From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.     

Publications briefly noted

PAUL W. LEWIS and BAI BIBO (PIU BO), compilers. Haqniq Doqtnoq Doq'yul. Hani Sayings. Kunming: Yunnan Nationalities Press, 1999. RMB25, paper.

ANDREW COBBING (based on an original study by Inuzuka Takaaki). The Satsuma Students in Britain: Japan's Early Search for the ‘Essence of the West’. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000. 201 pp. Introduction, plates, glossary, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. £45.00, hardcover.

PETER H. HOFFENBERG. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 418 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, index. US$50.00, hardcover.

MASAKO GAVIN. Shiga Shigetaka, 1863–1927: the Forgotten Enlightener. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2002. 233pp. Glossary, introduction^ appendices, notes, bibliography, index. £45.00, hardcover.

JOY HENDRY. The Orient Strikes Back: a Global View of Cultural Display. Oxford: Berg, 2000. 257pp. Introduction, bibliography, index. US$19.50, paper.     

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.

Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’     

The ‘Sex Question’ in Anglo-American Relations in the Second World War

During the viceroyalty of Lord Curzon, 1899–1905, the Persian Gulf states came to be treated by Calcutta as closely analogous to Indian Princely states. This shift in policy was most clearly expressed in the state tour of the Gulf in 1903 by the Viceroy. During this tour a number of symbolic, informational, diplomatic, and military methods were employed by the British to expand the role of the Indian Empire in the Persian Gulf. Curzon paid particularly close attention to his government's relationship with Muscat (modern Oman) and Kuwait. The catalyst for this change in the way the Government of India treated the Gulf states was a fear that France, Russia, and Germany were attempting to gain a foothold in the region. Historians of British Indian expansion have tended to focus on the role of ambitious frontier agents; the result has been a distortion which underplays the central role of metropolitan Calcutta, and in this case Lord Curzon, the Viceroy himself.     

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 2: Popular Frazerism and the Reconfiguration of Tradition in Europe Today

This article examines European festive culture through the lens of two ethnographic case studies of carnivals, conducted in Italy and the Czech Republic. The article analyses processes of meaning construction, cultural circulation, and reconfiguration of local traditions that are currently widely at work in rural and marginal European contexts. It explains why I propose to name the cultural complex shaped by those processes ‘popular Frazerism’. The article also argues that these phenomena are representative of a certain post-modern romantic imaginary of magic, antiquity, and primitiveness, and explores the symbolic sources and the social needs from which this imaginary draws its strengths and legitimacy.

This article is the second part of a broader study divided into two parts.     

From Steering Capitalism to Seeking Market Acceptance

This article puts into a historical context the employment conceptions and policies of leading Social Democrats in Finland from 1975 to 1998. It takes into account both the strategic decision-making and public argumentation of the Social Democrats in employment-sensitive issues related to economic, employment, labour market, state company, competition, globalization and integration policies.

Finland’s Social Democrats moved towards emphasizing private sector-led employment, approached the middle classes, adopted monetarist ideas, accepted the ‘market economy’ and favoured ‘controlled restructuring’ over counter-cyclical measures in a series of steps in 1975–1998. The deregulation of financial markets meant a shifting of the basis of Social Democratic employment policy from steering the capitalist economy to seeking market acceptance of the party’s politics. This did not manage to guarantee full employment in Finland during the period.

Furthermore, Finland’s Social Democrats seemed initially to practise a ‘third way’ type of ‘Bad Sillanpää’ policy long before its adherents in the UK. such as Tony Blair. After the mid-1970s, the Finnish Social Democrat-led governments no longer imitated Sweden, while implementing many reforms which were followed by the Swedish Social Democrats.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

Banning the barmaid: time,space and alcohol licensing in 1900s Glasgow

This article examines the decision of Glasgow’s magistrates at the beginning of the twentieth century to prohibit the employment of barmaids in the city's public houses, tracing the origins and advocates of the ban as well its effects on the licensed trade and the women who worked behind bars. It responds to Mariana Valverde’s recent work on the relationship between time and space in the operation of law, analysing the ways in which the magistrates sought to differentiate between licensed premises and practices so as to police the gendered boundaries of urban work and leisure culture. By attending to these vital processes of differentiation, in conclusion, it argues for research in social and cultural geography that explicitly connects the experience and management of the temporality of drinking practices to the production and regulation of licensing’s perhaps more obviously spatial geographies.     

