The international media has traditionally reported on the triad secret societies in terms of a mythic Chinese Mafia ruling a transnational criminal empire, and accounts of their criminal activities have often been sensationalized, even by serious writers and international law enforcement agencies. Academic historians, sinologists and sociologists in the 1980s and 90s have taken a rather different view of the development of such societies in South China and Southeast Asia. Some historians of the 1970s saw them as primitive revolutionaries who played an important, although indirect, role in the...

This set demonstrates the simultaneous appearance of colonialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric in the same text, highlighting the raw edge given to the transitional nature of the colonial project in this period. The texts:
* represent central documents in the emergence of modern Indology
* demonstrate how closely interwoven are the histories of Oriental scholarship and of British administrative policy contributions
* present the Orientalist side of the argument concerning the government of India to balance and oppose the Utilitarian and Anglicist bias implicit in James Mill's...