Among the dominant themes of world history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been the imperialism of the west and the nationalism of its colonial subjects. Nowhere were these themes developed more spectacularly than in South Asia; its history quite naturally came to be viewed as a gigantic clash between these two large forces. The subject then was held together by a set of assumptions about the imperialism of the British and the reactions of the Indians against it. That imperialism, so it was thought, had engineered great effects on the territories where it ruled. Those who held the power could make the policy, and they could see that it became the practice. Sometimes that policy might be formulated ineptly or might fall on stony ground or even smash against the hard facts of colonial life. But for good or ill, imperial policy seemed to be the main force affecting colonial conditions. It emerged from an identifiable source, the official mind of Whitehall or the contrivances of pro-consuls; and so the study of policy-making made a framework for investigations into colonial history.

For many Hindu residents of the great cities of northern India in the mid-nineteenth century, the most powerful figures in the community were members of the wealthy families of indigenous bankers and traders which controlled credit and dispensed patronage for the religious life of their localities. Just as in the smallest bazaar great power lay in the hands of the petty moneylender, so in the cities which remained clusters of bazaars and residential blocs, the banking and trading oligarchies determined the limits of commercial activity with their credit notes, and helped to supply the community through their secondary trades in cloth, grain and sugar.

British rule cut down Muslim power in the United Provinces. Between 1868 and 1916, municipalities and councils acts tempered the rule of officials, many of whom were Muslims, with the rule of the people, few of whom were Muslims. Up to 1916, Muslims felt this loss of power most severely in the towns. But, because the municipalities were electorates for the provincial councils, this decline of Muslim power in the towns was reflected in the province as a whole. UP Muslims directed their politics towards compensating for this loss. They aimed for a protected share of power. This essay analyses the local origins of this Muslim demand.

Gandhi's passive resistance campaigns in South Africa and his satyagraha agitation against the Rowlatt Bills in 1919 were conceived in wholly different circumstances; and the non-cooperation programme of 1920 was designed to meet conditions which were different again. To regard the non-cooperation movement simply as the logical consequence of the 1919 satyagraha and as the political application of Gandhi's ideology is to fail to appreciate just how experimental and uncertain Gandhi's politics were during this period.

The period from the 1880s to the 1930s was one of major change in the political organization of India. Indians joined the British in the highest offices of state; government greatly increased its activity through legislation and through the trebling of taxation; elective institutions and legislatures steadily replaced the discretionary rule of bureaucrats; a nationalist movement of great size and force appeared; the means of communication—through road, rail and press—improved beyond recognition to bring together for the first time the diverse peoples of India.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal administered the largest province in India. In addition to the Bengali-speaking area, it included parts of Orissa and virtually all of Bihar. Nearly two-thirds of the population were Hindus, and just over one third were Muslims. However, the Hindus predominated mainly in Bihar, Orissa and west Bengal, while the Muslims lived mainly in the east. In Bengal Proper there were, by 1901, more Muslims than Hindus. The province was ruled from Calcutta, the only large city in the region. Until 1912 Calcutta was also the capital of India itself. The city was a great economic, political, administrative and educational centre, and few other towns exercised such an influence over their surrounding districts as Calcutta did over Bengal.

During the twenty years after the First World War, Indian politics were moulded by two main forces, each of which drew strength from the other. Important constitutional changes devolved a range of powers to Indians. But the British did not plan these reforms of 1919 and 1935 as stages by which they would quit India, bag and baggage, but rather as adjustments in the methods of keeping their Indian connection while retaining intact most of its fundamental advantages. At the centre of government in India, the powers of the Raj were increased; in the provinces more and more authority was entrusted to Indians. This system canalized much of Indian political action into the provinces. Moreover, by placing the new provincial administrations upon greatly widened electorates, it gave the Raj a further range of collaborators, selected now for their mastery of vote-gathering. The reforms of 1919 provoked another seminal development. By widening the functions of local government bodies in municipalities and the rural areas, which were to be chosen by the same voters who elected the new provincial councils, they linked the politics of the localities more closely to the politics of the province.

