The First World War changed the pattern of international relations in East Asia. What had previously been another arena for the European power struggle became the cockpit for two regional forces, Japanese expansionism and incipient Chinese nationalism. The confrontation between the two, which was to last for a quarter of a century, began as a most unequal contest. Great power rivalry had enabled China to balance off her enemies and to maintain her status as a sovereign entity. But with Europe distracted, China was helpless, and Japan had a unique opportunity to pursue an independent expansionist policy. Instead of cooperating with England and the other powers in order to get a fair share of the China spoils, after 1914 Japan could make her bid for the grand prize, exclusive access to China's resources. Thus the European powers’ pre-occupation with mutual slaughter exposed China to extreme danger, greater than that which she had faced during the heyday of classical imperialism.1 But Japan was not alone in welcoming the European retreat. Japan’s opportunity was also Sun Yat-sen's opportunity.

In the early summer of 1875 agrarian rioting occurred in the Bombay Deccan. The disturbances began at Supa, a market village in Bhimthari taluka of Poona District, where on 12 May an unruly peasant mob attacked the houses and shops of the local Gujarati moneylenders. ‘The combustible elements were everywhere ready’1 and the riots spread through the poor, eastern regions of Poona and Ahmednagar Districts. The riots were directed entirely at the village sowkars (moneylenders), to whom most of the peasant agriculturists of the area were indebted.

Among the characteristic features of local and state politics in modern India are a tendency to reach decisions by consensus procedures and the instability of factional alliances. Thus, Mayer notes that the ‘dislike of an open vote is widespread in rural Indian society’.1 As to the instability of political alliances, Bailey has observed that in Orissa political allegiances are apt to change rapidly and there is a quite bewildering degree of impermanence at the lower levels, a constant stream of new recruits coming in, while others drift away to other bosses or out of the system altogether.2

L'histoire a légué au Vietnam méridional des particularités économiques, sociales et culturelles qui n'ont cessé de peser sur l'évolution de la nation vietnamienne.

It is well-known that the French colonial theory of assimilation, even though it could never be carried out completely in practice, implied the development in French colonies of an indigenous élite of people prepared to accept both French culture and a (subordinate) role in the running of the colony. In French Cochinchina, this élite was especially important owing to the circumstances of the conquest, between 1860 and 1867, when most of the Vietnamese scholar-officials who had ruled the area previously, withdrew and refused to co-operate with the Europeans. The French had no choice but to create an élite of their own, and begin to educate it in French ways. The process has been discussed in detail in a recent study by Dr Milton E. Osborne, which takes the story of colonial rule in southern Viet-Nam down to about 1905.1 During the first four decades of the twentieth century, this élite continued to grow and develop, so that by the 1940s it had become the key element in Cochinchinese society so long as colonial rule might last. The purpose of the present article is to examine the composition and role of this elite about the end of the period in which France could take its presence in Indochina for granted.