Review articles

Decline of the British model

Philip Norton, The British Polity. New York and London, Longman, 1984, pp. 386. $23.95 (paper).

David Childs, Britain since 1945, London, Methuen, 1984, pp. 308. $17.95 (paper).

F.E.C. Gregory, Dilemmas of Government: Britain and the European Community, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1983, pp. 265. $17.95 (paper).

Zig Layton‐Henry, The Politics ‐of Race in Britain, London, Allen and Unwin, 1984, pp. 191. $17.95 (paper).

Alan Doig, Corruption and Misconduct in Contemporary British Politics, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 437. $12.95 (paper).     

‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur la spécificité de la violence coloniale. Malgré des exemples familiers—comme la grande révolte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh à Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a échappée à l'attention des historiens. Contrairement aux états européens ou la souveraineté dérivait en principe du moins d'un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l'état colonial restait fondé sur la subjugation violente des indigènes.     

Women beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India during the Second World War

In British India in 1943, a rapidly escalating Allied coal crisis resulted in the lifting of a six-year-old ban on women’s employment underground. Over 70,000 low-caste and adivasi (indigenous) women, battling the war-induced Bengal Famine, sustained production levels and prevented the monthly loss of 385,000 tons of coal between August 1943 and February 1946. Their employment sparked unprecedented outrage among the public, in the press, and in parliaments, generating a transnational discourse on Indian women workers for the very first time. Meanwhile the desperate colonial government disciplined miners through the threat of starvation, information that has so far remained concealed.     

Publications briefly noted

SHARON KINSELLA. Adult Manga: culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. £12.99, paper.

STEPHEN ESKILDSEN. Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. vii, 229 pp. US$19.85, paper.

H. A. J. KLOOSTER. Bibliography of the Indonesian Revolution, Publications from 1942 to 1994. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997. Bibliographical Series no. 21. 666 pp.

J. E. HOARE (ed). Britain and Japan: biographical Portraits, Volume III. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xviii, 397 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

AYAKO HOTTA‐LISTER. The Japan‐British Exhibition of 1910: gateway to the Island Empire of the East. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xvi, 256 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

JACQUES GERNET. Buddhism in Chinese Society: an Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (trans. by Franciscus Verellen). New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. xvii, 441 pp. US$21.00, paper.

GREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER. Cartographies of Desire: male‐male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xi, 399 pp. US$45.00, hardcover.

GAIL HERSHATTER. Dangerous Pleasures: prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii, 591 pp. 26 b/w illustrations, 6 tables. US$18.95, paper.

TSERING SHAKYA. The Dragon in the Land of Snows: a History of Modern Tibet since 1947. No location given: Columbia University Press, 1999. xxix, 574 pp. US$29.95, paper.

J. E. HOARE. Embassies in the East: the Story of the British and their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the Present. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999. xvi, 238 pp. £40.00, hardcover.

PADMASIRI DE SILVA. Environmental Philosophy and Ethics in Buddhism. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. xv, 195 pp. A$69.95, hardcover.

ROB GOODFELLOW. The Green Iguana, and Other Short Stories (cartoons by Weldon Neville). Wollongong: Kang Djoko, 1999. 96 pp. A$20.00, paper.

GAO MINGLU (ed). Inside Out: new Chinese Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 223 pp. US$29.95, paper.

EVELYN S. RAWSKI. The Last Emperors: a Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 481 pp. 10 b/w illustrations, 3 line figures, 3 maps, 18 tables. US$45.00, hardcover.

RANA MITTER. The Manchurian Myth: nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 295pp. US$45.00, hardcover.

KATSUICHI HONDA. The Nanjing Massacre: a Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (ed. Frank Gibney, trans. Karen Sandness). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. 400 pp. Photographs, map, index. US$68.95, hardcover; US$25.95, paper.

E. BRUCE BROOKS and A. TAEKO BROOKS (eds). The Original Analects: sayings of Confucius and His Successors. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. x, 342 pp. US$34.00, hardcover.

ALEX MCKAY (ed). Pilgrimage in Tibet. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1998. xi, 228 pp. £35.00, hardcover.

LISA RAPHALS. Sharing the Light: representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 348 pp. US$21.95, paper.

