This article explores the ambiguous role of coastal smuggling during the first decade and a half of Communist rule (1949–65). Fearing that the illicit flow of commodities siphoned critical revenues and undermined foreign policy, Communist China repurposed and expanded Nationalist China's war on smuggling while employing novel tactics of mobilization. Yet smuggling was not just a threat; it was also a lifeline that alleviated widespread material shortages and supplied the everyday needs of individuals and firms during the tumultuous transition to central planning. Businesses from ‘underground factories’ to state-owned enterprises relied on black markets to meet ambitious production targets and circumvent bottlenecks in official supply channels. Smuggling was thus more than just ‘corruption’ practised by officials—it was also a ‘creative accommodation’ employed by broad swaths of social actors coping with the enormous changes. This article argues that the nascent command economy and the vibrant underground economy existed symbiotically rather than antagonistically. Exploration into this complex relationship reveals many cross-border connections between Communist China and the capitalist world that both complemented and undermined domestic state consolidation.

This article, based on new archival materials, reconstructs the experiences and observations of an Indian war correspondent from 1944 to 1946 as he covered the advance of Indian soldiers of the British-led Indian Army from northeast India, through Burma to Malaya at the war's end, then to their eventual deployment with the South East Asian Command in Java after the Japanese surrender. As it transpired, Captain P. R. S. Mani worked as an enlisted public relations officer of the British-led Indian Army but also sustained his commitment as a patriotic Indian nationalist, who gathered intelligence on the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia and on the impact of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Relatively little scholarship has focused on Asian war journalism. Mani's tension-ridden role as a self-styled ‘Indian Army observer’ provides an illuminating insight into the way in which Britain's lines of communication were appropriated and subverted during wartime and beyond, and into the way his own nationalism was reshaped by his unofficial transnational activities.

As the Editors of Modern Asian Studies, we are sorry that Professor Sundar is disappointed that Professor Verghese's article, ‘British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India’, does not engage with her work in the manner she would have wished. We are in agreement with the reviewers of the article that Verghese sets out a problematic for his study that is posed in a significantly different fashion from Sundar's work. As Verghese explains below, his line of enquiry emerged from comparative questions that had their origins in the field of political science. These questions address issues that do not easily map onto Sundar's ethno-historical work on Bastar.

Immobility raises awkward questions for theorists of migration. From their standpoint, migration is unusual behaviour that requires explanation. Its obverse—staying in place—is seen as an ‘obvious’ state of affairs that calls for no explanation. Yet assumptions about the ordinariness of immobility are insecure. For one thing, we know a great deal more about the mobile societies of early modern Asia; for another, Asian mobility in the era of high imperialism is much better understood. Yet despite these cumulative gains in our understanding of the scale of mobility in early-modern and modern Asia, and its acceleration in ‘the age of migration’, immobility continues to be seen as the ‘obvious’ state of affairs. This article suggests some preliminary answers to ‘the immobility paradox’, based on a study of the greater Bengal region. By analysing the impact of the intensifying links, in the late colonial era, between Bengal and the global economy, it shows that this varied widely for different people, in ways that had a profound bearing on their capacity to move. The article develops the notion of ‘deficits’ which worked to inhibit the mobility of particular groups and individuals. Physical frailty and obligations of care, it shows, were crucial factors in shaping immobility. Relations of gender and generation, and the inequalities embedded in these relations, produced ‘overabundances’—of obligations to people and places—that tied certain people down. Finally, it hints at the reasons why, and the ways in which, stayers-on have grown poorer.

This article explores public knowledge creation by examining how the New York Times produced Pakistan news between 1954 and 1971, the formative period of United States of America (USA)–Pakistan relations. These years encapsulate not only the heyday of cooperation between the two governments, but also the American public's first major introduction to the South Asian country by the increasingly intrepid news media. A leader in shaping that introduction was the New York Times. While most studies of the American media focus on measuring the effect of news exposure and content on public opinion, this article focuses on the theoretically underexplored aspect of news production: foreign news gathering. With a lens on South Asia, it shows that foreign news gathering involves the straddling of on-the-ground political and logistical constraints that generate an atmosphere of high uncertainty. By exploring the limitations on news gathering faced by America's leading newspaper's foreign correspondents in Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, this article identifies an important historical source of the ambiguity characterizing USA–Pakistan relations. The findings are based on recently released archival material that offers rare insight into the news-production process.

