Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors. Invidious comparisons have situated Russia firmly in a context of backwardness relative to the West. The term ‘medieval’ customarily applies to Russia until the era of Peter the Great, that is, until the early eighteenth century, and even the least condemnatory scholars point out similarities between Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and early medieval tribal formations of northern Europe. Along with ‘backwardness,’ comparative history has customarily found in Russia an example of extraordinarily oppressive autocratic despotism, while at the same time, and omewhat contradictorily, decrying the incompetence and rampant corruption of the central state apparatus. These and other unflattering comparative generalizations arose in the observations of Western travellers who recorded their impressions of Russia in the early modern period and have continued in the writings of scholars and journalists to this day.

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.

The Chinese migrant's strong sense of attachment to the guxiang (native place) is well recognized, and literature on overseas Chinese generally proceeds on this assumption. There is, however, little discussion on the mechanisms which have bonded the migrant to the native place, either by helping him express his longing and concern for it, or by reminding him of his obligations as a native son. Family ties, ownership of land and business connections as well as pure sentimental attachment, so poignant in centuries of Chinese poetry, naturally make migrants feel concerned for its well-being and eager for its news. Overseas Chinese in most cases continue to communicate with the native place on an individual basis, for there are levels of activities where the scale and complexity are such that only organizational efforts would suffice. At the same time, an easily identifiable institution enables those at home to contact and rally more effectively its migrant fellow-regionals, when the need for spiritual or material help arises.

It is widely believed that nationalism in India stemmed from European domination. Imperialism, for the first time, generated the sentiment of ‘nationhood’ that brought together people of diverse religions, languages, and lifestyles to demand home rule. The process involved cultural revivalism, yet retained strong ties with the inheritance of two centuries of foreign domination. The spur to the writing of cultural tracts was sharp and the attempt to rewrite the ‘true’ history of their country became the leading preoccupation of intellectuals. Consequently, indigenous histories of different kinds emerged over a period of years preceding independence and in the years after 1947. Different generic models were used in an attempt to replace the ‘inauthentic’ historical accounts compiled by Europeans, featuring instead themes or motifs of writing that emphasized an assertion of a culture which was comparable, if not superior, to that of their European peers. Correspondingly, historiography and fiction-writing depicted national heroes, full of deeds of valour and bravery, engaged in wresting their ‘nation’ from the aggressor by an emphasis on indigenous themes. Models of writing structured around the earlier epics, the use of local dialects, the emphasis on ancient rituals and practices, all went into the making of a ‘pure’ tradition.

This article explores the origins and development of the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party) party's enterprises in Taiwan. Because the KMT party's enterprises are categorized in the private sector in all the statistical data, we should be very careful when we discuss the contributions of private enterprise to economic growth in Taiwan.

This article aims to inspect the scale of the party's enterprises, the reasons why KMT runs its own enterprises, and what influence they exert on the economic growth and political democratization of Taiwan. Obviously, these questions are significant for further economic and political reforms in Mainland China.

The land of Dai Viet, whose political and cultural heartland lay in what is now northern Vietnam, followed patterns somewhat analogous to those posited in other Eurasian ‘rimland’ states. The fifteenth to nineteenth centuries saw administrative centralization, territorial expansion, population growth, economic elaboration, a greater emphasis on textuality and moral orthodoxy, and growing cultural standardization. In contrast to France and West European states, however, the Vietnamese achieved this integration less by refining patterns established during the prior ‘charter age’ (c. 900–1400 c.e.) than by adopting a radically new model, that of the contemporary Ming government in China.

Monuments, memorials and statues, so commonplace in squares and parks of late twentieth-century cities, have interesting histories and convey particular historiographies. In public arenas planned and maintained by state administrations, symbolic representations situated for the purpose of communicating messages to passersby, visitors, and residents often mark the state's attempt to control space, history and popular memory. By extension, changes in statuary or monumental architecture over time may reflect shifts in rulers and their representations of rule. As Hung (1991) demonstrates, the ‘war of monuments’ in Tiananmen Square reflected struggles for power and demands by those excluded from power for rights and access. The ‘statumania’ of post-revolutionary France personalized contests for power and representation (Agulhon 1985). On the other hand, monuments that remain fixed on landscapes can be variously interpreted over time, forming, as Young (1989:70) has noted, ‘a kind of screen across which the projected shadows of a world's preoccupations continue to flicker and dance.’

