Traditional Vernacular Architecture of Kumaon: The Case of the Hill Towns of Munsiyari, Uttarakhand

Munsiyari is a region located at an altitude of 2,200 meters in the hilly state of Uttarakhand, India. The eponymous town is surrounded by twenty-two villages mostly inhabited by Bhotiya tribes, who once formed a community that traded with those crossing from India to Tibet, though this trade came to an abrupt end with the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Owing to the region’s prosperity, the villages exhibit a very interesting typology of hill architecture. This architectural identity is also a manifestation of a geographical and cultural response to a difficult terrain. Our study was carried out as part of the preparation of a dossier for inventorying the Kailash sacred landscape with the aim of documenting the present state of the traditional vernacular heritage of the selected indigenous community for the UNESCO nomination of the wider region. That thorough documentation process was used as a means of analyzing local vernacular heritage and its current situation, and with a view to offsetting the rapid transformation of the past two decades.

The Development of Sino Indian Trade from the Perspective of “The Belt and Road Initiative”

Since ancient times, the two ancient civilizations of China and India have had a long history of trade exchanges, and such trade exchanges have left an important mark in the history of Sino-India relations. Chronologically，this article takes the Sino-Indian trade exchanges as a research perspective to outline two thousand years of trade history between two countries. From the Sino-Indian Business Road that began in the Qin Dynasty and Han Dynasty to the origin of the Silk Road on which Zhang Qian went to the Western Regions as an envoy, explored the Sino-India-Tibet Road and Maritime Silk Road trade; analyzed the opium trade between China, Britain and India in modern times. At the same time, it uses the founding of People’s Republic of China, the Sino-Indian War, the Belt and Road Initiative and the important events of the global epidemic as nodes to describe the development of Sino-Indian trade. In the long history, this kind of rich trade history also shows that China and India are more likely and should establish a better and more extensive trade cooperation relationship, and learn to effectively deal with the turmoil. This will provide reference for operating the trade activities between the two countries.

Pennsylvania’s Protestant Politics

Chapter 9 discusses how Pennsylvania gave Franklin more room for his talents, doubts, and questions than Boston did, thanks to the Quakers’ commitment to intellectual and religious freedom. The colony’s religious diversity, especially among German Protestants, was a challenge to its well-being especially when Quaker pacifism proved a liability in defending against French and Native American military forces. It shows how Franklin continued to rely on his knowledge of Protestantism and skills as a civic leader while he served in the Pennsylvania Assembly during the French and Indian War and then as the colony’s chief negotiator in London with the Penn family and British government officials in efforts to secure a royal charter for Pennsylvania.

Blame

In this chapter, evading blame is the incentive to delegate. Retrospectively or prospectively, one delegates to a “fall guy” lower down in the organization to protect oneself from the consequences of one’s actions. Blame is a task that the principal opportunistically allocates the agent when the unanticipated contingency of a whistle-blower appears on the scene and wrongdoing becomes visible. Volkswagen software engineers, hired to write code, were tasked with the blame when the scandal over diesel emissions erupted; Abu Ghraib personnel were blamed for the torture of detainees; and commanders recruited militias rather than regular forces to carry out controversial violence in the French-Indian War, the Irish Civil War, and elsewhere.

Fatherland or Livelihood: Value Orientations Among Tibetan Soldiers in the Indian Army

The recruitment to military in modern nation states, by and large, is voluntary. Although it is commonly assumed that a soldiers’ job in the army is to fight against the enemies of their motherland, the Indian Army has a regiment of Tibetan soldiers who are not Indians as per the law of the land. Known as Special Frontier Force (SFF), this regiment was until recently a secret wing of the Indian Army. Joining the Indian Army during the heydays of their diasporic dispersal due to the Chinese territorial aggrandizement and Sino-Indian war of 1962, with a hope of direct encounter with their enemies, Tibetans continue to be voluntarily recruited to the now non-secret SFF. As part of the Indian Army, they should be ready to fight the enemies of their host country. In fact, over the decades, they have been requested by India to take part in several military exercises. In the changed international geopolitics, Tibetans in exile may not get another opportunity to fight against their own enemies. The trajectory of the value orientations of the Tibetan soldiers in the Indian Army constitutes the axial concern of this article.

Laws of War and Peace

Alongside individual murders and crimes, the federal government also confronted in the territories a long-standing borderlands law governing organized violence. Both Natives and whites there conducted larger-scale, often brutal expeditions against each other, often with little or no formal authorization from their ostensible governments. The federal government sought to replace this seemingly pathological culture of violence by imposing a definition of war drawn from the newly adopted U.S. Constitution that made the federal government, and particularly Congress, the sole arbiter and source of legitimate violence against Native nations. The effects of this federal assertion of supremacy differed in the two territories. In the Northwest Territory, the conflict known as the Northwest Indian War expanded earlier practices of borderlands violence under federal auspices. Citizens of the Southwest Territory demanded the same, and nearly got it, in what this chapter terms the war-that-nearly-was. What actually followed in the Southwest Territory instead was an intense, polyvocal legal contest between territorial citizens and officials, Congress, the Washington administration, and the Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw Nations over the meaning of the categories of war and peace. Yet again, federal officials failed to establish federal supremacy, but they did succeed in insinuating federal law into territorial life and Indian country, including disputes between Native nations.

Indian Fighters in the Philippines

This article explores the connections between the violence that accompanied U.S. continental expansion in the nineteenth century and the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States following the Spanish-American War. Perhaps geographic distance has served to mask the temporal proximity of these linked periods of U.S. expansion, because this is a connection that has remained largely unexplored in the historiography. Rather than viewing 1898 as a caesura marking the separation between the continental and global phases of American empire, this article explores continuities through an examination of the interaction between imperial culture and military violence. Some U.S. soldiers in the Philippines drew directly on their experiences in wars with Native people, while others narrated their time in the Philippines as an “Indian war” and validated their actions by discursively positioning themselves and their troops as “Indian fighters.” The Indian Wars were translated, through the actions, imaginations, and writing of U.S. soldiers, politicians, and journalists, into a flexible discourse able to travel across space and time. These frontier resonances became one of several structuring narratives that sought to racialize Filipinos in order to justify the war and occupation.

Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c.1900–1920

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlier The Indian War of Independence (1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment of The Indian War of Independence and situates it within the political and intellectual context of fin de siècle western India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.