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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- PEASANT RESISTANCE: FROM FOOTDRAGGING TO REBELLION -- I: From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia -- II: From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and Southeast Asia -- III: 'Moral Economy' or 'Contest State'?: Elite Demands and the Origins of Peasant Protest in Southeast Asia -- IV: Tactics versus Strategies in Peasant Protest Response -- V: Bandits, Monks and Pretender Kings: Patterns of Peasant Resistance and Protest in Colonial Burma, 1826-1941 -- VI: Concepts of Moral Economy and the Study of Commercialization in South Asia -- VII: South Asian Resistance in Comparative Perspective -- VIII: Peasant Movements and Millenarianism -- COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM AND PEASANT RESPONSES -- IX: Imperialist Rhetoric and Modern Historiography: The Case of Lower Burma before and after Conquest -- X: The Village and State in Vietnam and Burma: An Open and Shut Case -- XI: Colonization, Commercial Agriculture, and the Destruction of the Deltaic Rainforest of British Burma in the Late Nineteenth-Century -- XII: The Ryotwari in Lower Burma: The Establishment and Decline of a Peasant Proprietor System -- XIII: Immigrant Asians and the Economic Impact of European Imperialism: The Role of the South Indian Chettiars in British Burma -- XIV: The Annex of the Raj: The Anglo-Indian Interlude in Burmese History c. 1826-1941 -- XV: Ethnic Pluralism and Conflict on the Frontiers of South Asian Migration -- XVI: Market Demand Versus Imperial Control: Colonial Contradictions and the Origins of Agrarian Protest in South and Southeast Asia -- Index

Introduction : a train for the Shogun -- 1. "Engins" in the wilderness -- 2. Machines and Manifest destiny -- 3. Engineers' imperialism -- 4. Foundations of an American century -- 5. Imposing modernity -- 6. Machines in the Vietnam quagmire -- 7. Technowar in the Persian Gulf -- Epilogue : the paradox of technological supremacy.

Perhaps the most fundamental and enduring effects of the worldwide crisis of the European
colonial order brought on by the Great War of 1914-1918 resulted from the challenges
it provoked on the part of Asian and African novelists, poets, philosophers, and
emerging political leaders. Four years of indecisive, mechanized slaughter on the Western
Front gave rise to spirited and widely publicized critiques of the civilizing mission
ideology that had long been invoked to justify European dominance. Since at least the
early nineteenth century, the credibility of the civilizing mission credo for European
colonizers as well as subject peoples depended increasingly on its emphasis on the
unprecedented superiority that Europeans had attained in science and technology over
all other peoples and cultures. Some Indian and African, and indeed also European,
intellectuals had challenged these gauges of European racial and historical preeminence
in the decades before 1914. But the appalling uses to which European discoveries
and inventions were put in the First World War raised profound doubts among
intellectuals across four continents about the progressive nature of industrial civilization
and its potential as the model for all of humanity to emulate. The highly contentious
exchanges that these questions gave rise to in the postwar decades soon coalesced
into arguably the first genuinely worldwide discourse and proved a critical prelude to
the struggles for decolonization that followed.

Just days after William Howard Taft arrived in the Philippine Islands in early June 1900 to take up his position as the chairman of the five member commission charged with the task of establishing a civilian government for the newly annexed colony, he wrote to J.G. Schmidlapp, an old friend in Ohio, to assure him that he was settling quite comfortably into his exotic surroundings. Taft found the climate in Manila much more agreeable than he had been led to expect was possible in the tropics. The heat, he estimated, was comparable to Cincinnati during the summer months. He was also heartened by the 'strong, healthy-looking' young Americans he encountered in the streets of the capital, which he deemed as robust as any back home. But Taft drew a much larger lesson from the apparent ease of his own acclimation and that of his countrymen to the tropical locale. He concluded that though 'it may be that it is the survival of the fittest […] it is evident that men can live here and be healthy'.

In his recent work on the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy stresses the importance of Great Britain's colonial empire in establishing its credentials as the most imposing ofthe great powers in the decades before the First World War. Britain not only possessed 'the greatest empire the world had ever seen', but its status as the great global power appeared to be enhanced by the fact that in the last three decades of the nineteenth century 'it had added 4.25 million miles and 66 million people to the empire'. Other key 'indicators of British strength' marshalled by Kennedy include overseas fleets, naval bases and cable stations, which were inextricably bound up with its farflung colonial enterprises. Though empire is essential to Britain's great power status, in Kennedy's argument it has almost nothing to do with the steady decline in British power in the period before the Great War and, at an accelerating pace, throughout the twentieth century. He alludes in places to imperial crises and commitments as key contributors to Britain's perilously overextended position both before and after the war. He also concedes that resistance by colonized peoples, whether in the form of 'tribal unrest' or 'western-educated lawyers and intellectuals seeking to create mass parties' was somewhat troublesome, but 'less threatening' than developments within Europe itself. In Kennedy's view, Britain's retreat from imperial and global power (and, for that matter, that of France as well) can best be understood by charting the decline, relative to that of the other great powers, of its economic base, both industrial and commercial, and its incapacity, due to that decline, to meet the ever-expanding and more costly military commitments that its leaders viewed as essential to the maintenance of its positions as a great power.

Although there has been a dramatic broadening of the definition of social protest in recent years to include collective behavior that was once dismissed as criminal, irrational, or insignificant, our attention has continued to be focused on movements involving direct, often violent, confrontations between the wielders of power and dissident groups. Avoidance protest, by which dissatisfied groups seek to attenuate their hardships and express their discontent through flight, sectarian withdrawal, or other activities that minimize challenges to or clashes with those whom they view as their oppressors, has at best remained a secondary concern of students of social protest. Although specific forms of avoidance protest, such as the flight of slaves in the plantation zones of the Americas or the migration or serfs to the towns of medieval Europe and peasants to the frontiers of Tsarist Russia, have merited a prominent place in the historical literature on some societies and time periods, avoidance protest has rarely been systematically analyzed as a phenomenon in itself. There have been few detailed studies of the diverse forms which avoidance protest may take and the ways in which these are shaped by the sociopolitical contexts in which they develop. This neglect is serious because in many societies and time periods (perhaps in most in the preindustrial era), modes of protest oriented to avoidance rather than confrontation have been the preferred and most frequently adopted means of resisting oppression and expressing dissatisfaction.