This article presents the first complete critical edition and annotated English translation of the nineteenth-century Javanese mystical poem Suluk Lonthang. Combining different disciplinary expertise in old and modern Javanese philology, Tantric Studies, and Islamic Studies, it interprets the protagonist of the poem as an expression of the multifaceted and multivocal Javanese religious landscape of the time, whose historical—and translocal—roots can be discerned in Sufi traditions from the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, as well as Tantric traditions from both pre-Islamic Java and the Indian subcontinent.

This article contributes to historiographical examinations of gender and capitalism in eighteenth-century India. Focusing on the fragile nature of revenue farming ventures in this period, the article illustrates how propertied women in the Eastern Gangetic plains used matriarchal authority and affect to lead their agrarian and mercantile family firms into commercial transactions. The article shows that the household was the locus of these commercial relationships and that of the competing and layered sovereignties of distinct state and non-state actors. At the same time, matriarchs exercised their authority beyond it. Travelling in palanquins, or having their kin conduct transactions on their behalf, they asserted their maternal authority and social status in different publics to protect their firms’ interests. In a second key argument, the article suggests that Mughal law, fostered by native officials in the early colonial courts in Banaras, facilitated propertied women’s participation in this economy. Matriarchs demonstrated a keen understanding of this fractured jurisdictional landscape and used it to their advantage as they manoeuvred from one legal forum to another. The third argument of this article illustrates that colonial regulations redefined, and could even compromise, propertied women’s engagements in land revenue transactions. These shifts were made possible through the mobilization of gender and specific understandings of womanhood and the household. In this article, I show that these attempts to disenfranchise propertied women in Banaras were intimately connected to the Company’s vision of a colonial public in which it could monopolize sovereignty.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.

During the Mamluk period (1260–1516), Gaza developed from a minor town into an important city in southern Bilād al-Shām, the capital of an administrative province. This prosperity was the product of substantial and continuous Mamluk investment in the town, the security and stability maintained by this regime, and Gaza's strategic location as the bridge connecting Egypt and Bilād al-Shām. This article will trace the concomitant development of Gaza as a provincial intellectual centre within this context. Combining narrative sources with epigraphic and material evidence, it will show how the growth of Gaza as an administrative centre instigated a flourishing—albeit modest—scholarly scene in the town, which, while strongly connected to and integrated with wider social and intellectual networks within the Sultanate, retained its unique character.

This study examines whether a degree of autocracy and high quality of bureaucracy—two mechanisms often discussed in the context of Covid-19 responses—provide a meaningful explanation for East Asia's relative success compared to the rest of the world at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Our multiple regression analysis for 111 countries supports our expectation, as East Asia as a region is significantly and negatively associated with confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths compared to the rest of the world, and its interaction with the quality of bureaucracy further contributes to the negative association. In sum, this research highlights the important role of East Asia's regional characteristics in pandemic responses.

This study examines the political dynamics that shape legislators' policy positions on importing US meat into Taiwan during the past decade, focusing on the cases of US beef in 2012 and US pork in 2021. The trade policy surrounding this issue has become politically contentious, involving conflicting national interests and constituency preferences. Legislators face a dilemma, torn between prioritizing the interests of their constituents and aligning with their party's interests. The central argument posits that legislators affiliated with the ruling party are more inclined to advocate for or adjust their stances to support the removal of import bans on American meat, while those associated with the opposition party tend to exhibit a greater reluctance to endorse such a stance. Factors such as the legislators' constituent's interests, district vs party-list affiliations, the urban–rural divide, or education level do not consistently explain legislators' positions on the US meat trade policy. To examine these arguments, this study employs a mixed-method approach, incorporating quantitative analysis and two case studies of individual legislators. The findings of this study offer empirical support for the central proposition.

Is political polarization in Indonesia here to stay? For years, scholarly consensus on partisanship in Indonesia viewed weak partisan identity, collusive party behavior, and the predominance of personality as features of a system that would prevent the emergence of deep polarization. In the wake of religious and ethnic mobilizations during three contentious elections, the question of whether polarization has come to Indonesia is increasingly salient. Where previous studies have focused on elite polarization, we focus on whether polarization has a mass base. Using an original, nationally representative survey of 1,520 Indonesian adults shortly before the 2019 election, we tested whether political preferences in Indonesia reflected any of four underlying sets of resentment—religious, anti-Chinese, anti-Java, or regional. We found links of varying strength between each of these resentments and political preferences. Analyzing the sources of resentments, we find evidence that different resentments may travel through different channels: religious resentment through organizational membership, anti-Chinese resentment through exposure to social media, regional resentment through awareness of regional resource disparities, and resentment of Java through having experienced the old politics of Java—Outer Islands conflict. These links between political affiliation and resentment suggest that polarization is here to stay, so long as politicians make use of real, underlying resentments.