LING HUPING. Surviving on the Gold Mountain: a History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 252 pp. US$19.95, paper.

DENNIS HIROTA (ed). Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ix, 257 pp. US$21.95, paper.

WENDY LARSON. Women and Writing in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 267 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. US$51.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

BURTON WATSON (trans). The Zen Teachings of Master Lin‐Chi: a Translation of the Lin‐chi Lu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xxxii, 140 pp. US$18.00, paper.     

The Imperialism of Internment: Boer Prisoners of War in India and Civic Reconstruction in Southern Africa, 1899–1905

During the course of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, over 9,000 captured Boers were sent abroad to India as prisoners of war. Using hitherto unexamined sources, this article explores how, during their internment and repatriation, British officials and administrators across the empire collaborated in a concerted attempt to transform the imperial enemy into colonial collaborator. This involved a necessarily intercolonial effort to conduct a successful programme of ‘re-education’ capable of cultivating ‘white’ British virtues in preparing Boer POWs for their future rights and duties in reconstructing Southern Africa upon their repatriation. In so doing, the government of India and other colonial officials across the empire thus recapitulated their ideal of Britain’s imperial project in the Boer POW camps. Highlighting the intercoloniality of this process, India’s viceroy, Lord George Curzon, played as prominent a role as did the War Office, or South Africa’s soon-to-be pro-consul, Lord Alfred Milner. The microcosmic imperialism of Boer internment thus reveals a great deal about the nature and structure of power within the British Empire, and emphasises the value of an intercolonial or transcolonial perspective in examining the complex, global consequences of the Anglo-Boer War.     

Reinterpreting the economic and social history of Spanish South America

Haciendas and ‘Ayllus’: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. By Herbert S. Klein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 230.

Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule. By Anthony McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 399.

Encomienda y encomenderos en el Perú. Estudio social y político de una institución colonial. By Jose De La Puente Brunke. Seville: Excma. Diputación Provincial, 1992. Pp. 536.

Deudas olvidadas. Instrumentos de crédito en la economía colonial peruana 1750–1820. By Alfonso W. Quiroz. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993. Pp. 233.

Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826. By Enrique Tandeter. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 332.     

Book reviews‐comptes rendus

Peter GARNSEY & Richard SALLER, L'Empire romain. Economie, société, culture, Paris, La Découverte / Textes à l'appui, 1994.

Morris SLAVIN, The Hébertistes to the Guillotine: anatomy of a ‘conspiracy’ in Revolutionary France, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1994, xvii + 280 p., ISBN 0–8071–1838–9.

Philippe BURRIN, La France à l'heure allemande, 1940–1944, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1995.

Emmanuel LE ROY LADURIE, Le siècle des Platter 1499–1628, t.1 “Le mendiant et le professeur”, Paris, Fayard, 1995, 529 p., 170 FF., ISBN 2–213–01444–2.     

The Red Cross and the Establishment of Maternal and Infant Welfare in the 1930s Gold Coast

In 1932 the Gold Coast Branch of the British Red Cross Society was inaugurated in Accra. Its central, stated purpose was to maintain and expand health and welfare services for women and children. This article examines closely the work of the Red Cross as it set up and ran clinics, fundraising campaigns and building programmes in the Gold Coast. It asks how a humanitarian organisation became so integrated into services for mothers and infants in the course of the 1930s. In so doing, it contributes to a burgeoning area of historiography that looks at humanitarianism as a key component of Empire. During the 1930s, as the British Empire became subject to oversight by new international networks that the League of Nations sat at the heart of. In this context, the colonial government was under pressure to provide welfare for African subjects, particularly mothers and babies. This article argues that state, mission and eventually humanitarian organisation – the Red Cross – were interdependent in providing these services. The Red Cross became politicised as it shored up the colonial state’s health infrastructure, intervening as a solution to dilemmas over who was responsible for maternal and infant health.     

Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940

This article is about the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in 1939 for an alliance against Nazi Germany and about how the British government later tried to represent those negotiations to public opinion. The first part of the essay presents the Soviet point of view on the negotiations and how the British and French governments, though mainly the British, reacted to Soviet alliance proposals. It is a fresh representation of the Soviet perspective from published and unpublished Russian language sources.

