruptions and the extent of their violence inexplicable. Bound by tradition, tied to their village, loyal to their lords, they seem to us simultaneously irreverent, rude, ribald and lacking in respect. We find them shrewd in their economic judgments, but incapable of knowing their own real interests. Though they appear responsive to social and economic change, they also seem bound by symbols and ideologies that tie them to the past. They are never at home no matter where they move. Committed to their own interests, they are nevertheless tricked and cheated by city slickers, seigneurs and nobles.

This paper attempts to explain how, in Southeast Asia, the strong patron-client bonds which joined peasants to local elites tended to break down during the colonial period—particularly in directly-ruled low-land areas. By examining the effects of social differentiation, the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, and the growth of colonial administration on day-to-day class relations in the countryside, it is possible to show how a relationship the peasant once viewed as collaborative and legitimate came increasingly to be seen as one of simple, if unequal, bargaining or of outright exploitation.

Patron-client relationships are seen as a pattern of exchange of goods and services in which the balance of exchange is related to the legitimacy of the relationship. In particular, physical security and subsistence insurance are minimal services the peasant anticipates in exchange for his deference. In the pre-colonial period the greater availability of alternative social mechanisms such as the kindred and village, the existence of unclaimed land, and the absence of strong outside backing of local powerholders served to provide minimal guarantees for clients, with the social and demographic impact of colonialism strengthened, the bargaining power of elites and moved the balances of reciprocity to their advantage the protective power and coverage of deference relations eroded. The result was a loss of legitimacy by agrarian elites.

We possess in ancient Tamil a large body of poetry which antedates for all intents and purposes the incursion of Sanskrit culture into Tamilnad. This poetry, found in the eight anthologies and the Pattuppāṭṭu, dates from the first and second centuries A.D. The culture which produced it was a continuation of the megalithic culture which dominated the Deccan for the millenium before Christ. The special importance of early Tamil poetry for cultural history is that it describes this civilization, which according to the Allchins was characterized by a very conservative and unchanging culture, before it was appreciably influenced by Sanskritic culture from the North. Thus a study of early Tamil reveals elements which were contributed to India by this culture and which were later assimilated by the rest of India. Other sources for this culture—the Sattasaī in Māhārāṣṭrī, for example—show the influence of Sanskrit culture, so that it is not possible to determine from them which elements belonged originally to the Deccan culture and which to the culture of the North.

There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

The Peiyang Army was the most significant military development in China between the Hsiang and Huai Armies which suppressed the Taiping and Nien rebellions in the 1860's and the army that Chiang Kai-shek raised and employed in the northern expedition of 1926–27. The Peiyang was the first Chinese army to be comparatively modern in training and discipline as well as in weaponry. Formed for the most part by Yuan Shih-k'ai while he was governor-general of Chihli province from 1901 to 1907, the Peiyang Army grew to six divisions of about 10,000 men each. Size alone gave the army a major role in politics during the last decade of the Ch'ing dynasty and the early years of the Republic.

Perhaps the most widely and persistently reported characteristic of Japanese organizational development in the period 1868–1945 is the pattern of behavior known as ringisei. The literature defines ringisei as a system, emerging first in the 1870's and becoming endemic after 1900, characteristic of both public and private bureaucracies in Japan. In this system of decision-making, policy was and, apparently, still is drafted at lower departmental levels by “specialists” and circulated by document or formal approval, indicated by the affixing of a seal, to successively higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. The policy thus circulated was said to become official when the document reached the minister or senior executive official and he affixed the final seal to the document. It is this pattern that is usually viewed as being synonymous with decision-making from below. This assumption appears to stem from the often repeated belief that once drafted in response to a request from superiors the document (ringisho) met only approval or stalling but never rejection on its journey through ever-higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. Analysts have consistently seen the ringisei system as a major, if not the key, factor in the civil bureaucracy's inability to innovate and as the means by which officials were able to avoid individual responsibility for decisions. The system is also often viewed as the means by which, in the pre-World War II period subordinates were able to impose policies on their superiors without being held accountable.