Why do people's preferences towards trade liberalization fluctuate? And why do we observe the eventual return of public support towards free trade? The traditional literature in international political economy has typically calculated individuals' preferences based on their comparative advantage as income-earners, which arises from their specific or general skill level or employment status. What needs to be taken into account, however, is that their economic preferences are constructed based upon their intertwined identities as both income-earners and consumers. We designed and conducted an experiment in Japan (2015) that would impartially elicit answers regarding respondents' daily consumption patterns or (and) employment concerns rather than deliberately or artificially informing them of the potential benefits or harms of trade liberalization. The results display that consumer priming offsets negative impacts arising from employment priming. The consumer effect reduces individuals' concerns on income level or employment when they are exposed to consumer and employment primings simultaneously. Furthermore, our subgroup analyses reveal that the consumer effect remains even among those experiencing economic fragility such as low income or job insecurity. This suggests that potential losers have incentives to support free trade by appreciating consumer benefits.

This article presents fresh evidence and arguments regarding the historical study of sensory experience through a focus on the mechanical treatments of bronzes and jades in ancient China. The techniques employed to polish and engrave hard bronze surfaces before the invention of iron tools that are harder than bronze remain a mystery. The article provides new insights into engraved/chiseled bronze inscriptions, which can be too easily dismissed by connoisseurs as fake. Through a focus on post-processing techniques for cast bronze objects made before 1 b.c.e. in China and exchanges of techniques between bronze producers and jade workers, I argue that some of the traces found on bronze objects that may have been left by working with abrasives such as those used in lapidary industry demonstrate that lapidary techniques and post-processing of cast bronze objects were interrelated. Investigations as to how bronze and jade producers interacted show that they aimed to improve the visual and tactile experiences for their customers or patrons. Active and frequent exchanges of ideas and techniques took place between the bronze and jade production communities. Their emphasis on visual and tactile experiences demonstrates how such industrial powers developed in ancient China and how they were sustained throughout the last two millennia b.c.e.

This article explores the manner in which the Eurasian metallurgical tradition was transformed into an indigenous tradition on the Chinese Central Plains. It argues that the association of luminosity with the divine has a cognitive foundation, which accounts for the use translucent stones and shiny metals, including copper, bronze, silver, and gold as mediums for religious artifacts throughout the world. In China, this association was the primary impetus for the development of an indigenous metallurgy based on a piece-mold and coring technology. Although the technology ultimately concentrated on the production of ritual vessels, it was first developed at Yanshi Erlitou 偃師二里頭 for the production of clapper-bells (ling 鈴), which had similar round hollow bodies.

We further explore the history of clapper-bells, arguing that they were a development of a Central Plains tradition dating back to the Yangshao 仰韶 period (5000–3000 b.c.e.). We argue that their religious significance at Erlitou lay in the previously unheard sound produced when the two luminous substances, jade and bronze, struck against one another. Thus, religious interlocutors at Erlitou used them to contact the ancestral spirits. Later, in the Yinxu 殷墟 period of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300–1050 b.c.e.), bronze clapper-bells were worn by dogs buried in tombs. We propose that their role there was a development of the earlier one; that is, they were used to contact the occupant's ancestral spirits as he was guided by the dog in the underworld.

The Ahl-i Hadith in South Asia has largely been studied as a textualist, puritan movement as a result of its exclusive emphasis on the Quran, Hadith sources, and connection with a variety of radical political and armed groups. In contrast, poetry has largely been associated with Sufi movements. This article questions this distinction and makes a historiographical intervention by examining the poetry of Maulana Muhammad Anwar Shopiani (d. 1940) in the Kashmiri, Persian, and Urdu languages. Through a close analysis of Shopiani's biography and poetry, the article complicates the hitherto available picture of the Ahl-i Hadith movement which Shopiani helped to take root in Kashmir. Doing so draws attention to the movement's novel literary aspect that engages with regional Sufi and sympathetic Hanafi thinking as well as with the broader Persianate literary traditions and transregional currents of revivalist thinking on the basis of the principle of taḥqīq, research. Even as Shopiani's message remains committed to a ‘factual’ iteration based upon Quran and Hadith sources, it is the concept of love, both in its spiritual and worldly manifestations, that emerges as central to his thought. It is through this that the paradox between the actual historical distance from Prophet Muhammad's time and the Ahl-i Hadith's ideological desire to revive that time by a literal enactment of the sunnah is resolved. In doing so, the article makes a methodological case for employing poetry as a source for writing an intellectual history from below which examines Islamic movements on their own terms.

