Starting from the premise that all empire building involves ideological constructs justifying the violence that accompanies such efforts, this article concentrates on elucidating the case of the Portuguese in Asia, specifically in Japan. Although well beyond the formal Portuguese thalassocracy in Asia, the Japanese islands were exposed for about a century, between 1543 and 1640, to the informal presence of Portuguese traders and missionaries. The symbiotic relationship between these two groups was based on the experience that, in Japan, the trade was difficult to conduct, for violence was always lurking beneath the surface of the trading relationship. We know of several instances when such violence actually exploded into major armed clashes, and many other times violence was narrowly averted through the mediation of the missionaries.

Based on original research in the archives of Portugal and Spain, this article analyzes the records that the leaders of the Portuguese who came to Japan in the sixteenth century, the so-called capitães mores, have left behind. Finding that a significant number of these men were or later became members of the Order of Christ or were closely related to such members, it then explores their mindset through a survey of the function of this military order in Portuguese society of the late Middle Ages. The result is a group portrait of thirty-seven men who may be considered a representative sample of the Portuguese leading both the formal and informal empires in Asia. This portrait will clarify why both Japanese and Portuguese authorities agreed, at least during the second half of the sixteenth century, that the Jesuit missionaries were an indispensable presence in Japan.

The origins of printing in East Asia have been the subject of lively debate over the last twenty years, and a constant point of reference has been the first recorded act of printing in Japan, which took place in the 760s. The term Hyakumantō Darani 百万塔陀羅尼 (hereafter HD) is commonly used in Japan to refer to this episode, and it denotes the Buddhist dhāraṇī or spells which are thought to have been printed in Nara and then inserted into wooden miniature pagodas, and which have for a century been regarded as the oldest printed texts in the world.1 They were printed, so the evidence suggests, in the closing years of the reign of Shōtoku 稱德 (718–770, r. 764–770), who was the last woman on the Japanese throne for nearly one thousand years and who had had an earlier reign under the name Kōken 孝謙 (r. 749–758).2

In this article I shall first examine the evidence relating to the HD and the origins of printing, since the whole question has long been clouded by hypotheses masquerading as fact. Second, I shall explore the origins of the practice of producing miniature pagodas and its transmission to Japan. Third, I shall argue that the established views on the motivation for the HD are inadequate, and shall identify the factors that demand a new explanation, particularly the pagodas themselves. Finally, I turn to the ideological and political factors underlying these events and suggest a new explanation. This new explanation focuses on the politics of Shōtoku's situation and the connection with empress Wu (Wu Zetian 武則天; 624–705, r. 690–705), and it goes some way towards explaining why printing was not resorted to again in Japan for several centuries.

This essay compares nation-making in India, Turkey and Iran through differing visions of modernity and Enlightenment as temporal horizons. The comparison is traced through the Islamic Triumvirate (Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires) focused upon the Mughal Emperor Akbar's multi-religious experiment in early modern empire consolidation. The essay then analyses the national independence movements which defined – through either violent or non-violent practice, direct seizure of state power or civil society transformation – the post-independence political formations of India, Turkey and Iran between democracy and authoritarianism. As ideal types, these experiences constitute two distinctive temporal horizons: the movement (involving the masses in nation-making as a multi-centred process) and the programme (nation-making from above employing a blueprint of rupture). The political tradition being highlighted is nation-making based upon an ethic of reconciliation over totality. This tradition links development and public freedom in creating a democratic society.

This essay explores the nature of the changing scholarship on Chiang Kai-shek, reviewing some of the established assessments which dominated writing about Chiang for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, but contrasting these with new assessments which are now emerging in both Chinese- and English-language scholarship. The authors examine the ways in which new access to the Chiang Kai-shek diaries, a changing cross-Strait relationship and new attempts to rehabilitate the Republican past in the People's Republic of China have all had major ramifications for scholarship on Chiang. They tease out some of the exciting new threads that such scholarship is leading to, but also ask questions about the limitations and shortcomings of some of the approaches that are now dominant in the field.