The growth of the Indian National Congress traditionally has been discussed in terms of the spread of nationalism as a sentiment. The development of the Congress movement in Punjab, however, suggests it may owe less to nationalism than to specific changes within the provincial political systems. Communal politics denied to the Congress much Hindu support in Punjab until the late 1930's. It was not until efforts to organize a Hindu communal party ceased and one faction within the Congress sought Hindu communal support that a large proportion of the Punjabi Hindu community joined the Congress movement.

One critic of Chinese poetry has written, suggestively: “Western readers are sometimes struck by what they do not find …”. One of the most familiar constituents of poetry, particularly of the lyric, that will not be found in much of Chinese nature poetry is an identifiable grammatical subject. It is not uncommon for a translator of Chinese poetry to ask “… who is its subject? I? You? She?” The requirements of the translation into Western languages suggest, of course, that a subject be supplied. Caught between syntactical correctness and the authority of the text, the translator is often forced to opt for fluency in the target language rather than fidelity to the source language. To be sure, this practice is of no great consequence in most instances. But, if we look at two excerpts, one from the Li Sao and the other from the T'ang shih san pai shou, and compare both text and translation, it becomes clear that there will be times when something other than mere linguistic convention is involved.

THE superior in Thailand has been described as unquestioned and domineering. Inferiors stand in awe of (fy-eng) the superior. Yet, the superior is expected to act to his inferiors in a concerned and benevolent fashion. He should aid his inferiors yet not dominate them to such an extent as to destroy their sense of autonomy. In this paper I shall extend previous discussions of Thai superior-inferior behavior by showing the compatibility of the Thai concepts of benevolence and awe. This sense of awe felt towards a superior permits him to undertake actions considered benevolent by his inferiors. To illustrate this situation I shall describe certain types of contact that occurred between rural Thai officials, as superiors, and villagers as their inferiors.

Contrary to accepted scholarly opinion, Ssu-Ma Kuang was not a leading spokesman for monarchical absolutism during the Sung dynasty. He conceived of “non-action” as a practical technique of government in which the various strata of the administration had their own unique areas of competence. The emperor, in his view, had only limited powers of decision-making. The outline of Ssu-Ma's theory of the proper relationship between bureaucracy and monarchy is that the bureaucracy is the official interpreter of the classical tradition, which was the criterion for the legitimacy of imperial decisions, and that the bureaucracy was to have wide-ranging discretionary power and delegated authority. The emperor was to rule through “non-action” by turning over authority to qualified subordinates.

Though Taiwan has since 1949 been the seat of the Nationalist Government and the domicile of several millions of exiled Chinese, no serious literature has been produced until the late fifties.1 Explanations are not difficult to give. For one thing, since nearly all the important figures of modern Chinese literature have remained in the People's Republic of China,” their works are therefore proscribed for political reasons. Cut off from their mainland base, the disinherited young Taiwanese writers, having no native idols to emulate and anxious to create a tradition of their own, could only import from the West whatever “isms” they considered to be the literary fashions of the day—symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, futurism, modernism, phenomenalism, etc. Quite often, however, what they regarded as daring experiments at the time of initiation later turned out to be

During the 1660's four Manchus dominated the Chinese empire from the court at Peking. These four, Soni, Suksaha, Ebilun, and Oboi, had been appointed in the “Imperial Will” of the late Shun-chih Emperor to serve as Regents during the minority of the K'ang-hsi Emperor. For the first five years of the Regency these Manchus governed collectively. After 1666, however, one of the Regents, Oboi, managed to concentrate power in his own hands and to eliminate the influence of the other Regents. In the years of 1667–69, the young K'ang-hsi Emperor, assisted by his grandmother (the Grand Empress Dowager) and several Manchu advisers, sought to assert personal control over the Ch'ing state and to eliminate the ambitious Oboi. Eventually, in June, 1669, the Emperor arrested Oboi and put an end to his faction of relatives and supporters.