One of the central questions driving my research as a political scientist is understanding why ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic states revolves around one identity rather than another. Why, for example, do some regions of a diverse polity like India experience recurrent religious conflict whereas other regions experience severe caste conflict? In my book, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, I argue that these patterns of conflict are shaped by the legacies of British rule, especially the enduring divide between directly ruled provinces and indirectly ruled princely states. I contend that British administrators, in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion that they interpreted as a religious (Muslim) uprising, began to emphasize caste and tribal identities in their provincial governments, creating policies of ethnic stratification that led to increased caste and tribal conflict over the long run. Princely rulers, on the other hand, did the opposite: they implemented ethnic policies on the basis of religion, thereby creating legacies of communal violence. I defend this argument using archival research and interviews carried out in four comparative case studies (comparing two sets of contiguous provinces and princely states in Rajasthan and Kerala), one additional case study, and a statistical analysis of ethnic violence across 589 Indian districts.

The interwar period has recently been described as a highly internationalist one in South Asia, as a series of distinct internationalisms—communist, anarchist, social scientific, socialist, literary, and aesthetic1—took shape. At the same time, it has been argued that the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 drew to a close various opportunities for international association (at least, temporarily). Taking into account both these contradistinctive developments, this article deals with another—and thus far largely overlooked—South Asian internationalism in the form of wartime Indian humanitarianism. In 1938, the Indian National Congress helped organize an Indian medical mission to China to bring relief to Chinese victims of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By focusing on this initiative, this article traces the ideas, the practices, and the motives of Indian political humanitarianism. It argues that such initiatives, as they became part of much wider global networks of humanitarianism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, created new openings for Indian nationalists to establish international alliances. This article also examines the way in which political humanitarianism enabled these same nationalists to perform as independent leaders on an international stage, and argues that humanitarianism served as a tool of anti-colonial emancipation.

This article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium-distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens, and knowledge from China. The colonial state's experimental tea plantations were directly connected to the devastation of the opium trade. The multiple uses of Jardine Matheson's drug-distribution networks and skilled employees becomes evident upon examination of their role in facilitating Chinese migration. The recruitment of tea cultivators from China in the 1830s also impacted on colonial concepts of racial hierarchy and the perceived contrast between savagery and civilization. Ultimately, Jardine Matheson's extraction of skilled labour from the China coast informs our understanding of the evolving private networks that became crucial to British imperialism in Asia, and through which labour, capital, people, information, and ideas could be exchanged.

In the spring of 1938 a mission of the Italian Fascist Party journeyed to the Japanese empire, visiting China, Korea, Manchukuo, and Japan itself. Those were happy days for the Axis and, as such, characterized by a flood of shuttle visits and requests for cooperation between Italy, Japan, and Germany. As we explore the choreography of the visit and accompany the Italian Blackshirts on their two-month-long trip, two processes become clear. On the one hand, the presence of the Blackshirts in Japan helped place the nation's regional war with China in the broader context of worldwide conflicts. On the other hand, this trip assisted in firmly placing the new Axis alliance in the context of a pan-Asianist empire under Japanese control. This article suggests that both processes were linked and mutually enhancing of one another. At the same time they were part of a much more far-reaching phenomenon, namely the globalization of the Axis alliance. This, I will argue, was acted out on the stages provided by what is best described as the ‘spectacle of global fascism’. Of course, this spectacle proved to have its tensions and oddities. But as the focus on the performative aspects of the Italian-Japanese encounters shows, this novel form of fascist diplomacy was a way of handling contradictions within the alliance. At the same time, the spectacle served to strengthen it. In other words, seen through the lens of the Blackshirts’ mission, the Axis appears significantly stronger, diverse, and also more global than conventional diplomatic history has perceived it to be.