The problem of controlling and taxing the countryside is one which has remained with all governments in Asia, or indeed in the whole developing world, up to 1972. Government has inevitably tended to be essentially urban-based, centred on military power-bases, whether they be ‘Pacified Areas’, towns or mud forts, backed by military power normally concentrated in these centres. Outside the towns, however, lived the great mass of the population, and the great mass of the potentially taxable wealth, and it is upon its ability to control the rural areas that the credibility and survival of any régime must ultimately depend. It is perhaps an indication of our preoccupations with the problems of pacification and control in Asian societies that increasing interest is being shown in the patterns of rural control, in systems of traditional deference, which are usually seen as surviving much longer and much more strongly in the countryside than in the towns, and in problems of income distribution through social structures based on land. In such a situation, then, the role of the ‘estates’—of traditional and institutionalized systems of dependence and of control, of systems which were commonly used and hence studied by governments—is one which demands to be considered.

In the summer of 1857 British power throughout much of northern India was suddenly and violently subverted. Yet in spite of the fact that the uprising has perhaps commanded more attention than any other single event in Indian history the debate over its nature and causes still rages and 1857 remains a sensitive and highly controversial issue.

To a degree exceptional even in that age of historical recovery and sociological discovery, awareness of the village community was a creation of the later nineteenth century. With due allowance for the contribution of the German historical school, it was—within the English-speaking world—an Anglo-Indian creation. In England, save for a handful of ‘survivals’, the village community was a purely historical phenomenon, studied by historians; but in India it was an omnipresent reality, utilized by revenue officials in assessing and collecting the land revenue. From the efforts of these groups—historians and revenue officials—to comprehend substantially similar institutions two intellectual traditions derived. Originating in complete independence of one another, both traditions converged in the third quarter of the nineteenth century for a brief, intense, period of cross-fertilization—only to separate as totally again. What made their convergence possible was the rising popularity of evolution and ‘comparative method’—which insisted on the essential identity of the defunct English village community and the living Indian village, separate in space and time, but co-existent in the same phase of social evolution. Then disillusion with unilinear evolutionary schemes and the exhaustion of comparative method—its apparent inability to produce any fresh discovery—drove them apart.

In 1609, Satsuma, at the southern tip of Kyūshū, conquered Okinawa (then called the Ryūkyū Kingdom). Throughout the subsequent Tokugawa period, Satsuma was said to have kept the Ryūkyūans in a state of virtual slavery by plundering the profits of the lucrative Sino-Ryūkyūan trade and imposing an excessively heavy tribute-tax on the native products. This exploitation of Ryūkyū's trade and native resources was reported to have been one of the important financial resources for Satsuma; and one that made possible Satsuma's vigorous political and military activities in the middle nineteenth century leading to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In spite of such claims, no study of this topic has been made except those that have been strongly colored by the sympathies of the writer.

For a little over twenty years the Meiji press demonstrated a remarkable degree of vitality, resilience, and strength of purpose in the face of severely repressive laws of which the most onerous and irksome were those authorizing the government to ban and suspend publications. When, in March 1897, the 26th Century Affair culminated in the passage of revised press laws eliminating that dreaded power, the new freedom was largely the product of leadership which came from the press itself, and particularly from that part of the press often characterized as ‘conservative’, ‘right-wing’, ‘nationalist’ or even ‘ultra-nationalist’.

In 1609, Satsuma, at the southern tip of Kyūshū, conquered Okinawa (then called the Ryūkyū Kingdom). Throughout the subsequent Tokugawa period, Satsuma was said to have kept the Ryūkyūans in a state of virtual slavery by plundering the profits of the lucrative Sino-Ryūkyūan trade and imposing an excessively heavy tribute-tax on the native products. This exploitation of Ryūkyū's trade and native resources was reported to have been one of the important financial resources for Satsuma; and one that made possible Satsuma's vigorous political and military activities in the middle nineteenth century leading to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In spite of such claims, no study of this topic has been made except those that have been strongly colored by the sympathies of the writer.