When 1 October 1965 dawned on Djakarta, the Sukarno régime appeared to have been bloodily consolidated. By evening its foundation had been undermined. The subsequent collapse took the lives of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the Communist Party, and ended hostilities against Malaysia. For the first time in many years it seemed that the prosperity of the people might be put before the ‘progressive’ posturing of politicians. The events of the day are therefore worth considering in some detail.

Rapid population growth and widespread unemployment are twin dilemmas in all the South-east Asian nations. In other more developed countries, increases in population have coincided with the growth of industry and towns. Consequently serious rural unemployment has been avoided. However, the pace of industrialization in South-east Asia has not been able to cope with the natural growth of the cities, let alone to absorb immigrants from the countryside. Yet, even the very limited opportunities for employment in the towns has attracted people to them with concomitant spreading of slums, poverty and squalor. It can be argued that ‘urban growth in the underdeveloped areas is not a feature of the expansion of the industrial base but an expression of the severity of the agrarian crises’. Further, it seems unlikely that the current rate of urbanization and industrialization in South-east Asia will solve the unemployment problem in the region. A solution must be found within a rural context.

Sikh history has produced few men as controversial as Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu. His conduct, especially in the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46, continues to evoke bitter argument. Whereas the debate at the end of the war pertained to the wisdom of creating the independent state of Kashmir, in more recent years it has centred around Gulab Singh's part in the conflict, which resulted in the partial dismemberment of the Sikh state. Two major evaluations have been made. A school of Panjab historians condemns the Jammu Raja's conduct as perfidious and brands him as a traitor. This conclusion is disputed by pro-Dogra historians who, while acknowledging his reluctance to become involved in the war, imply that he played an effective political role on behalf of the Sikhs which prevented the complete annexation of their state in 1846. Such widely differing assessments, often made without sufficient historical data and characterized by political or regional bias, have done little to produce a balanced understanding of this highly controversial affair. This paper tries to reconstruct and re-evaluate the Raja's role in the war.

In 1857 Delhi ceased to be the seat of the Mughal kingdom, and in 1912 it became the capital of the British Empire in India. The city had always had strategic and, therefore, economic and political significance. In the half-century between 1857 and 1912 Delhi's increasing economic and commercial activity prevented the city from sinking, as some historic Indian cities did, into the obscurity of just another provincial town. Curzon described it in 1899 ‘a capital city, now of commerce as once of power’. It acted as the commercial entrepôt for all north India, after becoming the junction of a huge railway network connecting north India to the ports. Commercial expansion in turn led to a steady growth in the city's population. This physical and economic expansion was, however, affected by the government's concern for security in Delhi. The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of urban development in Britain, but when urban government was taking root in India in this same period, it was cramped not only by apathy and financial stringency, as in Britain, but also by strategic considerations. This is an aspect of Indian local government which has not been studied at all. As for Delhi itself, the city has yet to find its urban historian. In this paper I shall examine how far official considerations of military security affected the city's development.