Since the end of World War II the study of Southeast Asia has changed unrecognizably. The often bitter end of colonialism caused a sharp break with older scholarly traditions, and their tendency to see Southeast Asia as a receptacle for external influences—first Indian, Persian, Islamic or Chinese, later European. The greatest gain over the past forty years has probably been a much increased sensitivity to the cultural distinctiveness of Southeast Asia both as a whole and in its parts. If there has been a loss, on the other hand, it has been the failure of economic history to advance beyond the work of the generation of Furnivall, van Leur, Schrieke and Boeke. Perhaps because economic factors were difficult to disentangle from external factors they were seen by very few Southeast Asianists as the major challenge.

The first five papers in this issue of Modern Asian Studies were originally written for a panel that came together at the 40th meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco, in March of 1988, to discuss ‘Civil Ritual in India: British and Indian Modes of Symbolic Representation.’

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

In its reply to the Report of the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Representatives (The Hockin Committee) on Independence and Internationalism (1986), the Government of Canada reiterated its intention to treat the Asia-Pacific as ‘an area of concentration in the National Trade Strategy’ (Canada's International Relations, 1986, p. 60). Within the National Trade Strategy, significant attention is being given to the development of Canada's economic relationship with the countries of Southeast Asia, most notably the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) grouping. The policy mechanisms deployed to promote closer economic and social ties with Southeast Asian countries include those pertaining to international trade and finance, development assistance, transport, immigration and cultural relations.

The exchanges that comprised the formal meetings between Indian Rulers and the British Residents attached to their courts both reflected and, in some measure, determined the changing political relationships between the Indian states and the English East India Company. As the Resident and his staff introduced new symbols and meanings into his ritual intercourse with an Indian Ruler, these new elements affected the attitudes and actions taken by the audiences of these exchanges, in both India and Britain. As the military and political power of the Company flowed over or around the regional states of India during the period 1764–1858, the Company's Residents proved able to assert increasing influence over the shape of these rituals in the Indian courts.

These people, called badagàs, though of the same colour and quality as the other peoples of India, are more valiant and powerful in war; because, as I have said, they are a wealthy people, and of great chivalry, and behave with greater dignity than the others, and they have all their cities and towns sheltered and encircled all around with walls of mud or of stone, with their bulwarks, rather like our fortresses, in which too they differ from the other peoples of India, who in general do not live together and encircled in this manner.

The notion that the series of alarming events in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century might be connected goes back at least as far as Voltaire. Professional historians of Europe during the past forty years have fixed on this period as the principal case to test the idea that societies can undergo a ‘general crisis’, in which agricultural, demographic, climatic, economic, military and political factors are interrelated (Hobsbawm 1954; Trevor-Roper 1959; Aston 1965; Parker and Smith 1978; Parker 1979). For some this was the crisis of the transition to capitalism, for others that of the absolutist state, while more recent commentators have put more emphasis on climatic and environmental factors. The causal connections between the various factors remain the most puzzling unresolved problem.

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The really important ‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.

As the British Empire extended its power across the Indian subcontinent, the military and political pressures which it could bring to bear had proved to be its most significant assets. However, both to establish and to maintain an English political paramountcy which could guarantee economic dominance came over time to be revealed as two separate tasks, demanding very distinct skills. To maintain and secure this newfound power in India, the British were forced to come to know more about India. They had to grasp the ‘rules’ of India's preexisting political ‘game’ and, more frequently, to confront their need to rewrite these rules into a form which they could comprehend, in which they could compete, and where their dominance could be virtually assured.This process suggests the ‘gathering in of the threads of legitimacy’ towhich D. A. Low has to eloquently drawn our attention.

The history of coal mining in Malaya is synonymous with the history of Malayan Collieries and Batu Arang town since coal was only ever economically mined in this small area in Ulu Selangor. The town of Batu Arang, the Malayan Collieries and the mines left an indelible mark on Malayan history. Previous accounts of the history of coal mining are restricted to mentions in general works on labour and the labour unrest of 1936–37 and 1946–47. This paper outlines the role of coal mining in the Malayan economy in the first half of the twentieth century. It also focuses on the history of labour at the collieries and the significant role that labour played in the development and growth of industrial activism in Malaya.