Western evaluations of the prospects for economic development in Indonesia seem to have come full circle in the past twenty years. The initially positive appraisals of the immediate post-independence period, based on the extensiveness of untapped resources, the apparent commitment of Indonesian leaders to development within a framework of parliamentary institutions and “rational” planning, and the euphoric Zeitgeist produced by newly-won independence, were undermined first by the parliamentary instability of the mid-1950s and then by the continuing political instability and presumed economic irrationality of the Sukarno years. Deepening pessimism, having reached its nadir in 1963–65 when cracks in the Guided Democracy structure were most visible and the Indonesian Communist Party seemed to be moving inexorably toward full control of the polity, was gradually reversed after 1966, as the new army-backed regime of President Suharto began to consolidate itself and to declare its commitment to a Western-assisted process of economic development.

The British impact on India perhaps was as profound on issues of the death rate and population growth as on political and economic development, but it has been less thoroughly examined.1 And in contrast to successes by the mid-twentieth century in limiting small-pox, malaria, and cholera, there was an earlier and darker tale, almost as obscure as the lives of the millions who perished in terrible epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was how new economic conditions, ineffective village sanitary practices, the impact of modern transport and irrigation works, and population pressure and poverty all helped the spread of disease, and how public health measures failed to prevent a high mortality.

One of the most salient features of traditional political life in Tibet was the intense and pervasive competition for power and prestige that took place within the ranks of the politically relevant, particularly within the aristocratic lay-official segment of the government. Plots, disputes, and confiscations were key elements in the dynamics of the system. Although this competition appears, synchronically, to be part of a stable circular process, when the Tibetan political system is viewed diachronically, the apparent stability is seen to be part of a larger, ongoing process of change. Thus, while it is possible to analyze the “structure” of this competition from a synchronic point of view, a diachronic perspective is necessary to understand the forces which have generated it, as well as the overall nature of the system.

Between 1900 and 1908 the Chinese revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, tried to obtain assistance from the French government for his movement to overturn the Manchu dynasty, and at one point he contacted a French army officer who gave the impression that such aid might be forthcoming. This connection between Sun Yat-sen and France, revealed in Sun's memoirs, has intrigued and puzzled historians who have been uncertain as to the policy behind this curious contact. However, French archival records reveal that the promise of assistance to Sun was ephemeral as the French government decided that its political and economic interests in Asia dictated against any support for an Asian revolutionary leader. Under pressure from the Imperial Chinese government French officials banished Sun Yat-sen from Indochina in 1908, thereby demonstrating a basic hostility toward revolutionary movements in Asia.

South Asian scholars have long viewed communal competition in terms of majority-minority struggle, of Hindu versus Muslim, leading to the final partition of the British Raj into two antagonistic states. Punjab history offers a dramatic case of religious competitiveness between two minority communities, concerned more with their own sense of identity than with questions of power and dominance. Attempts among Punjabi Hindus to create a new, modernized and respectable religious tradition could not be contained within their community but inevitably altered existing relations with all other religions in Punjab, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian. As newly anglicized elites came into existence, they provided a growing class of alienated and marginal men. Unable to relate to the orthodox world around them, they sought to redefine that world, and in so doing created new ideological systems encompassing a reinterpretation of the past and present, plus a new vision of the future. Elaboration, defense, and dissemination of these ideologies produced both group consciousness and a heightened awareness of separation, of distance between those who accepted the new beliefs and all others. This process of identity reformation created in late nineteenth century Punjab a period of intense dynamism, of ideological and religious conflict amidst an increasingly polemical atmosphere, as each group within a given religious community, Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim, sought to project its own concepts and in the process struggled with others within their own community and beyond. This process of questioning, and its resultant answers permanently altered relations among Punjabi religious communities and, at a more fundamental level, the conceptualizations undergirding many of the groups within them.