2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST expansion of foreign control, but as something which did have the effect of frightening off foreign capital for a while. In explaining the specific new forms that foreign investment has taken in post-independence India, he attributes an important role to the particular environment, the "ethos" in which business has to be conducted. This is an "ethos" in which the foreigners do not feel altogether at home. For example, in the intricate devices for "dealing with" labour, or "managing" the bureaucratic machinery of controls and regulations, the Indian capitalists have developed a knack, an expertise arising from their local experience which the foreigners lack. It is this which inter alia accounts for the fact that the typical and favoured form of foreign investment in India has been the joint venture with Indian capitalists wherein the foreigners often hold minority equity. This "ethos" also includes certain labour attitudes arising perhaps from extreme alienation, which, from the capitalists' point of view, however, makes for "poor quality" labour; and this is the reason why, notwithstanding all the recent measures of liberalisation and inducement, India has not been able to attract much multinational subcontracting, the way south Korea for instance has done. The difference between the two countries lies not so much in regard to the stringency of labour laws, but in their vastly different business "ethos". For students of the political economy of Indian development, no matter whether they share Desafs perspective or not, the article provides much material and throws up important issues to ponder over. Two notes deal with the history of two different regions and with dissimilar topics; each however, documents the coercion of the people. Mahadev Chakravarti's note on forest policy in Tripura shows how historically "conservation" had been a camouflage for the commercial exploitation of the forests by vested interests, backed by the government, who had progressively restricted the rights of the local people to forest produce. Forestry in other words illustrates the more general phenomenon of commoditisation going hand in hand with coercion of the people. This cocercion is sought to be justified in the name of "conservation"^ but is actually the main source of spoliation of the forests. No genuine conservation measures can be undertaken without involving the people and safeguarding their interests. Rattan Lal Hangoo provides evidence to show the tremendous squeeze on the Kashmir peasantry introduced by the revenue demands of the State in the late nineteenth century; added to this official squeeze was the substantial extraction by the administrative personnel to line their own pockets. Such unfettered aggrandisement led inevitably tcT a crisis of revenue administration in the State. Finally we publish a discussion between Nayanjot Lahiri and Amalendu Guha, stimulated by the latter's paper on the Ahom State published in an earlier number of Social Scientist on the question of the continuity in the histQiy of the A^sam valley between the pre-Ahom and the Ahom p^riod^.