Was the Madras Army professional in the 1830s? The answer depends largely upon the definition of professionalism. Professional standards in society at large and in military forces have changed over the past two hundred years. Major political decisions with enormous social and economic consequences are made by governments today based upon their understanding of military professionalism. This understanding should incorporate the historical record including nineteenth-century developments outside of Europe.

The seventeenth-century crisis concept served the research in European history well, it deepened and broadedned and broadened our understanding of well-studied issues, even though we were far from agreeing on a definition of what the seventeenth-century crisis was or is. This is the kind of conceptual embarrassment which baffles our colleagues in the social sciences, but which the historian takes in his stride.

With the publication of Bernard Cohn's seminal article in the Invention of Tradition, the study of ritual in colonial India has acquired a new significance and a new respectability for South Asianists, particularly those inclined to ‘ethnohistorical’ approaches. Recently a number of essays on imperial ceremony have begun to appear with very profitable results. But those working on this subject have generally confined themselves to examining one of two problems: either they have looked at the ideological models and cultural meanings that informed the thinking of the British designers of these observances or they have explored the role of ritual in the setting of princely India. As yet scholars have developed little sense of how Indians outside the ‘native states’ conceived of their participation in durbars and other forms of public ceremony. Many materially inclined historians seem to assume that imperial ritual was a meaningless charade for Indians, that those who participated in ritual acts did so at best as a means of avoiding offence to their rulers, that the locus of ‘real’ politics lay elsewhere. A few no doubt consider the current focus on imperial display even to be a waste of time. In part this attitude issues from a nationalism that refuses to acknowledge its imperialist antecedents. In part it stems from a more general cynicism among late twentieth-century intellectuals toward ritual.

Colonial regimes have frequently shown a preference for sharing the burdens of defence with certain ethnic groups of the countries under their control. The advantages of a policy of this type—the essence of the divide and rule system—were many and varied. Binding natives to the service of colonial defence solved the functional problems of manpower in situations where no adequate corps of white regulars was readily available. The practice was cheaper to maintain and found to be an effective instrument of control. Its employment also drew off warlike elements that might have made trouble.

From 1919 through 1921, a combination of poor rice harvests and speculative buying caused unprecedented rice shortages in Southeast Asia and led to imposition of government controls over the rice industry. Because there were large workforces in South and Southeast Asia entirely dependent upon imported rice, the shortages were potentially very serious. Malaya and the East Coast Residency of Sumatra, for example, exported non-edible primary products such as tobacco, rubber and tin, and imported rice from Burma and Siam. Two-thirds of the rice consumed each year in Malaya, and one-half of that used in Sumatra's East Coast Residency, was imported, and local food production fell far short of the minimum needed if imported grain could not be obtained. Tea cultivation in Ceylon, tobacco and rubber planting in British North Borneo, and sugar planting in the Philippines were conducted along much the same lines.

Resource cartels face a fundamental organizational problem. While production control can secure higher prices, these are enjoyed by all producers, regardless of whether they are members of the cartel or not. Those who take the benefits without making a contribution to its costs are freeriders, and they can destroy the conditions under which effective collective action is possible. If resource cartels are to make an important contribution to improving the terms under which peripheral nations participate in the world economy, it is important for them to find ways of resolving the freerider issue.

Bengal is a vast cremation ground, a meeting place for ghosts and evil spirits, a land so overrun by dogs, jackals and vultures that it makes one wonder whether the Bengalis are really alive or have become ghosts from some distant epoch. And yet in the imaginative words of the poet, golden Bengal was once ‘well-watered, fruitful, abundant with crops.’ A garden of culture and civilization for over a thousand years … (Biplabi, 7 November, 1943, cited in Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Medern Bengal: the Famine of 1943–44, New York, 1982).

Here I apply a theory of ‘political displacement’ to the study of an incident that took place at King George V's investiture as ‘King-Emperor’ of India at the ‘Delhi Durbar’ on December 12, 1911. By ‘political displacement’ I mean the shifting of political attention from one domain to another, or from one idiom to another, where problems emergent but unresolvable in the first are dealt with by conversion into the second. My purposes are these: First, to describe the problem created by the incident when the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda, second in rank among the Indian Princes, ‘insulted’ the King-Emperor; second, to trace reactions, both British and Indian, to the series of events that followed; and third, to examine how the incident's conversion from one political idiom to another rendered it interpretable, thereby reducing confusion and permitting action.

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.