During the period from late 1824 to 1826, a crisis in the Grand Canal system led to intense and sustained imperial involvement in chiangsu regional government. The collapse of the Yen-hsu retaining embankments on Hung-tse Lake in northern Chiangsu sparked the crisis and caused serious flooding in the Huai-yang region east of the Canal, which destroyed sections of the Canal at the critical Huai—Yellow River junction, and dissipated the lake's unsilted water reserves that were crucial to the crossing of government grain boats at the Huai—Yellow River junction on their annual northward journey to Pei-ching. As a result, the transport of strategic grain supplies destined for the capital was brought to a virtual standstill, precipitating a major government crisis that challenged the newly established Tao-kuang Emperor and indeed cast a shadow on the dynasty itself because of the intense

The Indonesian revolution was a costly affair. Not only was it accompanied by the extensive destruction of life and property, but the actual logistics of fighting a protracted revolution placed enormous financial demands on the new Indonesian Republic, founded on 17 August 1945, three days after the Japanese surrendered, at a time when the revolutionary government was decidedly ill-equipped to meet them. The Republic was unable to take over immediately all the revenue sources of the colonial government and faced major difficulties in rapidly building up an alternative taxation structure. Needing a ‘soft’ form of taxation which was easily collected and which did not fall too obtrusively on the shoulders of its citizens, it turned to opium. The sale of opium to addicts had been used by colonial governments in Southeast Asia as a source of revenue, although its importance had greatly declined in the twentieth century. The Republic, however, not only maintained the colonial distribution and sales network but expanded its use of opium to make the drug an important source of government revenue and, for a time, a major source of foreign exchange.

The dark and fatal passage of plague across the Indian sub-continent in the early twentieth-century, and the inability of Western medicine quickly to halt its incursions symptomized disharmonies in the relationship between modernization and Indian society and ecology. The impact of economic development and environmental change on Indian mortality has been examined elsewhere, but the result was the perpetuation or increase of high death-rates from a multiplicity of diseases through the end of World War I. In the half-century 1872-1921 annual mortality ranged between 40 and 50 per thousand, more than twice the death-rates of the advanced West, and life expectancy fell from about 25 to 20 years. The Indian experience was not unique. Epidemics of cholera and the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis in the industrializing West, and the ordeal of mortality in the colonial Philippines also illustrated how development activities induced social and environmental disruptions and sustained or promoted high death-rates.

The Maithil Brahmans of Bihar and the Bengali Brahmans of Bengal, two of the five great North Indian Brahman castes, had, as of the early nineteenth century, closely similar systems of ranked grades and hypergamously marrying lineages. In addition, fundamental concepts—of purity and pollution, of coded substance, of sattva, rajas, and tamas (Dumont 1970; Inden 1976; Davis 1983)—form a shared construction of reality for both groups of Hindus. Yet despite a common ideation and similar patterns of organization up to that point, the ‘Kulin system’ of Bengal virtually disappeared in the middle of the last century, while among the Brahmans to the east in Bihar, the system faltered during the same period, then corrected itself, grew more complex with greater refinements of rank than at any time in the past, and has survived into the present.

The time has come when the communal holocaust must be confined to the Indian States, the time has come when both the Hindu and Muslim newspapers must be prevented from blowing communalism into British India. There was a time when our politicians like Gokhale rightly used to take pride in Indian States being free from communalism, which was a vice in British India.… But the table appears to have been turned.

In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent events became known as ‘The Bahubali Affair’ (Marathi bāhubalīprakaran).

After seven years, the care-and-maintenance network sustaining an estimated three million plus Afghan refugees in Pakistan functions with remarkable efficiency. There have been no epidemics, no starvation, little malnutrition because of insufficient intake of food, and no major outbreaks of violence.