The second part of the essay focuses on how the British sought to represent the abortive negotiations through a white paper, placing the blame for failure on the Soviet Union. France opposed publication because, however carefully prepared, the white paper showed that the Soviet side had made serious alliance proposals with precise, reciprocal undertakings which the British government was reticent to entertain. The French were all the more annoyed because the white paper omitted to underline that they had been more receptive to Soviet proposals.

The trilingual, multi-archival evidence presented in the first part of the essay effectively supports the French perception of the white paper and more generally of the failed tripartite negotiations.     

Book reviews

General

Peter Elphick. The Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East, 1930–1945. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997. xvii, 510 pp. Introduction, author's note, maps, photographs, index. £20.00, hardcover.

Northeast Asia

Nancy Abelmann. Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. US$40.00, hardcover; US$18.00, paper.

Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner, editors. Resistance and Reform in Tibet. London: Hurst and Company, 1994. £32.00, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

Ronald D. Schwartz. Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising. London: Hurst and Company, 1994. £37.50, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

Mick Broderick. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Japanese Studies Series. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. x, 255 pp. US$93.50, £55.00, hardcover.

Susan Brownell. Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. 393 pp. Bibliography, index. US$49.95, hardcover; US$18.95, paper.

Lincoln Li. Student Nationalism in China, 1924–1949. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. ix, 209 pp. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, plates, index. US$19.95, paper.

Colin Mackerras. China's Minority Cultures: Identities and Integration Since 1912. Melbourne: Longman, 1995. x, 252 pp. Contents, preface, maps, photographs, references, index. A$42.00, hardcover.

David Zweig. Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. xvii, 365 pp. Contents, preface, tables and figures, index. US$62.95, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

South Asia

John Hutnyk. The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996. x, 223 pp. Preface, bibliography, index. US$65.00, hardcover; US$22.50, paper.

Frederic C. Thomas. Calcutta Poor: Elegies on a City above Pretense. An East Gate Book. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. ix, 166 pp. Preface, plates, notes, bibliography, index. US$29.95, hardcover.

David William Martin. The Changing Face of Calcutta. New Delhi: Vikas, 1997. xxvii, 232 pp. Rs.450, hardcover.

Thomas R. Trautmann. Aryans and British India. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997. ix‐xiv, 260 pp. Illustrations, maps, references, index. US$35, £24.95, hardcover.

David Gordon White. The Alchemical Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. xviii, 596 pp. Preface, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, index. US$49.95, hardcover.

Joanna Williams. The Two Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa. California Studies in the History of Art, No. 34. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xix, 210 pp. 289 plates. US$65.00, hardcover.

Liz Wilson. Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. xviii, 258 pp. Foreword, bibliography, illustrations.

Stanley Wolpert. Nehru, A Tryst With Destiny. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii, 546 pp. Preface, illustrations, footnotes, bibliography, index. A$49.00, hardcover.

Southeast Asia

Justin Corfield, editor. Rama III and the Siamese Expedition to Kedah in 1939: The Dispatches of Luang Udomsombat. Trans. Cyril Skinner. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No. 30. Melbourne: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1993. Editor's introduction, translator's introduction, map, plate, appendices, index. 338 pp. A$24.95, paper.

Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without a Name. Translated from the Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. London: Picador, 1995. 289 pp. A$16.95, paper.

Dean Forbes. Asian Metropolis: Urbanisation and the Southeast Asian City. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. xxii, 120 pp. Foreword, contents, maps, plates, index. A$19.95, paper.

Antoon Geels. Subud and the Javanese Mystical Tradition. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No. 76. Preface, author's note, abstract. 262 pp. £30.00, hardcover.

Bryan Hunsaker, Theodore Mayer, Barbara Griffiths and Robert Daley. Loggers, Monks, Students and Entrepreneurs: Four Essays on Thailand. Introduction by Clark Neher. DeKalb, Illinois: Southeast Asia Publications, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 1996. Occasional Paper No. 18. vi, 143 pp. Introduction, bibliographies, index. US$12.00, paper.

Ian Mabbett and David Chandler. The Khmers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. x, 289 pp. Preface, introduction, plates, maps, appendices, bibliography, index. £35.00, hardcover; £13.50, paper.

Leo Suryadinata, editor. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians. Sydney and Singapore: Allen and Unwin, and ISEAS, 1997. A$35.00, paper.