The managing agency system has been the dominant form of business organization in India for over a century, yet no one has described the circumstances surrounding its first emergence. It is not difficult to understand why an aura of mystery enshrouds the early years of the system. Students of managing agency invariably have been economists. Although they feel obliged to make some reference to its historical origins, they neglect the sources where the evidence abounds. A typical statement from a recent official Indian study of managing agency reads:

Little is known about the early twilight zone of the history of our industrial development in which the managing agency system and the joint stock companies played a great part.

In 1881, the Japanese government was headed by a single President, Sanjō, assisted by two vice-presidents, Iwakura and Arisugawa. These men alone had direct access to the Emperor on state affairs. Beyond giving advice of their own, their principal task was to mediate in disputes between the councillors and to advise the Emperor on which was the stronger side when his decision was necessary to resolve a deadlock. Sanjō and Iwakura were court nobles with long ties with Satsuma and Chōshū, whose armies had fought and won the Restoration war of 1868–9, and whose leaders thereafter held the key posts in the council, the executive and the Armed Forces. While deeply conscious of their primary loyalty to the Emperor and anxious to prevent his domination by powerful factions, Sanjo and Iwakura in the last analysis, and with some regret, regarded Satsuma and Chōshū as the essential pillars of the new regime. Arisugawa was a Prince Imperial, who had been raised to the position of vice-president in 1880. He had been chairman of the legislative Genrōin that included several prominent members antipathetic to Satsuma and Chōshū dominance of the government. While Sanjō and Iwakura were basicallyagreed with the Sat-Chō leaders that Prussia provided the best model for a future constitution, Arisugawa as chairman of the Genrōin had presented the Emperor with a draft constitution in 1879 that drew heavily from the English model. It should be noted that there was therefore a possibility that Arisugawa would dissent from his presidential colleagues when the issue of the constitution was raised within the government in 1881.

A venerable occupation in North Thailand is the production of miang, a delicacy consumed as a snack or dessert by local people and by those of neighboring regions ranging from Assam to Tonkin and north through Yunnan. The product is prepared from tea leaves fermented by peasants living along the upper slopes of the Northern hills, the natural habitat of the wild tea shrub. The finished product is transported from there to wholesalers located in most sizable towns and villages of the lowlands. Each market place in lowland villages includes the stall of at least one miang vendor, who is supplied with inventory on a credit basis by the wholesaler and who retails the commodity by the bundle or by the chew, each unit, ordinarily laced with a dash of salt, garlic, sugar-water, or shredded coconut, selling for one baht (approximately U. S. $ .05) or less.

In China, as among many of the African and Asian peoples, early nationalism was almost the monopoly of the urban, educated elite. It was nurtured on anti-imperialist sentiment and was brought to maturity by a knowledge of Western civilization rather than a mastery of Chinese tradition. It was often closely associated with the revolt of youth against their fathers, with the younger generation seeking a more rapid modernization than the older generation. Little wonder, then, that student movements punctuate the definition of nationalism and provide exclamation points in its expression.

Prior to the October I, 1965 coup attempt, the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) controlled the largest Communist organization in any non-Communist state. The Party itself, with some three million members, was the center of a web of mass organizations claiming 15 million members and seeking to mobilize specific segments of the population: workers, peasants, youth, women, students, cultural workers, university teachers, and even village officials. D. N. Aidit, M. H. Lukman and Njoto, the triumvirate that had led the Party since January 1951, were honored by President Sukarno at home and by the major Communist parties abroad. A Djakarta-Peking axis was the base of a vociferous confrontation against the West, and Communist youths spearheaded government-sponsored demonstrations against “neo-colonial” establishments within the country. Meanwhile, several non-Communist politicians and military officers appeared to be plotting their own opening to the left in preparation for a Communist takeover.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the biggest rebellion Imperial China had ever experienced, had undoubtedly exposed the many inadequacies of the dynastic government. The decrepit state of the army was at once revealed. The Manchu banner troops had long decayed while the Chinese Army of the Green Standard (Lü-ying) had also reached its nadir at the turn of the nineteenth century. The government, therefore, had to depend more and more on local, gentry-led armies. The defeat of the main government armies in 1860 eventually forced the court at Peking to place full responsibility in the hands of these gentry-led armies, thus introducing a new phase in the war of suppression.

The conflict between the theory of art for art's sake and the theory of purposive art is not of recent origin. In modern times however the Soviet Union has made a comprehensive experiment with the theory of purposive art, subordinating all artistic endeavors to socialist realism and partiinost—the party spirit. This experiment began when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party passed a resolution on April 23, 1932 creating a single Union of Soviet Writers (actually organized in 1934) and inviting the authors to join this Union while adhering to the doctrine of socialist realism in literature. Western literary critics have maintained that while the appreciable part of literature produced during the last thirty-five years “possesses artistic qualities of high worth” in its postwar development Soviet literature in general has simply become a “perfect propaganda instrument.”

