This paper aims to demonstrate how ‘the religious’ is conceptualized and practiced among urban Indian entrepreneurs. It investigates a continuum of religious sentiment and practice, including non-religious elements, rather than a fixed repertoire of belief and ritual. These religious orientations range from the incorporation of certain Hindu religious practices into the business setting to a denial of any substantive role religion may play in the lives of entrepreneurs and the imbuing of religious dispositions with secular meaning. I argue in this paper that the religious and quasi religious practices of India's new social and economic elite are geared primarily towards the enhancement of their ‘flexible’ lifestyles. The study also makes a claim that modern urban Hinduism accommodates hybrid secular-sacred religious beliefs and practices.

This paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity.

This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized.

Most scholarly works on exhibitionary practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have focused on the meaning and importance of display, and the cultural bases, and indeed biases, that supported various inclusions and exclusions. The exhibition has usually formed part of a larger narrative of new rituals that were enacted in the modern period to serve, variously, imperial, market or patriotic objectives. Can the persistence with which the Princely Mysore state organized its Dasara Exhibition from 1907 until well after independence be understood solely within these frames? In both its choice of location and its timing, the Dasara Exhibition was organized with dogged insistence, despite its obvious failures. This can only be understood in relation to the larger changes that were envisaged for the economy of the region, as the state attempted to build a supplement, even an alternative, to the princely splendour and pomp that was on conspicuous display. This paper looks at the subtle changes and shifts that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in exhibitionary practices as they related to both real and envisaged changes within the economy that the Mysore bureaucracy was obliged to bring into being.

While establishing a framework for colonial governance in the Philippines, American policymakers had to confront the issue of opium smoking, which was especially popular among the Philippine Chinese community. In 1903, the Philippine Commission proposed a return to the Spanish-era policy of controlling the opium trade through tax farming, igniting outrage among American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines and their supporters in the United States. Their actions revived a faltering global anti-opium movement, leading to a series of international agreements and domestic restrictions on opium and other drugs. Focusing mostly on American policy in the Philippines, this paper also examines the international ramifications of a changing drug control regime. It seeks to incorporate the debate over opium policy into broader narratives of imperial ideology, international cooperation, and local responses to colonial rule, demonstrating how a variety of actors shaped the new drug-control regimes both in the Philippines and internationally.

This paper explores the nature of film exhibition amongst the Chinese community in Manila during the Japanese Occupation of that city. Based on advertisements and film listings published in the Chinese-language press of the day (as well as on pre-war records concerning commercial Chinese entertainment in the Philippines), it explores the continuities in film exhibition practice undertaken by various theatre operators within the Binondo area of Manila both before, during, and after the war. The paper suggests not only that such practices represented a quite different trajectory from that experienced in other parts of Occupied Manila, but also that a more thorough exploration of the Manila Chinese during wartime—one which goes beyond questions of mere collaboration and/or resistance—will encourage us to question some of the assumptions that underpin recent scholarship about this community.

Building on recent scholarship that highlights social change caused by the Anti-Japanese War, this paper traces the politicization of women working in the cotton mills of Chongqing, the Nationalist wartime capital. Upon joining the workforce in the late 1930s, most cotton mill hands were young, uneducated women expected to endure hard work and remain physically confined to the factories. By 1945, women workers were at the forefront of a militant labour movement, writing manifestoes and petitioning government officials. This process of politicization stemmed from their decision to work in factories, which breached societal norms, and their experience of disciplined labour regimes and brutal working conditions, which fostered an incipient class-consciousness. Moreover, Nationalist-sponsored factory education campaigns had the unintended effect of leading women to challenge class exploitation and sexual discrimination. Their participation in the labour movement, which was fuelled by their struggle for economic justice and desire for higher social status, used both legal forms— especially petitions and letters to the press couched in the wartime nationalist rhetoric of shared sacrifice—and extralegal means, namely class violence. The paper concludes that the social changes and conflict that accompanied women's wartime work helped prepare the terrain for Communist rule.

In the wide domain of finance, taxation is one of the issues to which public opinion is most sensitive. This paper explores why tax reform was hotly debated in Japan throughout the 1920s, focusing on the policies of the two main political parties. Though a topic rarely treated by historians, this controversy reveals a wealth of information on the concerns that lay behind policy choices in years that were marked by economic instability and social unrest; it shows, in particular, how the ruling elites tried to attenuate class conflict by enhancing the redistributive function of taxes, which had thus far been subordinated to the encouragement of rapid economic growth and the financing of state investment. While these attempts deserve attention as tentative steps towards the development of a welfare state, their limits indicate that the parties, in spite of extending the suffrage during this period, retained strong links with a restricted network of established constituents. This paper dwells especially on the earliest and least studied phase of the dispute on tax reform, in order to prove that the emergence of distinct party platforms did not stem simply from tactical considerations, but was rooted in broader policy visions.