The article analyses how population genetics has impacted on nationalist discourses across the Taiwan Straits and affected the relationship between Taiwan and China since the 1990s. In Taiwan this cutting-edge science has helped to construct a native-based and Taiwan-centred national identity through promoting indigenous peoples’ rights, rejecting a blood-based, cross-Straits nationalism, and founding a pan-Pacific indigenous peoples’ community through genetic links and cultural affinity. In China, after subverting the nationalist myth of Peking Man (a Homo erectus group believed to be the common ancestor of the Chinese) by analysing genetic data, the same group of Chinese genetic scientists have constructed another nationalist myth of a genetically homogenous nationhood. Such a discourse not only valorizes Chinese nationalism through claiming a DNA-based Chineseness across ethnic distinctions but also asserts genetic links between China and Taiwan, therefore providing a ‘scientific’ basis for China’s nationalism in the new century.

Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and the Taegeukgi rallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

By looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its claim for economic sovereignty, internally and externally. It led to a 17-month-long official trade deadlock, especially in the eastern region of partitioned Bengal. It ended when the two governments established an exchange ratio for the two rupees, no longer at par with each other. This interactive delinking of currencies was symptomatic of the improvisational decoupling of the colonial subcontinent’s post-colonial states. In tracing its trajectory, this article contributes to the inconsiderable literature on why devaluation did not happen in Pakistan, revises the rationale offered, and presents the event as a contingent exercise in economic decolonization, generative of a post-colonial sovereign difference.

China's environmental crackdowns under Xi Jinping have led to a sweeping shutdown of private enterprises. To circumvent this, enterprises have developed different survival strategies including direct lobbying to government officials and indirect lobbying through business associations. Based on comparative case studies of environmental lobbying in Chinese cities, our research finds that larger enterprises, enjoying more economic leverage, tend to lobby directly using their own political connections to sway environmental enforcement. By contrast, smaller enterprises are excluded from these clientelist networks and have to lobby through business associations, the effectiveness of which hinges on the support of large enterprises. Therefore, we argue that although the Chinese government's increasingly stringent environmental policies have shrunk the lobbying (and living) space for private enterprises, the existence of environmental clientelism protects economically powerful and politically connected private enterprises but sacrifices the others in the implementation of environmental policies.

The Japanese public has been assumed to possess a deeply ingrained aversion toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We employ a survey experiment to ascertain whether this aversion is unconditional or may erode in the face of hypothetical deterioration in Japan's security situation, and in particular a hypothetical withdrawal of the US security-nuclear umbrella, increased North Korean nuclear weapons testing activities, and movement by South Korea toward the attainment of a nuclear arsenal. We find that the Japanese nuclear aversion may come under stress in the face of such developments. Additionally, we find that the elasticity of Japanese attitudes with respect to the nuclear option in the face of external security deterioration may be associated with an important individual-level demographic characteristic, namely, gender.

The growing tension between mainland China and Taiwan has a cultural aspect closely related to national identity. We focus on recent history curriculum changes in the mainland and in Taiwan and find that education authorities on both sides have implemented master narratives for content selection in and organization of history textbooks. In mainland China, the master narrative of pluralist unity constructs a geographically consistent Chinese nation throughout history, which bolsters the state's current claim to a territorial integrity including Taiwan. In Taiwan, the master narrative of multiculturalism becomes the essence of Taiwanese identity, and weakens Sinocentrism in Taiwanese official historiography.

The earliest pieces of knowledge and research on China in Poland reflected development of Sinological studies in Western Europe. Being located on the sidelines of trade routes through which Eastern ideas and goods reached Western Europe, Poles used to get their information about China mostly from intermediaries: medieval travelers, merchants, and envoys, and since the sixteenth century, letters, writings, and books by Jesuit missionaries. The Poles contributed the very first comprehensive description of Chinese flora, and were important in spreading mathematical knowledge among Chinese scientists. A Pole established Monumenta Serica, still published today, and another Pole applied formal logic to the research of Chinese classical texts for the very first time. Despite all that, regular Sinological research in Poland did not take off until the twentieth century, and even then it was interrupted by political upheaval in Poland and by researchers’ fight either for freedom or with ideology.