Pakistan is an ideologically inspired state and Urdu was a part of this ideology. During the development of Muslim separatism in British India it had become a symbol of Muslim identity and was the chief rival of Hindi, the symbol of Hindu identity (Brass, 1974: 119–81. Thus, after partition it was not surprising that the Muslim polemical and methodologically unreliable books. Some of them are, indeed, part of the pro-Urdu campaign by such official institutions as the National Language Authority, because of which they articulate only the official language policy (Kamran, 1992). Other books, especially by supporters of Urdu, invoke simplistic conspiracy theories for explaining the opposition to Urdu. One of them is that the elitist supporters of English have always conspired to protect it in their self-interest; the other that ethno-nationalists, supported by foreign governments, communists and anti-state agents, oppose Urdu (Abdullah, 1976; Barelvi 1987). While such assertions may be partly true, the defect of the publications is that no proof is offered in support of them.

Compared to missionaries like Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay is a name almost unknown in the annals of Christian evangelism in China. The personnel roster of the London Missionary Society, to which he initially belonged, did boast of such luminaries as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneering Protestant preacher in early nineteenth-century China and James Legge (1815–1897), a missionary turned Sinologist and Oxford don. But Mackay, as one of the Mission's numerous field workers, is not likely to be found in such distinguished company. In fact, his sojourn in China, in comparison, was relatively brief. It lasted not quite six years, from January 1891 to September 1896, when he died of cholera and was buried in China. In many ways, he was merely another missionary, one of the many men and women, Catholic and Protestant, who had toiled in China, then faded into oblivion, and have since eluded the eye of the historical researcher.

The former princely state of Hunza (now part of Pakistan's Northern Areas District) commands one of the largest and most complex irrigation systems in the whole of the western Karakoram mountain range. Built during the 18th century, Hunza's hydraulic works contributed significantly to the emergence of this small Central Asian state. Few writers, however, have explored the role of irrigation in Hunza's political evolution. Müller-Stellrecht (1981:55) has made some passing observations about the economic importance of irrigation in her paper on traditional Hunzakut society, Kreutzmann (1988) has provided some historical facts concerning the building of the canals and the present-day water distribution system in Hunza, while the French geographer Charles (1985) presents a significant body of data on Hunza's hydraulic works, but entirely from a physical perspective. In this paper, which is based on ethnohistorical data gathered during field research in Hunza, in 1990 and 1991, I examine the role of irrigation in the process of state formation in Hunza.

Despite the serious studies of the past century, the history of Mainland Southeast Asia is still poorly understood. This is not to say that we do not have numerous studies of particular countries and events in individual countries; but, despite the efforts of Victor Lieberman, Anthony Reid, and others, we still lack a comprehensive sense of the dynamics of the premodern history of long periods on a region-wide basis.

This paper focuses on the south-central Javanese state of Mataram and its late seventeenth- and mid-eighteenth-century successors—Kartasura (1680–1746), and Surakarta (founded 1746) and Yogyakarta (founded 1749). It concentrates principally on the administrative, military and cultural trends of the period, looking at the ways in which Mataram and its heirs imported their cultural styles from the defeated east Javanese and pasisir (north-east coast) kingdoms, while developing a Spartan polity dominated by the exigencies of war and military expansion. The disastrous reign of Sultan Agung's successor, Sunan Amangkurat I (r. 1646–77), and the emergence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as a major political force in Java led to the rapid eclipse of Mataram/Kartasura's military influence duringJava's ‘Eighty Years War’ (1675–1755) when the heritage of the great early Mataram rulers was squandered. This period of turmoil ended in the permanent division (paliyan) of south-central Java between the courts of Surakarta (Kasunanan, founded 1746, and Mangkunegaran, founded 1757) and Sultan Mangkubumi's new kingdom of Yogyakarta, which, in terms of its martial traditions, was the principal inheritor of the early Mataram polity. At the same time, the political authority of the courts continued to face challenges from regional power centres, not least the powerful administrators of Yogyakarta's eastern outlying provinces (mancanagara)based in Madiun and Maospati, and the networks of Islamic schools (pesantrèn) and tax-free religious villages (perdikan), which drew their strength both from court patronage and the piety of local communities.

The majority of Japanese even today believe that the politico-cultural universe of the Edo period was fundamentally determined by the closure of the country. They also think that the opening of Japan can be reduced to the development of exchanges with the West, following the birth of the Meiji regime. It is hard for them to imagine that Japan developed in relation with other Asian countries, since they are hardly used to appreciating Asian cultures.