Introduction

This journal issue re-evaluates rural reform in twentieth-century Asia. So far, historians have approached development outside the cities as a contingent dimension of empires and nationstates or as a derivative of urban planning efforts. By contrast, the case studies assembled here frame the history of villages and rural change as a decisive arena in which ideas and practices concerning the redesign of state and society were formulated, negotiated, and experimented with. Particularly during transitional years of accelerated historical change, such as after the world wars and during decolonization, the concept of the rural and rural communities functioned as a medium for diverse and often conflictive notions of the future, imaginations of socioeconomic order, and political aspirations. The authors of these development paths were not only international development experts or urban elites but also (self-proclaimed) representatives among rural communities who wove their vested interests, ideas, and norms into the fabric of development and modernization. In that light, this journal issue proposes to investigate more in detail to which extent, for whom, and with what consequences negotiations about the meaning of the rural gave shape to developmental ideas more generally. In other words, the case studies analyse rural history and the conceptual history of the rural in Asia as key elements of twentieth-century development history.