Rhoads Murphey

The City as a Center of Change: Western Europe and China

Every sedentary society has built cities, for even in a subsistence economy essential functions of exchange and of organisation (both functions dealing with minds and ideas as much as with goods or with institutions) are most conveniently performed in a central location on behalf of a wider countryside. The industrial revolution has emphasised the economic advantages of concentration and centrality. But is it true to say that change, revolutionary change, has found an advantage in urbanisation; in concentration and in numbers ? The city has instigated or led most of the great changes in Western society, and has been the centre of its violent and nonviolent revolutions. In western Europe the city has been the base of an independent entrepreneur group which has successfully challenged and broken the authority of the traditional order. In China, while cities with the same universal economic functions arose, they tended until recently to have the opposite effect on the pattern of change. China has consistently reasserted itself as a single political unit, but it is otherwise the appropriate qualitative and quantitative counterpart of Europe, and provides a reasonable basis for comparison. China and Europe have been the two great poles of world civilisation, and an examination of the different roles which their cities played may help to elucidate other differences between them.

Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia

The subject of this essay—better so labeled than as a research paper—is too broad to permit more than a sweeping as well as selective treatment in the short space of a journal article. It may nevertheless be worth presenting in those terms, painting with an overly broad brush on too large a canvas perhaps, but attempting through its scope to relate as parts of a common phenomenon events and patterns in separate areas. Such an effort may help to throw light on an aspect of the grand design of European colonialism in Asia and on some of its consequences. These were different in each area and some of the differences, notably between China and the rest of Asia, may be instructive as they can help us better to understand idiosyncratic aspects of the diverse history of modern Asia. But the similarities in events, patterns, and consequences which such a gross comparison can also illustrate may be equally instructive, and often overlooked. Indias modern history and Chinas, Japans, and Southeast Asias, are for good reasons commonly examined separately by separate specialists. Many politically conscious Asians of the colonial or semi-colonial period, and most of the colonialists themselves, did not see Asia that way but more nearly as a single system, for all its regional variety, on which the overt and implicit force of the modern West as an alien system was attempting to impinge.

The Ruin of Ancient Ceylon

T HE study of abandoned civilizations, and of the reasons for the disaster, is a field in which many imaginations have wandered. In several parts of Southeast Asia, notably in Cambodia, northern Siam (the Kingdom of Haripunjaya), the Pagan area in the dry zone of Burma, and the dry zone of Ceylon, this pattern has been repeated. Only in Ceylon is there a more or less continuous historical record, plus numerous stone inscriptions, to assist in solving the puzzle. Otherwise the cases are suggestively alike. All arose on reasonably level plains (oftenl the only level land in the region), in a climate of alternating wet and long dry seasons, which especially in the tropics usually means irrigation if agriculture is to be productive enough to support a more than primnitive civilization. All did in fact depend heavily on extensive irrigation, and appear to have shared the characteristics which Wittfogel has associated with this kind of basis: a strong central state, massive public works, a highly structured society, and a powerful ramified bureaucracy. All were plagued with chronic invasions from nearby densely populated areas, and all collapsed with dramatic suddenness, to be blotted out by jungle so that with some even their memory was forgotten. Finally, all were abandoned at about the same period, the thirteenth century (Angkor Vat somewhat later), and with few exceptions no significant attempts were made to reoccupy them until very recent years. The high productivity of all of these places until the thirteenth century is emphasized by the impressive stone ruins which remain, evidence of a large agricultural surplus; presumably they could be made productive again. What was the basis of their ancient greatness? What led to their abandonment? Why were they never reoccupied? It is proposed here to examine the case of Ceylon, partly for its own sake, and partly with the hope of throwing some light on the other similar cases. The written historical record, the studies of many others in Ceylon, and the growing body of precise geographical information about the Ceylon dry zone make it the most workable problem. The present article is largely an assembling and critical review of the considerable work which has been done (most of it well known to students of the field), toward a more complete answer to the questions posed above. In addition, Ceylon has undertaken, especially since 1945, an extensive program of development and colonization of its dry-zone areas where the ancient Sinhalese kingdom once flourished. Jungle has been cleared, ancient works rediscovered and restored, and the irrigation and agricultural problems with which the ancients wrestled have been tackled on a large scale.

Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700

A study of the Ottoman military machine and its successes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in a period when they were feared by western European states and the focus of much military concern. The book is intended for undergraduate courses in early modern history, Ottoman history, history of the Middle East and North Africa, and for military historians.

Presidential Address: Toward the Complete Asianist

I APPRECIATE BEING HERE in this role, remembering those, including my teachers, who have stood here before me, and remembering the role of the AAS in providing the commonality from which all Asianists benefit, the freemasonry of shared learning. Most of us prefer to work individually as scholars, but none of us really works or writes alone. We are sustained by our links, in print and in person, with generations of fellow scholars. That vital nexus is greatly enhanced through our common enterprise in the Association, and we owe it and its dedicated staff a profound debt. This is our fortieth annual meeting, and we have much to celebrate: our sound organizational and financial position and-the object of all our collective efforts-a vigorous community of scholars of Asia. The AAS is approaching its second half century. Many of us remember its founding by our mentors when we were graduate students, and have seen it grow from a tiny band where almost everyone knew one another and its records were carried around by Wilma Fairbank in a shoe box, to the multifaceted organization of today with its some six thousand members and its battery of computerized functions. We have never been power brokers or guild policemen, roles we have sought to avoid or minimize, and partly as a result we have flourished as a scholarly fraternity. Our annual and regional meetings attract a high proportion of our membership, who come to learn from one another and to enjoy mutual interchange more than to pursue professional one-upmanship. All of this is excellent and should give us much satisfaction as we review our first four decades. But in at least one respect, the Association has not realized its full potential. We call ourselves, on occasions like this, Asianists, but in fact most of us function primarily or exclusively as specialists concerned at most with one of the regions of Asia: Japan or China, Korea or Inner Asia, South Asia or Southeast Asia, and more commonly with a far smaller subregion, historical period, or disciplinary subset. This is apparent from each years regional and national meeting programs, from the pages of our journal and Bibliography, and from the list of our Monographs, all of which faithfully reflect the field called Asian Studies. There are of course exceptions, in the field at large and in our activities and publications, but in truth there are very few genuine Asianists among us. The reasons for this may seem insurmountable, or simply sufficient to demonstrate that the way things are is the way they should be. It takes years of arduous study and experience to develop competence in any of the subfields into which the