On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was actually an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand count of his travels. Nevertheless, he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans-Himalayan explorers—recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India—who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years. Derek Waller presents the history of these explorers, who came to be called "native explorers" or "pundits" in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbors. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet. Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favor of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European count venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. Now, thanks to Waller's efforts, their contributions to history will no longer remain forgotten.

A collection of 62 essays on agrarian reform in Asia is presented. Based on field observations, Ladejinsky's works reflect his concern with the redistribution of land to submarginal farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and landless laborers. The papers express Ladejinski's belief that the role of Asia in establishing the dominance of democracy over Communism is crucial and that the welfare of the Asian people will play a definitive role in the outcome; that agricultural progress is basic to economic development and welfare; that the redistribution of land to the mass of cultivators or the secure land tenure, with adequate water supplies and technical assistance at reasonable rents for tenants, is the best way to provide incentives for agricultural development; that basic agrarian reform is inevitable and revolutionary in character; that political leadership is necessary for the achievement of agrarian reform and the maintenance of stability; and that assistance from Western nations is vital. Two official documents leading to land reform in post-World War II Japan, a chronological bibliography of Ladejinsky, and a list of depository libraries for the Ladejinsky papers are appended.

By the end of the 19th century, British imperial medical officers and Christian medical missionaries had introduced Western medicine to Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Their Footprints Remain uses archival sources, personal letters, diaries, and oral sources in order to tell the fascinating story of how this once-new medical system became imbedded in the Himalayas. Of interest to anyone with an interest in medical history and anthropology, as well as the Himalayan world, this volume not only identifies the individuals involved and describes how they helped to spread this form of imperialist medicine, but also discusses its reception by a local people whose own medical practices were based on an entirely different understanding of the world.