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This article introduces a special issue of Citizenship Studies in which historians of East, South and Southeast Asia continue the project of globalizing citizenship by analyzing practices and conceptions of citizenship in pre-colonial China, India and Indonesia. Building on the recent global turn in citizenship studies as well as historicizing this turn, we shift the conceptual focus from formal membership and contracts to practices and acts of citizenship. Against citizenship essentialism, conceptual room is created for different ways in which people across Asia have participated in ruling and being ruled, employing different vocabularies, institutions and practices that showed they had agency in the polities they lived in. The main conclusion is that forms of citizenship participation can be found everywhere in Asian history, and were often anchored in practices which were both structural and effective.

Renewed and connected histories : slavery and the historiography of South Asia / Indrani Chatterjee -- War, servitude, and the Imperial household : a study of palace women in the Chola Empire / Daud Ali -- Turkish slaves on Islam's Indian frontier / Peter Jackson -- Service, status, and military slavery in the Delhi Sultanate : thirteenth and fourteenth centuries / Sunil Kumar -- The rise and fall of military slavery in the Deccan, 1450-1650 / Richard M. Eaton -- Drudges, dancing girls, concubines : female slaves in Rajput Polity, 1500-1850 / Ramya Sreenivasan -- Slavery, society, and the State in Western India, 1700-1800 / Sumit Guha -- Bound for Britain : changing conditions of servitude, 1600-1857 / Michael H. Fisher -- Bharattee's death : domestic slave-women in nineteenth-century Madras / Sylvia Vatuk -- Slaves or soldiers? African conscripts in Portuguese India, 1857-1860 / Timothy Walker -- Indian Muslim modernists and the issue of slavery in Islam / Avril A. Powell -- Slavery, semantics, and the sound of silence / Indrani Chatterjee

This review article provides an overview of important, recent approaches to conceptual history from scholarship on South Asia. While conceptual history is not a consolidated field in South Asia, the colonial encounter has greatly stimulated interest in conceptual inquiries. Recent scholarship questions the uniformity even of well-researched concepts such as liberalism. It is methodologically innovative in thinking about the influence of economic structures for the development of concepts. Rethinking religious and secular languages, scholars have furthermore stressed the importance of smaller communicative units such as genre or hermeneutical practices to shape ideas e.g. of the political. As part of global and imperial formations, scholars are well aware of the link between power and colonial temporalities. Lastly, they have suggested new sources for conceptual history, such as literature, film, and sound.

In this essay, Nicholas Tarling, Professor of History at The University of Auckland from 1968 to 1996, reflects on the nature of history-writing and on the nature of the historiography of Southeast Asia. It will be of interest to students of Southeast Asia and to those who think about history, read it, and write it.

This is the first attempt at a world wide compilation, and although useful, it can not claim to be as yet comprehensive, as information from a number of Universities was not to hand when this issue went to press. Greater efforts will be made in 1962 however, and this feature of the Journal may well become an annual supplement. It is in the interests of scholars all over the world to be aware of current research, and as it is our aim to make this Journal of the utmost utility to the world-wide brotherhood of South-East Asian historians, we hope that the compilation will be given maximum support. Information for inclusion should reach us by August of each year.