One consequence of the democratization of Eastern Europe has been a sharp reduction in the provision of development assistance by the former Communist countries. At its high point in the mid-1980s, aid from Communist Eastern Europe to the developing countries is estimated to have peaked at between $516–537 million a year, supplementing Soviet aid of some $4–4.5 billion. Taken together, it is estimated that Soviet and East European Communist aid represented nearly 10% of total world Official Development Assistance (ODA) disbursements during that period. Following the political changes that wrought democratization to Eastern Europe, these aid flows declined drastically or even ceased. This downward shift in aid reflected a profound and widespread aversion to any ongoing East European role in international development.

One of the most talked-about topics among Chinese intellectuals and Western China observers in the past few years has been the six-part television series Heshang (River Elegy). After its first broadcast in June 1988 through the national television network Zhongyang dianshitai (China Central Television, or CCTV in short), the film caused immediate shockwaves throughout China, marking the climax of the so-called ‘wenhua re’ (cultural fever). It was re-played through the CCTV in August, and some local stations aired it even more than twice. twice. Videotapes of the series have been circulating widely among overseas Chinese circles. Total number of viewers was reported to be over 400 million [Lee 1989]. The script appeared in various editions, and much attention has been paid to the ideological dimension of the film.

By 1690 the Supreme Government of the Indies in Batavia agreed that, financially speaking, it was no longer wise to continue the direct trade between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and China. It was argued that the vessels so far used for the China trade could be better deployed in the Indian Ocean.

The indigenous population in Java, it is generally believed, remained by and large subsistence peasants under the colonial rule in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Javanese could not participate in the estate plantation industry or ‘transform their general pattern of already intensive farming in an extensive direction, for they lacked capital, had no way to shuck off excess labor’. Their access to waste land to became restricted and consequently they sought refuge in the wet-rice cultivation which ‘soaked up almost the whole of the’ population in a process of ‘agricultural involution’, which ‘went on steadily’ during the nineteenthcentury.’ Thus Javanese were confined to the subsistence agriculture for their living because they had neither. capital nor opportunity to embark upon a path of economic development characterized by economic diversity.

While the growing volume of new long distance oceanic trade which developed during the fifteenth century helped to stimulate an awareness of the wider world in Western Europe, it also had a much more specific enabling effect on the development of natural history and the status of science in the eyes of government. A rising interest in empirical fact-gathering and experimentation led to a growing enthusiasm for experimentation with new types of medical practice and new drugs. Apothecaries' gardens became established at the universities and were increasingly stocked with plants imported from distant lands. These gardens became the sites of the first attempts to classify plants on a global basis. The voyages of the first century and a half after the journeys of Henry the Navigator from 1415 onwards had already begun to transform the science of botany and to enlarge medical ambitions for the scope of pharmacology and natural history. The foundation of the new botanic gardens was, therefore, clearly connected with the early expansion of the European economic system and remained an accurate indicator, in a microcosm, of the expansion in European knowledge of the global environment. The origins of the gardens in medical practice meant that, as a knowledge of global nature was acquired, the Hippocratic agendas of medicine and medical practitioners continued to form the dominant basis of European constructions of the extra-European natural world.

This paper investigages the role of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O) in the maritime organization of the Asian specie network between 1850 and 1920. In this period the specie network comprised several strands and layers but this paper will concentrate on those involving the flow of gold from Australia to India.

For many students of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British intellectual and literary history, Sir William Jones (1746–94) has lately come to seem a figure of great significance for our understanding of the period. A notable if implicit claim for his importance is to be found in Jerome McGann's revisionist New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993); A Hymn to Na'ra'yena (1785), Jones's translation from the Sanskrit, is symbolically placed as the anthology's first item. This essay will argue that Jones's Indian scholarship will be better understood in the light of its links with contemporary developments in biblical criticism.

This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called ‘feudal system’ of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have been the objects of Orientalist discourse.