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present.

Possession among Jains remains an almost unexplored field of study. Based on fieldwork at a Jain pilgrimage site in India, this paper presents ethnographical material on a hitherto unknown oracular possession cult. The paper looks at the ways in which Jains themselves understand and sometimes critique possessions, as a way of understanding Jainism itself. The ethnographic material is presented on the background of other cases of Jain possession, both in scriptures and other accounts, in an attempt to show how possessions challenge our understanding of Jainism as a religion. Furthermore, possession is not one thing. There are various types of possession—depending for instance on who possesses—and they have different implications in the Jain scheme of things.

In the latter half of the twentieth century thousands of Khmer people were displaced from their homes along the freshwater rivers of Vietnam's Mekong delta. Their pattern of settlement along freshwater tidal rivers was an ecological adaptation unique in the Khmer-speaking world, of which only vestiges remain. Drawing upon oral histories and ethnographic observations of O Mon, a district in the central Mekong delta, this paper reconstructs a picture of the traditional river-based livelihoods, social structure and religious life of Khmers in this region in the 1940s. It describes how these Khmers were driven from their villages early in the First Indochina War. Experiencing ongoing dislocations in subsequent periods of war and peace, most have been prevented from returning to their former homes or reclaiming their land. Relying on testimony by elderly Khmers, who witnessed the disintegration of their riverside communities, the account challenges existing depictions of the ecology and history of the Mekong delta, offering new insights into the complexity of the Indochina wars and the severity of their consequences.

This paper takes up the project of conceptualizing a new history of food in India through an exploration of conversations about food, digestion, desire, and embodiment that took place in Hindi-language publications in early-twentieth century North India. Through an exploration of cookbooks, guides to health and wellness, and food advertising spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, conversations about food preparation, consumption, and distribution come to be revealed as significant anchors of historical, political, economic, and cultural debates about the Indian nation in this period. The centrality of food to conversations that took up the reproduction and regeneration of the Hindu middle class helped to conceptualize an idealized Indian nation[A]. Subsequently, the focus on food advertising imagined the transformation of these citizens into consumers. Moving beyond the colonial fascination with native bodies and tropical constitutions, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the conversations that emerged out of a focus on food in popular culture did the work of envisioning new possibilities for post-colonial embodiment.

In May 1949 the Chinese Communist Party seized Shanghai. Rather than being elated at the prospect of harnessing the economic power of China's largest city to complete the revolution, the Communists approached it cautiously. How would the Chinese Communist Party set about transforming this free-wheeling port city with a ‘semi-colonial’ past into an orderly and socialist city? How would it balance ideology and pragmatism in reshaping Shanghai? This paper uses the takeover of two British companies as case studies to explore these issues at the ground level. It is argued that the means by which these companies were transformed tell us much about the Party and its state-building policies. When cadres entered foreign companies, their priority was not radical change and anti-imperialism, but rather fostering a sense of stability and unity to avoid disrupting production. Their gradual approach was due in large part to the Party's awareness of its own limited skills, resources and manpower, but also to its leaders and cadres recognizing that before they could remake Shanghai anew they had first to deal with the material and human legacies of the past.

In 1904, the British Indian government passed the Ancient Monuments Protection Act and, in doing so, radically enlarged the state's bureaucratic claim to structures defined, for the purposes of the Act, as monuments. The project of conserving the Hindu temple was beset by disagreements. The claims of the colonial state and local Hindu devotees were separated by different precepts about religiosity and alternate orders of aesthetics, time, and history. However, it is clear that there were also confluences: legislative authority could masquerade as custody of the antiquarian and, in practice, the secular veneration of material antiquity blurred with Hindu divinity. This paper combines an exploration of the principles of archaeological conservation, as they were formed in the European bourgeois imagination, and then traces their transfer, though imperial administration, to case-studies of specific temples. Of particular interest is the deployment of the Act by local administrations and the counter-challenges, appropriations, and manipulations of the same legislation. How were the aesthetic codes of conservation—and the legislation that sought to order and enforce their introduction—compromised by religious claims and practices?

In this paper I examine British policy towards the Yuan Shikai government in China between 1912 and 1914 through a consideration of the role of Britain's ‘men on the spot’ in China (i.e. British diplomats and bankers resident there). In doing so, I synthesize two bodies of literature that rarely interact: British imperial history and work by China historians. Three main elements shaped British policy in China: first, British policy-makers were determined to support Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power in China; second, in the making of its China policy, the Foreign Office relied heavily on Britain's men on the spot; and, finally, these men were anxious about the vulnerability of the Yuan Shikai government and were therefore manipulated to a certain extent by Chinese politicians. I suggest that British policy-makers were reacting to, rather than controlling, Chinese politics and that in this period collaboration with British imperialism was a rational choice for the Yuan Shikai government.

