In 1926, when it contested the general elections to the Imperial and Provincial Legislatures for the first time, the Indian National Congress was embroiled in a protracted struggle between rival factions for control of the Congress organisation. Electoral rivalries exacerbated existing factionalism and highlighted the often contradictory aims, methods and interests pursued by competing groups within the loose framework of the nationalist movement. If the non-cooperation campaign of 1920–21 had witnessed a national awakening and initiated a more aggressive phase in the history of Indian nationalism, the unity imposed upon the Congress proved fragile and temporary. The curious alliance of forces which had adhered to the Congress in the more confident days of the movement and which were mixed so promiscuously with the survivors of the old Congress, exposed the organisation and its leadership to greater strain in sustaining the united front once the impulse of the agitation had subsided and provincial, regional and sectarian forces began to re-assert themselves with a vengeance. The price of a tenuous unity in 1920 was increased competition and disruption within the Congress throughout the decade; a whirlpool of differences which, to many contemporaries in the thick of events, threatened to overwhelm it.

In 1926, when it contested the general elections to the Imperial and Provincial Legislatures for the first time, the Indian National Congress was embroiled in a protracted struggle between rival factions for control of the Congress organisation. Electoral rivalries exacerbated existing factionalism and highlighted the often contradictory aims, methods and interests pursued by competing groups within the loose framework of the nationalist movement. If the non-cooperation campaign of 1920–21 had witnessed a national awakening and initiated a more aggressive phase in the history of Indian nationalism, the unity imposed upon the Congress proved fragile and temporary. The curious alliance of forces which had adhered to the Congress in the more confident days of the movement and which were mixed so promiscuously with the survivors of the old Congress, exposed the organisation and its leadership to greater strain in sustaining the united front once the impulse of the agitation had subsided and provincial, regional and sectarian forces began to re-assert themselves with a vengeance. The price of a tenuous unity in 1920 was increased competition and disruption within the Congress throughout the decade; a whirlpool of differences which, to many contemporaries in the thick of events, threatened to overwhelm it.

It has been generally accepted for some time that among the most valuable sources for the history of Rājasthān, especially the Rājasthān of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries A.D., are the indigenous chronicles (vātas and khyātas), whose existence was well-known even to Tod, but which fell once again into obscurity for the hundred years following the publication of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han in 1829–32. It is therefore a matter of no small pleasure that, during the past decade or so, many of these texts have at last been finding their way into print. Our thanks in this matter are particularly due to the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute centred in Jodhpur and to the Sadu} Rajasthani Research Institute of Blkaner, who have led the field in the publication of Rajasthani works of both historical and literary interest. This activity on the part of the publishers will certainly add impetus to research on mediaeval Rajasthan, and for this reason, as well as the obvious philological interest of a language as fully-attested and yet linguistically isolated as that of the Rajasthani prose chronicles, it has seemed worth while to prepare these grammatical notes.

The motivations for imperial advance have, over the years, caused considerable debate among historians. It has been thought by some that a law of the turbulent frontier forced the expansion of empire, for a region of order surrounded by an area of disorder had eventually, for its own protection, to conquer the area of turbulence. Thus, empires would inexorably advance their borders until they reached some great natural barrier or the frontiers of another stable power.

In December 1875, the Tokyo press was full of rumours that there would soon be a new Japanese-language newspaper on sale. At the end of the month, there came the not-unexpected announcement that the Nisshin Shinjishi (Reliable Daily News), founded some years previously by a Yokohama journalist, J. R. Black, would cease publication on 31 December.

More than one-third of the area of Britain's Indian empire and over one-quarter of its population were ruled by the Indian princes. But despite its size, princely India has largely remained the province of the pulp journalist to whom we owe our hackneyed view of the princes as a bizarre assortment of spendthrifts, torturers and voluptuaries. Recently, serious scholars have begun to publish material on the princes, but the focus has mainly been upon the more backward states.

In my article entitled ‘The Arrow Incident: A Reappraisal’,1 I recently analysed the existing documentary evidence relating to the Arrow incident. But an investigation of this incident in itself does not reveal the process which transformed a small dispute into a war between Great Britain and China. In this article I shall attempt to study this crucial transformation. Such a study would amount to an examination of the role of Harry Parkes in British diplomacy in Canton immediately after the incident. Before embarking on this project, however, it might be useful to give a brief introduction to Parkes and his background.

Historians of the early phases of British conquest in India have until recent years given comparatively little attention to the economic elements in British expansion. Historians of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century generally portrayed conquest as a largely defensive reaction to French rivalry or to the instability created by the collapse of the Mughal empire. The commercial functions of the East India Company were largely ignored; if they were mentioned at all it was only to point out that the Directors of the Company believed that costly wars and conquests were incompatible with successful trade and therefore took a jaundiced view of the supposed ambitions of Warren Hastings and Wellesley. Wellesley. In 1948, however, in his John Company at Work, Professor Holden Furber both revealed a much more complex pattern of British economic interests in India, including an extremely vigorous private sector operating in the interstices of the Company's monopoly, and suggested a number of links between ‘economic contact between India and the west’ and the rise of British ‘imperialism’. More recently, historians have begun to examine such links in detail in studies of specific parts of India. The extent to which the British had entrenched themselves in the economic life of Bengal long before Plassey, was noted by Dr Bhattacharya in his The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, a book which prompts questions about the extent to which Siraj-ud-daula or Mir Kasim were victims of British economic success.