The slow growth of railways is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing features of the history of modernization in China. The Chinese government often gave as its reasons for opposition to railway development the fact that improved communications would facilitate foreign military expansion, that railways obstructed the feng-shui, that mandarin and peasant alike were opposed to the railway, and that railways destroyed the livelihood of the common people. But, until recently, these explanations have never been given serious consideration, despite the fact that Ch'ing officials discussed railway-policy in these terms in a major debate in 1866–67. This is partly because historians have found it difficult to accept Chinese objections to railway development at their face-value, and partly because Chinese officials themselves, seeing that foreigners were unimpressed by Chinese arguments against railway construction, offered others which they thought would be more acceptable to the Western mind.

If one wishes to understand something about the political mobilization of Chinese communist society, then it is necessary to concentrate primarily on the aims behind that political mobilization. The ways in which the Chinese try to direct matters so that those aims may be attained, determine the content and character of the mobilization. An analysis which is mainly concerned with such dimensions of the phenomenon ‘political mobilization’ as intensity, globality, tempo, structuring, organization, etc., is not suited to the Chinese situation, simply because these dimensions are to a large extent determined by, and can be explained by, the meaning and content of the underlying values and aims.

Central Luzon is a fertile plain directly to the north of metropolitan Manila. This region, thoroughly colonized and densely populated, has been a centre of agrarian unrest for decades. In the forties and fifties Central Luzon formed the nucleus of a peasant movement which produced the strongest anti-Japanese guerilla-army in the whole Southeast Asia, the Hukbalahap (an abbreviation of Anti-Japanese People's Army) or in short Huks. The strength of this army came primarily from the fact that the struggle against the national enemy could be combined with the pre-war conflict between the peasants and the landowners.

The bond between nationalists and communists in the Indonesian independence movement was always close. For this reason the failure of the communist rising of 1926–27 was felt in nationalist circles as a blew for the Movement. It is also typical that the communist rising of 1948 did not lead to a ban on the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, whereas the anti-communist sweeps of 1951 were not received in outside circles with whole-hearted approval. The co-operation between nationalists and communists rested thus on more than a simple battle for independence. The nationalists, just as much as the communists, attributed a positive significance to the public masses, which were to harbour all the prosperity of the nation. These popular masses were supposed to be bowed down by imperialism and capitalilst exploitation, so that the Indonesian nationalists also made the liberation of the popular masses a point of policy.

A FORMIDABLE consensus of academic opinion exists on the question of the formation of Malaysia. In its most commonly stated form, this consensus is manifested in an explanation which specifies a date—27 May 1961—and sees Malaysia as the outcome of the attempt to solve the ‘Singapore Problem’. The movement towards Malaysia is, with dull regularity, dated from the Tunku's almost casual, certainly very vague, reference to the need for a ‘closer understanding’ between Singapore, British North Borneo (Sabah), Brunei, and Sarawak, and for ‘a plan whereby these territories can be brought closer together in a political and economic association’ which he made in the course of a speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of South-east Asia on 27 May 1961.

Few documents in recent history have provoked such controversy as the so-called ‘Tanaka Memorial’. ‘Document’ is perhaps a misnomer, for the original (assuming that there was one) has never been seen by anyone willing to admit its existence. The memorial is said to be a 13,000-word secret petition presented by Prime Minister Baron Tanaka Giichi to Emperor Hirohito on 25 July 1927 outlining a program of economic penetration into Manchuria, China, and Mongolia that would prepare for Japan's subjection of Asia and Europe. Exposed by the Chinese in 1929, the document gained global notoriety during the 1930s. Over vehement Japanese objections and disclaimers, it was translated and circulated in Europe and the United States. Grandiose designs expressed in a language that might have aroused incredulity or mirth in calmer times sounded uncomfortably authentic in the context of Japanese behavior in East Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945.