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AbstractThe article investigates the possibility of the Theravada fraternity at the Mahavihara monastery of Sri Lanka became a 'fundamentalist' movement especially in its quarrel with king Mahasena in the 4th century CE. Beginning with defining the crucial constituents of fundamentalism, the article explores the major organisational and religious conflict lines between the three monastic traditions and highlights the use of Pali as a specific language to encode the canon. Though not all of the aspects of the definition are met, the Mahavihara showed clear signs of an inward-looking, exclusivist and scripturalist movement; features that it shares with 'fundamentalist' movements. The article thus questions the relatively fixed connection between fundamentalism and modernity, which is a common feature of current research on fundamentalism.

Review: Ashley Jackson: Ceylon at War, 1939-1945. Warwick: Helion and Company 2018. ISBN 978-1-9123-9065-6

Review: Valerie Hansen: The Year 1000 - When Explorers connected the World and Globalization began. New York: Scribner 2020. ISBN 978-15-01194-11-5

AbstractAround the turn of the twentieth century, electric tramways made their appearance in the cities of Asia, but despite being a universal technology, and despite the considerable impact they had upon life in these cities, the history of tramways in Asia has hardly ever been studied. Trams, wherever they ran, mobilized the urban population to a degree unseen before—their track network could restructure the urban topography and re-evaluate its segments, as independent villages became suburbs and residential quarters rose or fell in status, and add to the segregation of workplaces and residential areas. The two cities of Singapore and Rangoon, which have been selected because of their comparability, provide two contrasting examples of how trams functioned and eventually failed in an Asian urban environment.