Understanding how unequal relations are reproduced over time is as significant as comprehending inequality itself. For unequal relations exist only in human practices that reproduce them. More than a play on words, the coupling of production with reproduction in recent anthropological studies highlights processes that provide the basis for production. The necessity of reconstructing practices that reproduce social relations is perhaps nowhere more neglected than in the study of South Asian history. When it comes to explaining how unequal relations between social groups were maintained, the caste system is the perennial favorite. This is particularly so where relations between landlords and landless laborers are concerned. Thus, even Jan Breman's sophisticated and rich study of dependent laborers in South Gujarat points to the jajmani system, the institutional form of caste relations in the agrarian context, as the basis for relations between laborers and landlords in the past. While his study illuminates how bonded labor relations can be understood in the light of the jajmani model, it fails to explain how these relations were reproduced. Are we to assume that the transactional norms of the caste system, once in place, simply drove laborers and landlords into actions that reproduced bondage?

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of ‘permanent wage work’, ‘short-term wage work’, ‘casual work’ and ‘self-employment’ or ‘dependent work’ in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.

That people get the governments they deserve is a saying born out of the expectation of citizens to influence the choice of rulers, or that societies mould states. Perhaps, conversely, when governments are imposed on people, especially by outsiders, they are likely to be more than usually influential. Certainly, in India, social and religious changes are thought to have occurred under British rule. Official records provide much of the evidence for this. Yet British policy and attitudes in this area have not been very fully analysed. This essay is an attempt to start closing the gap, and it is hoped will provide some insight indirectly into how the records were produced and what was seen of social and religious change in the later nineteenth century—both matters ultimately of importance to the understanding of the period. Special attention will be paid to the cow-protection movements between 1880 and 1916.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) attempted throughout his public life to mobilize the Indian populace for mass political action. He did this by means of his speeches, journalism, leadership and philosophy. His desire was to throw off the yoke of British colonialism, to deliver his countrymen out of bondage. To this end Tilak sought a cogent and comprehensive, yet distinctly Indian, justification for anti-British pro-Hindu activism. He believed that the divergent sects of India could converge to form ‘a mighty Hindu nation’ if they would only follow the original principles of the Hindu tradition as set forth in such texts as the Rāmāyana and the Bhagavadgītā. And this convergence should be the goal of all Hindus.1 Tilak's interpretations of these texts, especially the Gītā, provided him with his ‘justification’ which rationalized his political work in religious guise.

The concept of the city as religious centre, administrative capital and economic pivot for a society, state or kingdom, expressed in the Islamic concept of madina (Gibbs and Kramers 1961: 291; Lapidus 1969: 69) pre-dates Muslim influence in Southeast Asia. The physical as well as functional characteristics of the Southeast Asian city, deriving from its urban features, as distinct from its rural surroundings, were a culmination of gradual evolution since the rise, about the middle of the second century A.D., of the first trading ports and cities. The distinction between the city as urban centre and its rural surroundings is attested in the traditional Javanese view of the negara. In the fourteenth century Nawanatya the negara is defined as ‘all where one can go out (of his compound) without passing through paddy fields’ (Pigeaud 1960, 3: 121). It is by virtue of their evolutionary origins through their total symbiosis with the surrounding rural peripheries that Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian cities, even pre-dating Islam, contrasted significantly with the cities of Medieval Christendom with formally constituted municipal laws and corporate institutions (Hourani 1970: 15).1 The pre-eminence of cities in their composite role as capitals for religious, political and economic activity was a significant feature of the historical evolution of pre-modern Southeast Asia and will constitute the definition of a city within the purview of this survey.

The tiny, oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, situated on the north-west coast of Borneo, regained full independence at the end of 1983, when the United Kingdom surrendered responsibility for its defence and foreign policy. Internally, the predominantly Muslim, Malay State has been self-governing since 1959, albeit by an autocratic monarchy. In this article, however, I shall focus on the British ‘Residency’ in Brunei, which lasted from January 1906 until September 1959.