Java's long-established sugar industry was transformed almost beyond recognition during the course of the nineteenth century. Under Dutch East India Company rule, which effectively lasted until the arrival on the island of Governor-General Daendels in 1808, sugar production had been organized almost exclusively by Chinese entrepreneurs, whose dozens of small sugar factories and plantations were scattered across the lowlands around Batavia (present day Jakarta). Their output played a subsidiary role in the prevailing pattern of colonial exploitation, was unable to compete in Europe with the production of West Indian sugar colonies and consequently found a sale, for the most part, only in other ‘protected’ Asian markets. During the nineteenth century, all this changed. First under government auspices—the so-called Cultivation System—and later under the direction of metropolitan-owned Sugar Corporations, the industry was transformed into a paradigm of colonial economic ‘development’. It was efficient, immensely profitable and productive (vast quantities of sugar were exported to the West), heavily capitalized and equipped with the best and most up-to-date machinery.

What, in detail, do Indian peasants do when famine looms? How do they defend themselves, who succumbs and who survives? Recently several talented economic historians have given these questions a vigorous airing. Morris D. Morris in particular set off the discussion by suggesting that South Asian peasants are well prepared for periodic drought famines. He argues (I compress him almost to parody) that long experience with the monsoon's periodic failures has taught the Indian cultivator prudence: when crops begin to fail the cultivator draws upon previously stored substances—his wife's jewelry, grain, cattle, etc.—and sells them or barters them to keep up his usual level of food consumption. Thus, while his assets are cyclically depleted and replenished, he can usually stave off the most feared effect of drought, which is starvation. N. S. Jodha, however, has partially contradicted Morris by adducing evidence from Rajasthan and elsewhere which shows the peasant cultivator to be more likely to cut back his current food intake rather than risk a loss of future production by depleting his capital assets. Like Morris, Jodha sees that farmers are rational and plan for the future, the disagreement being whether they plan for crop failures in the midst of good harvests or plan for good harvests in the midst of crop failures In fact these two views, suitably softened, are not incompatible, and one can imagine both operating at different phases of a worsening episode of drought.

Given the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-1970s a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reason able explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of 1977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system ? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load.

The majority of foreigners involved in the turbulent period marking Japan's early transformation to modernity have been relegated to the obscurity of archival research, only occasionally surfacing in specialist studies. One exception is Léon Roches, head of the French legation from 1864 to 1868; he enjoys a considerable degree of notoriety and controversy, with very few of even the most general works no modern Japanese history failing to mention him. The major reason no doubt is due to the policy Roches pursued and the role he is alleged to have played; although in fact the main line of his policy did not differ radically from that of his Western colleagues and his role had tended to be exaggerated.

I shall turn Japanese, for they at least can think, and be reticent! … I fail to see any Western people in a position to set the Japs an example in their diplomacy … their organization, their strategy, their virile qualities, their devotion and self control. Above all, their national capacity for self reliance, self-sacrifice and their silence, …

The publisher is the bride's parents, the readers are the bridegroom, and the kashihonya is the go-between.