Recent studies have stressed the need for micro-histories of the environment so that important differences and similarities at local, regional and national level might be revealed. This paper analyses the process and patterns of environmental degradation at regional level by taking the case of deforestation in colonial Punjab by studying its implication at the level of empire. More specifically, it examines three aspects of how the operation and expansion of railways from 1869 to 1884, a peak period of railway expansion, affected the forests of the Punjab's plains. First, the paper analyses the reasons for large-scale railway expansion in the Punjab by discussing spatial and temporal expansion. Secondly, the impact of the railway firewood demand on the Punjab's forests between 1860 and 1884 is examined, specifically, the conditions that facilitated the increased dependence of the railways on firewood. Next follows an examination of the temporally varying nature of deforestation, given that railway firewood demand was determined by railway line openings. This section also includes a discussion on the nature of the colonial state response to the deforestation crisis and its role in maintaining the fuel supply to the railways. Finally, in the context of deforestation in the Punjab, the paper discusses how and why railway fuel changed from firewood to coal.

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the ‘martial races’ enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races.

This paper charts the linguistic shifts in a popular iteration of the story of Lord Ram, commonly known as the ‘Radheshyam Ramayan’ (composed in the first quarter of the twentieth century), across four versions of the text published in the devanāgarī script, between 1939 and 1969. It argues that the author, Radheshyam Kathavachak, likely revised his text over the course of many years, in large part to bring its language closer to śuddh (pure) Hindi on the Hindi-Urdu spectrum—a labour that was in the service of the Hindi language movement, if not also Hindu nationalism. Whilst the language in the 1939 printing is a mixed register of Hindi-Urdu, by 1959, the language has undergone a process of ‘Sanskritization’. That is, much of the vocabulary of Persian and Arabic origin, and also much vocabulary associated with the Braj tradition, have been replaced with words from Sanskrit. The progressive editing of text also shows a deep concern for the standardization and occasionally, elevation of literary Hindi, and simultaneously, the correction of defects in meter and style. The example of Kathavachak's ‘many Radheshyam Ramayans’ offers insight into the timing and pace of the Sanskritization of Hindi letters, suggesting that for some, the process may have been more protracted and anguished than is often thought.

The paper examines the model value of the Mughal period in MARG, the leading art journal of 1940s and 1950s India. It combines a discussion of some of the key historiographical questions of Indian art history and the role played by specific art historians, including European exiles who were among the contributors to the journal, with broader questions on the interaction of national cultural identity with global modernism. In this context, the Mughal period—celebrated in MARG for its synthesis of foreign and indigenous styles—was consistently put forward as an example for contemporary artists and architects. From its inception in 1946 until the 1960s the review favoured a return to the spirit of India's prestigious artistic past, but not to its form. Its editorials and articles followed a clearly anti-revivalist and cosmopolitan line. It aimed at redressing misunderstandings that had long undermined the history of Indian art and surmounting the perceived tensions in art and architecture between a so-called Indian style and a modern, international one.

Energy security is one of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. Intensifying competition for ever scarcer forms of conventional energy resources is causing significant tensions in the international system. East Asia will have a more profound impact on global energy security than any other region as its burgeoning demand for energy fuels, spurred principally by China, is expected to continue growing at over twice the world average in the next few decades. This paper examines the reasons why we may expect the energy diplomacies of East Asian states to become an increasingly salient feature of East Asian states’ foreign policy and international relations in the foreseeable future, and thereby significantly shape the nature of the region's international political economy. It presents a framework of energy diplomacy analysis in order to better understand how East Asian states are formulating their energy diplomacy strategies and actions. The four prime elements of this framework comprise: empirical perspectives and generic task-oriented terms; agential influences on the formation and organization of energy diplomacy practice; the energy–development nexus; and transaction mechanisms of energy diplomacy. The main conclusions are first, mercantilist approaches to energy diplomacy will persist but continue to gradually give way to market institutionalism; second, energy diplomacy will become increasingly linked to other forms of diplomacy, such as trade, environment and development assistance; third, we may expect East Asian states to afford greater priority to multilateral energy co-operation both regionally and in a wider international or global sense as energy security interdependencies deepen; and fourth, East Asia's growing reliance on sourcing energy fuels from outside the region will make it more dependent on stable international energy markets—these markets are becoming increasingly internationalized and globalized, which will broaden the future options of East Asian states developing new international energy partnerships.