It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

Between the pacification of Tonkin in the late 1880s and the Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement of 1930–31, the Thai Nguyen Rebellion was the largest and most destructive anti-colonial uprising to occur in French Indochina. On August 31, 1917, an eclectic band of political prisoners, common criminals and mutinous prison guards seized the Thai Nguyen Penitentiary, the largest penal institution in northern Tonkin. From their base within the penitentiary, the rebels stormed the provincial arsenal and captured a large cache of weapons which they used to take control of the town. Anticipating a counterattack, the rebels fortified the perimeter of the town, executed French officials and Vietnamese collaborators and issued a proclamation calling for a general uprising against the colonial state. Although colonial forces retook the town following five days of intense fighting, mopping-up campaigns in the surrounding countryside stretched on for six months and led to hundreds of casualties on both sides.

In the field of research and studies pertaining to Malaysian rural society, there has traditionally been a dominant emphasis, especially by local scholars, on the analysis of the indigenous Malay peasantry rather than on the equally indigenous ‘tribal’ minorities, i.e. the Orang Asli. This has also meant that the new theoretical directions and perspectives developed in the various interrelated fields (such as ‘the New Economic Anthropology’, ‘Peasant Studies’, and Political Economy, including the Neo-Marxist School of Development and Underdevelopment) have been applied with rigour only to those issues arising from ‘the peasant question’ in Malaysia. To date, no scholars have as yet seriously attempted to address ‘the agrarian question’ in the context of Malaysian society by also incorporating in their theoretical analysis the position of its ‘tribal’ minorities.

The past two decades have witnessed a notable escalation in sectarian violence in Pakistan. Since 1979 doctrinal disputes between Sunnis (who constitute the majority of Pakistan's population) and Twelver Shi‘is (who number between 15% and 25% of the population, and are to be distinguished from Islami‘ili, Khoja and Bohri Shi‘is) has given place to full-fledged sectarian conflict. Militant Sunni and Shi‘i organizations have carried out assassinations and bombing campaigns that have killed political rivals as well as children and the innocent at prayer in mosques. In the first seven months of 1997 alone—the year when sectarian conflict reached its apogee—one hundred people died in such attacks in Punjab. The violence escalated further when in the first ten days of August 1997 (immediately preceding the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the country's independence) another seventy people were killed in incidents of sectarian violence.

On being awarded the Legion of Honor by President Corazon Aquino, Joaquin ‘Chino.’ Roces, publisher of The Manila Times, pleaded with the president:

Please allow me to remind you, first. That our people brought a new government to power because our people felt an urgent need for change. That change was nothing more and nothing less than that of moving quickly into a new moral order. The people believed, and many of them still do, that when we said we would be the exact opposite of Marcos, we would be just that. Because of that promise which the people believed, our triumph over Marcos was anchored on a principle of morality . . . . To our people, I dare propose that new moral order is best appreciated in terms of our response to graft and corruption in public service. We cannot afford a government of thieves unless we can tolerate a nation of highwaymen.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and self-contained political entities. Premodern and early modern west and south Asia is most productively approached and analyzed as an interactive continuum.