Studies on the origins of Hindu–Muslim riots in nineteenth-century India have rightly stressed the distinction between what Professor Norman Brown calls ‘the precipitating causes’ of conflict and the deepseated religio-cultural differences that have long kept these two communities apart. As Norman Brown says, the precipitating cause ‘might be a quarrel over ownership of a parcel of land and the right to erect a religious building on it, or the playing of music by a Hindu wedding procession as it passed a mosque where such a noise constituted sacrilege, or exaction of exorbitant rent or interest by a landlord or moneylender of one religious persuasion from a tenant or debtor of the other, or sacrifice of a cow by Muslims, or the clash of crowds when a Hindu and a Muslim festival coincided’.

This account of the Burmese Rebellion of 1930–1931, and the role of its leader, Saya San, emphasizes the importance of traditional elements in what is commonly regarded as a nationalist uprising. The apparently nationalistic symbols of the Rebellion had magical and protective functions that were not appreciated by the British at the time of the Rebellion. The importance of nationalism in Burma in the 1930s has been overestimated, while the strength and continuity of traditional appeals has been incompletely understood. A comparison of the tactics of U Ottama, a cosmopolitan revolutionary, with the less modern but more successful efforts of Saya San, suggests that the rural Burmese of 1930 were more responsive to symbolic appeals than to programmatic designs for reform. The Western-educated elite of Burma were at first surprised and perhaps embarrassed by the primitive uprising in the countryside, but they eventually embraced the Rebellion and its symbols. Thus the Saya San Rebellion was a key stage in the transition of Burmese nationalism; to the urban elite, it vividly demonstrated the survival of traditional values in the countryside, while proving that a peasant uprising could achieve only temporary success without specific and negotiable aims, which required modern political skills.

This paper describes certain features of the economy in an extreme mountain environment where two contrasted forms of traditional political organization have survived into the twentieth century. It attempts to show that these forms of organization not only have had implications for the agricultural economy in the past, but are now influencing economic behaviour in the face of new situations and opportunities.

In contrast to India, where communal affrays were ordinary incidents of life, there was little inter-communal hostility in Ceylon throughout British rule. The clash between the Sinhalese and the Muslims that occurred in May–June 1915 was the major exception to this general trend of peace and tranquillity2. Not only did the disturbance take the Ceylon government by surprise, it placed the Colonial Office in a quandary. In this paper it is proposed to examine the reactions of the Ceylon government and the Colonial Office to what was an unprecedented disturbance in the ‘senior colony of the new empire’3.

The Crimean War (1854—56), as its name suggests, was fought mainly on and around a peninsula jutting out from the northern shores of the Black Sea. Names such as the Alma River, Balaclava, and Inkerman are generally conjured up at the mention of this costly conflict. Strategic planning and operations on both sides, however, were not confined to the Crimea and the Caucasus. Far from Sebastopol, hostilities between Russia and the allied powers of Britain and France erupted in the seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and in the North Pacific Ocean. Accorded relatively little attention at the time, almost forgotten today, this Far Eastern1 theatre of the war offers insights into the growing role of Europe in East Asia. Whereas in the Crimea, the Allies achieved a victory of sorts while making immense human sacrifices, in the Far East they failed in many of their objectives but without incurring a great loss of life. The tragi-comic nature of tactical operations in the Far East should not obscure the war's broader implications: (1) the advance of Russia into the Amur River basin and Maritime Provinces then part of the Chinese Empire; (2) the intensification of British anxieties regarding Russian penetration into Manchuria and Korea; (3) the growing role of Japan in international relations; and (4) the progress of cartographical knowledge through surveys conducted in response to the demands of war.