Universal ideas of freedom are to be found throughout the world's diverse intellectual and political traditions, spread by the global trade in ideas which has grown exponentially during the past 200 years. In Africa and Asia, the conceptualization of freedom for individuals and societies has been heavily influenced by the translation of specific European or American ideas of freedom into new political and social contexts. This volume represents a pioneering preliminary assessment of some of the causes and consequences of this process. Africa and Asia have too often been portrayed in Western accounts as having no historical purchase on ideas of freedom, but the chapters in this volume reveal that these societies have long had their own ideas about the proper degree of individual autonomy relative to the authority exercised by the state and other institutions. The topics covered here are ideas of freedom in Africa from the slave trade era through colonialism to the nationalism that followed World War II (Crawford Young); the many forms of freedom in the states of sub-Saharan Africa since independence (William J. Foltz); why certain concepts of freedom have been empowered and others not in the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (James L. Gelvin); the differing ideas of freedom in modern India for individuals and for specific social groups (Sudipta Kaviraj); the contrasting fates of ideas of freedom in Burma and Thailand (Robert H. Taylor); political struggles in the Philippines and Vietnam about the meaning and practice of freedom (Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet); the evolution of the idea of freedom in Japan with respect to freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the liberation of such unfree persons as prostitutes (Sheldon Garon); and the ways in which Chinese conceptions of political freedom resemble or depart from modern Western conceptions (Andrew J. Nathan).

Offers an illuminating study of Ne Win, the most controversial of the first generation of post-independence Southeast Asian leaders, and how he steered Burma (now Myanmar), through the Cold War years. This book is a significant contribution to the historiography of Myanmar and its unnoticed role in the Cold War in Asia.

Dr Maung Maung (1925-94) was a man of many parts: scholar, soldier, nationalist, internationalist, parliamentarian, and public servant. His life spanned seven decades of political, economic and social turbulence in the country he loved and served, Myanmar. A pioneer amongst post-colonial journalists in Southeast Asia, he was equally at home in the libraries and seminars of universities in the United States, Europe and Australia during the Cold War. As a jurist, Dr Maung Maung knew the law must remain relevant to changing societal requirements. As an author, he wrote weighty scholarly tomes and light-hearted accounts spiced with his wry observations on human foibles. He was a keen observer of human strengths and weaknesses. A loyal friend, he never maligned his critics or denied their merits. As a man of affairs, he was capable of understanding the weaknesses of the institutions that he served and that ultimately failed to live up to their ideals. This book collects together a number of his now obscure but important historical and journalistic essays with a full bibliography of his works.

"The State in Myanmar" is a totally revised and expanded and updated version of "The State in Burma" (1987), with additional chapters covering the last twenty years of Myanmar's political history. It attempts to explain the country's current politics in the light of the historical evolution of state-society relations in Myanmar since the pre-colonial kings, through the colonial era to the current, and third, post-colonial regime in this strategically important and little studied South East Asian nation. The book explains the dramatic and unpredicted collapse of the previous socialist regime and the attempts by new and old political forces to wrest control of the state from a revitalised and increasingly confident military government. Myanmar's state builders have applied varying ideas in their attempts to fashion a stable political order in an often fractious and far from unified nation and "The State in Myanmar" places those experiences in comparative perspective.

Statecraft in Myanmar, previously referred to as Burma, has a lineage going back ten centuries or more. While the state today is expected to provide many other services for a vastly larger population than were its pre-modern predecessors, its basic functions of maintaining order, controlling economic distribution, and ensuring the perpetuation of itself and its elite managers, remain much the same. The tools available now to do so may be different, and the challenges it faces may have grown, but the issues it addresses would be familiar to the predecessors of the modern rulers of Myanmar. Myanmar, with its estimated population of about 55 million, the 24th largest country in the world, is larger than England. With a territory as big as Texas, it is wedged between the two of the oldest civilizations and now dynamic economies on the globe, India and China. Having been influenced by both India and China for centuries, Myanmar has developed its own cultural distinctiveness in contrast with its near neighbors in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Once governed as a British Indian province, Myanmar emerged from the colonial era and the Second World War an economically devastated but strongly nationalistic socialist state. Riven since independence by armed ethnic and ideological conflicts that lasted most of the years between 1948 and the 1990s, when ceasefire agreements were reached with multiple insurgent armies, Myanmar's little-studied politics contain elements common to many countries. However, in few have the complexity of forces, historical and contemporary, religious and secular, foreign and indigenous, come together in one place to create so many little understood, and seemingly irresolvable, political issues. The State in Myanmar attempts to draw the complex history of state-making and state perpetuation in Myanmar in one volume. The social and economic forces, as well as international and domestic issues, which have made Myanmar one of the poorest and least understood Asian countries, are discussed. The efforts of Myanmar's kings, British colonial officials, nationalist politicians, socialist ideologues, and army generals to preserve the state in Myanmar is a history worth attempting to understand on its own terms.