Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Road to Mandalay" in 1892 when Burma was a British colony and Queen Victoria was the Empress of India. In the poem, Mandalay is a city some 500 miles along the Irrawaddy River from the capital, Rangoon. British troops stationed in Burma were transported on the river by paddle steamers. The picture painted of…

Examining Malcolm Browne's photograph of the burning monk as well as appropriations of it by the Ministers' Vietnam Committee, I argue that self-immolation is a powerful rhetorical act that utilizes self-inflicted violence as a means of performing a visual embodiment of violence done by an "other." I assert that the power and resonance…

This article looks at the evolution of the social studies curricula in Pakistan, which are of critical importance in shaping the outlook of many young Pakistanis, who are affected by this polarised discourse. The author argues that this trend of polarisation springing from dynamics of education also effectively contributes to a widening social…

This article proposes the concept of an extractive regime to understand Indonesia's developmental trajectory from 1966 to 1998. The concept contributes to world-systems, globalization, and commodity-based approaches to understanding peripheral development. An extractive regime is defined by its reliance on extraction of multiple natural resources…

Historians work in a discipline with few inherent concepts and are obliged to draw upon many fields in recreating the past. Yet authors of most school history texts, state and national standards and curriculum materials seldom incorporate economic analysis in their work. Just look at state standards that include Adam Smith and John Locke but draw…

In the nearly 30 years since Edward Said published the hugely influential Orientalism, his indictment of racism and imperialism in Western scholarship on the Orient has had its share of plaudits and condemnations. Now Robert Irwin, the Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement, has reignited the controversy with his broadside against the…