Violence and Piratical/Surreptitious Activities Associated with the Chinese Communities in the Melaka–Singapore Region (1780–1840)
The chapter hopes to examine the Chinese as an exogenous and endogenous group who had either settled or intermittently infiltrated the Melaka–Singapore region in the Malay Archipelago. The Chinese in the archipelago had often been associated in Western sources with “rather positive” traits such as hardworkingness, astute business acumen, etc., characteristics which could help European colonizers sustain newly founded settlements. The chapter probes the shady world in which disparate subgroups of this ethnicity or creole ethnicity, whether these were related to one another, were engaged in surreptitious activities, or in banditry acts on the seas, which contributed indirectly and sometimes directly to general violence in the region. Overall, whether the Chinese were a more “peaceful” group interested in pecuniary relative to other interests and whether they contributed indirectly to militarization and tensions in the Malay Archipelago are re-examined.
Sociology of Secret Societies
WHILE THE AIMS, spread, and directions of the contemporary secret societies are always the same-to promote revolutionary changes by controlling or changing the power constellation of the State-the basic pattern is more clearly drawn today. Gone are the individual exploits, the spontaneity of action, the romantic hero, the intimacy of local deeds, so well known to the readers of romantic stories. It is true that periodically historical events still take place because of some violence or political assassinations carried out for personal motives, without any concrete political aim in the action (such as when the anarchist Luccheni killed the politically harmless Empress Elizabeth of Austria, or the disappointed office-seeker Ginteau assassinated President Garfield); but today's underground activities reflect a different atmosphere and attitude altogethermirroring our revolutionary age which has no special place for the theorizer or the peripheral plotter.l Three basic features characterize such movements: (1) They are totalitarian, extending into all spheres of life (politics, economics, education, religion, family). There is hardly any privacy left, of fundamental rights, of individuality, and nothing is left to chance. Discipline is the password of such movements. Lenin proclaimed (1900): "We must train men and women who will devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their life." His search for professional revolutionaries was coupled with his definition of the party as the revolutionary vanguard of the future State, and thus anticipated what revolutionary movements learned later: that they had to make a choice between thoroughly revolutionary policies and mass following, and, in their hesitating efforts "to steer between sectarianism and opportunism," lost many
The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 . By Geoffrey Wawro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1966. Pp. 313. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-56059-4.
This expanded and reworked Yale dissertation ventures into a topic done spellbindingly two decades ago by one of the grand masters of German military affairs, Gordon Craig, whose Battle of Koeniggraetz (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), was published in a series commissioned by Hanson W. Baldwin. NewYork Times military affairs editor. Wawro does not approach the literary brilliance of Craig, but his work goes beyond it in several important respects. First, although Craig dealt with a good deal of the preliminary background and also the aftermath, his book focused squarely on the major battle which decided the war, whereas the book at hand deals with the entire war, which included several other battles, notably Langensalza, between Prussia and the Hanoverians in north-central Germany and Custoza between Austria and Italy in northern Italy. Secondly, whereas Craig knew the German sources as well as anyone, Wawro here uses not only German, but Austrian, French, British, and Italian ones. Of the last two, the former are important for the diplomatic background, the latter for the southern campaign area as well as for the problematic PrussianItalian relations. Thirdly,Wawro has dug deeper than Craig into primary source archives. Especially for the central emphasis of the book, the Austrians and Italians, he has mined the archives in Vienna, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice. For example, he uses a number of war diaries which officers from captain to field marshal kept and later deposited in military archives. Interestingly, both authors use Hans Delbriick andTheodor Fontane. Delbriick wrote half a dozen essays on the war and after his death in 1929 two of his colleagues published a fifth volume of his classic Art of War in the Framework of Political History which dealt substantially with 1866, partly on the basis of Delbriick's Berlin University lecture notes. Fontane covered the war as a newspaper correspondent and published more than a thousand pages from his eyewitness experiences, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, 2 vols, (Berlin, 1871-72).