Of all the political personalities in the era between 1928 and 1949, Tu Yuehsheng was perhaps the most colorful, certainly the most unusual. Born into the lowest ranks of society, he rose to dazzling heights of power and exercised a political influence no gang leader had ever known before. The intimate relationship between Tu and the Kuomintang regime was a most unusual phenomenon in Chinese politics and deserves careful attention. Even though documentary materials are scarce by the very nature of the case, an investigation may shed important light on contemporary political mechanisms.

Views of desert regions of the world as areas with little productive use for the support of mankind have always been tempered by the optimism expressed in the phrase “to make the desert bloom like the rose.” We also know that the concept of the “Garden of Eden” was evolved in a desert environment. Thus, it is well realized that in a temperate or warm arid region, the flow of water from springs or from exotic rivers or the availability of fresh ground water derived from distant rainfall or snow-melt may create green oases of productive agriculture. One such region is China's colonial realm of Sinkiang, and especially the Tarim basin in central Asia. Here, such land and water resources presently provide some seven million people with food and materials for clothing. This also is a region with valuable unexploited mineral resources both varied and substantial.

Most research into modern Indian economic and social history has so far been carried out in such large and well organized research centers as the National Archives in Delhi, the National Library in Calcutta, and the India Office Library in London. These institutions are justly renowned for their vast collections of manuscripts and books on all aspects of Indian history. So extensive in fact are their holdings that one could easily spend an entire lifetime working happily in any one of them. And their attractiveness is no doubt further enhanced by the convenient location of all these institutions in large metropolitan centers, where students and teachers alike congregate in large numbers.

The Sung period (960–1279), as is generally recognized, shaped the pattern of China's development for the last millennium. Carrying forward the trends originating in late T'ang, it integrated both the traditional and the new ingredients into a distinctive way of life which gradually permeated the entire society down to the level of the average villager. The result was a broadly based, deeply rooted, stable, but conservative culture. Remarkable economic advancement and social reconstruction took place. The same was generally true, though to a lesser extent, of political institutions and thought: the bureaucratic empire was now thoroughly centralized under a generally attentive and restrained absolutism; great gains were achieved in the number, quality, and especially the status of the nonaristocratic scholar-officials; the enriching variety of theoretical formulations known as neo-Confucianism carried increasing weight. Government administration in particular, the most effective ever to exist in China itself, was probably the best in the world then and for several centuries to come. Improvements made by the Ming and the Ch'ing, after the intervening period of the Mongols, were more or less within this general pattern.

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.

In a recent interview with Edgar Snow, Mao Tse-tung asserted that he did not remember having written “Dialectical Materialism,” and that if he had written it, he surely would have remembered it. There is both internal and external evidence to support Mao's assertion. If the article was published under his name without his approval, then those who undertook this venture may have had the support of Soviet authorities, perhaps even of Stalin himself. There is also the possibility that it was forged and published by intriguers within the CCP who disapproved of the united front policies which Mao had just elaborated in his “New Democracy.” By first weakening his position with a damning forgery, they might then have hoped to overthrow him with Moscow's tacit approval. The Russian returned student leaders, Wang Ming and Po Ku, might well have devised such a plot.

Postwar Japanese scholarship, in its quest to explain Japan's modern history, has yet to deal adequately with the so-called right wing. Survey histories sometimes write it off as a lunatic fringe, or equate it simply with militarism and putschism. My purpose here is not to venture a total picture of the right but to present a microcosmic analysis of doctrines attributed to it through focusing on the theory of revolution formulated early in the Taishō period by Kita Ikki (1883–1937). Japanese writers regularly identify Kita as a leading rightist. Maruyama Masao refers to him as “the ideological father of Japanese fascism,” and his 1919 book on the “reorganization” of Japan (later published as Nihon kaizō hōan taikō) has been called by Kuno Osamu “the Mein Kampf of the Shõwa ultranationalist movement.”

Accounts of the Indonesian nationalist movement customarily begin with the cultural and educational endeavors of westernized Javanese aristocrats in the first decades of this century. The enormous popular response generated by the first interinsular political movement, Sarekat Islam, in 1912–1920 is explained by a series of generalities about the social conditions of the Indonesian people. The importance of religion is acknowledged as a focus for opposition to colonial rule during the phase between the self-defense of traditional, relatively isolated, societies and modern nationalist movements. But information is lacking. As Berg regretted in 1932: “lack of data makes it almost impossible to define how deep this pan-Islamic current went in Indonesia.”