From 1919 to 1922 the Indian National Congress carried out its first country-wide programme of mass agitations against the British. For the next six or seven years the party concentrated on the electoral arena. By fits and starts, it also carried on a programme of so-called ‘constructive’ work among the mass of the people. This helped to maintain some of the popular contacts earlier established. Elections, and the bitter communal conflicts that were a feature of the mid-1920s, at least in the United Provinces (U.P.), forged other links.

In this paper I wish to illustrate the hypothesis that a necessary co-relate of stable social order is a system of controlled conflict. In other words, a social system depends for its cohesion on the existence of conflicts in smaller sub-systems, provided that the conflicts are conducted within an accepted convention. Hence faction-feuds in a social system are not necessarily evidence of fission in that system but may also be evidence of fusion. I wish to illustrate this theme, what Gluckman called ‘The peace in the feud’, from evidence from Calcutta in the nineteenth century.

IN 1912 Shaukat Ali drew from popular Hindu mythology to explain some recent disputes at Aligarh. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was represented by the god Indra, the Muslim community was his sabha, or assembly, and Aligarh College was the divine akhara, or wrestling pit. Shaukat Ali was the Red God, Muhammad Ali, the Little Red God, and Aftab Ahmad Khan, the White God.

The fate of urban centres in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India has attracted attention far in excess of their supposed importance as population centres. It is assumed that flourishing towns are an indicator of economic development and change in their hinterlands. Muslim historians traditionally laid stress on the opulence of towns as a gauge of the wealth of divisions of the Moghul Empire. Recently, Indian historians of the Medieval period have returned to the theme, claiming for the Moghul cities large populations, developed ‘industries’ and sophisticated credit systems. Throughout these works there is an implicit paralled drawn with the point it is suggested that far from being mere administrative centers and entrepots for ‘aristocratic’ long-distance trade, these cities were exchange marts for wealthy hinterlands where agreculturalists exchanged thier products of ‘urban industries’. It is but a short step to argue that these cities weakened by the anarchy of the eighteenth century, were finally ruined by the negligent commercial amorality of the East India Company. The claim by early British writers that the security of British rule encouraged the growth of urban communities in which merchants secured relief from the vexations of local potentates and innumerable minor transit duties is rejected This argument for town decline first revived by Professor Irfan Habib almost as a throwaway, has recently been followed by other younger Indian Marxist historians.

IT is generally recognized that societies undergoing social and economic change are subject to uneven development. One aspect of this is the uneven development between what may be characterized as the three major sectors of society, viz. economic, government and military. Thus, although many countries have had the ‘common’ experience of being under colonial rule, the impact of colonialism on the three sectors varied. In other words, the transfer of skills to the sectors, in absolute and relative terms, differed depending on the colony in question.

It is usually thought that industry was very limited in Hong Kong until after 1947. Study of pre-war Chinese trade directories indicates, however, that industry was already well developed on the eve of the Japanese invasion. This represented partly a surge in industrial growth after 1937, and partly long-established industry rooted in the local community.

In September 1687 the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, finally achieved a goal he had sought for the past forty years: the conquest of the kingdom of Golconda. After an extended siege of the great fort of Golconda, treachery and a night escalade had finally given the Mughal ruler possession of the last center of resistance in the kingdom. Abul Hasan, the last Qutb Shah ruler, became a Mughal captive. Aurangzeb wasted little time in sending the former king off to captivity in Daulatabad fort. For approximately four months the conquering emperor remained in Hyderabad in order that he could personally direct the first steps toward assimilation of the new territories into the empire.

It has been customary to view the effects of the British annexation of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (1801–3) in terms of an abrupt caesura. Upon the whirling anarchy of the North Indian scene there suddenly fell the Pax Britannica. A political revolution was worked almost overnight. The tide of Sikh expansion was checked and turned back, Jat power penned in Bharatpur, Sindhia driven across the Chambal to his matchless rock citadel at Gwalior, and the Oudh nawabi stripped of its Doab, Rohilkhand and eastern districts. The second line of the political elite could not long survive this dismantling of the superior political structure. Although, at first, expediency impelled the use of large-scale intermediaries, the assertiveness of British rule and its hunger for revenue could tolerate no more than could the Mughals the existence of tall poppies along the principal strategic highway of its power between Benares and Delhi; and on their part the number of magnates capable of keeping their footing and making the rapid adjustment from warlordism to estate management were few indeed. Within two decades of 1801 a large proportion of the established magnates had been swept from the scene, and the remainder were finding that the sun of official favour had gone down while it was yet day.

‘In England every piece of land is owned by someone—an individual, a public body, a company or perhaps by the crown. In India this is not so.’ Thus writes, in his unpublished reminiscences, a British ICS Officer who acquired experience of revenue work in the United Provinces and Bengal in the course of his career in India from 1915 to 1946.

One interesting aspect of the Revolution of 1911 in China was the role of the new-style army. The new-style troops, as one category of revolutionary activists distinct from the civilian radical intellectuals, determined the opening phase of the revolution, initiating the Wuchang uprising and bringing pressure to bear on most of the provincial leaders. Their contribution was the physical strength which the revolutionary intellectuals, who provided the ideology, lacked. The army played its vital role, not in the beginning of the revolutionary movement, but at a later stage when the prevailing order had been discredited and the imperial government had lost the allegiance of the people. Indeed, the success of the revolution reflected the interaction between revolutionary ideas and military power.

In recent years there has been a continuing effort to place the history of scientific activity in Europe firmly in the political, economic and social contexts in which ideas and institutions have developed. Hitherto, however, comparatively little attention has been paid to the development of scientific institutions in the European colonial empires, or to the role of scientific activity in the commercial exploitation, civil government, or political development of individual countries.