The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

Beginning in the late 1880s King Chulalongkorn of Siam embarked on a radical reform of the structure of his administration. The existing organization of ministries, which had had its origin in the mid-fifteenth century, was abolished and replaced by a western-style governmental structure in which each ministry had clearly-defined functional responsibilities. In addition an attempt was made to introduce western administrative, accounting, audit and correspondence procedures into the operations of the Siamese bureaucracy. At the same time the Government undertook a number of major public works projects, most notably the construction of railways linking Bangkok with the most distant provinces of the Kingdom. The essential objective of these reforms was to ensure a more effective and efficient administration of the whole Kingdom by the authorities in Bangkok. In turn this was regarded as essential if Siam were to maintain her political independence in a period when all her neighbours had fallen under European colonial rule.

When, more than ten years ago, Professor Harry Benda urged Southeast Asian historians to consider the significance of peasant movements, he wrote with singular perspicacity. The attention that had been paid to the peasantry as a political force in the literature published up to the middle 1960s was limited. Nevertheless, on the basis of his own research into the Samin movement in Java and a shrewd estimation that much available evidence had been neglected, he argued for both the possibility and the worth of studying peasant movements throughout colonial Southeast Asia. Like many other students, I was struck by the force of Harry Benda's arguments, and the following essay owes much to his scholarly inspiration.

Despite the important role played by urban settlements in Southeast Asia, the city in general and urban society in particular have received little attention from historians. The study of town government is a particularly neglected field, especially for the period of colonialism. Although a considerable literature devoted to the political organization and institutional development of colonial rule exists, information on the situation in urban centers remains surprisingly meager. The lacuna is more marked for the indigenous peoples than for Chinese. Nonetheless enough pertinent data do exist to suggest that some form of indirect rule was widely paracticed as a mechanism for urban administration. Since most towns and cities in colonial Southeast Asia were characterized by some degree of social and cultural pluralism, indirect rule had the effect of segregating the various ethnic groups and further segmenting urban society along ethnic lines. This essay analyzes the development of urban government during the colonial period through case study of Kuching under the Brooke Raj (1841–1941). It then attempts to define some general patterns through a brief comparative analysis of several other cities in the region.

The foundation of a State in Afghanistan by the Pashtun tribesmen in 1747 posed the question of a religious policy. The issue was not that of proselytism. Most of the Afghans did adhere to one or another form of Islam and the followers of other creeds did not even constitute one percent of the population. But the Islam adhered to by the tribesmen did not have Shari'a (Islamic Law) as its judicial basis and no religious tradition enforced allegiance to monarchs.

One of the central choices that confronts designers of direct taxes is that of the precise combination of equity and administrative ease. Both equity and administrative ease are normally accepted as desirable objectives in the design of taxes. But the objectives conflict with each other. Equity requires a tax sufficiently flexible to adjust the size of the tax payment to the individual taxpayer's ability to pay. Administrative simplicity, by contrast, requires a tax where the due payment can be quickly and simply calculated, and promptly and conveniently collected. Thus tax designers face the painful dilemma of being able to achieve improvements in equity only by increasing the difficulty of tax administration, or, alternatively, of being able to reduce these difficulties only by accepting additional inequities.

The description provided by John Foster Fraser, a British journalist wandering through Siberia and Manchuria in the autumn of 1901, is of Khabarovsk, a town of some fifteen thousand people. Such scenes were not peculiar to Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, but could be witnessed in other towns throughout the Russian Far East such as Chita, Blagoveshchensk, Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii, and Vladivostok. Who were these ‘weak, withered-faced’ Chinese that one was likely to encounter? What were they doing within the boundaries of the Russian Empire? What were the attitudes of the Russian population towards the Chinese and what policies did the provincial and central authorities adopt with respect to them?