by C. A. Bayly and D. H. A. Kolff The papers published in this volume were originally presented at two meetings of the Cambridg~-Leiden group for the comparative study of colonial India and Indonesia he1d in June 1979 and September 1982. These meetings were jointly sponsored by the Centre for the History of European Expansion at Leiden and the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge. The Cambridge Centre had been restricted to the study of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Nepal but had recently incorporated Southeast Asia into its area of interest; the Leiden Centre, which had encouraged comparative study from the beginning, necessarily found itself concentrating attention on Indonesias as the most important region of the former Dutch colonial empire. The meetings were intended to be exploratory, as much to alert the participants to work being done in the respective countries and to their different types of academic discourse as to compare 'India' and 'Indonesia'. Nor were the meetings intended to be exclusive. Scholars from several British and Netherlands Universities were involved from the beginning. More recently a wider series of conferences has been inaugurated. This brings scholars in India and Indonesia into a project wich seeks to develop the comparisons between the * two colonial societies on a more systematic basis.