Search results
In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were established. This book explores two themes at the heart of the colonial process: agency and identity. The agents of British empire in China included the usual suspects: Britons from the official and military castes, as well as Iraqi Jewish merchants, Parsis and Indian Jews, Eurasians, South East Asian Chinese. The reliance of colonial regimes on local middlemen has become an essential part of any explanation of colonialism, though it is only very recently that the model has been systematically applied to Hong Kong. The Daniel Richard Caldwell affair could hardly have broken out at a more difficult time for the young and problematic British colony at Hong Kong. The book defines the ambiguous positioning of the Baghdadis vis-a-vis the British, and shows that their marginality did not represent, as a whole, a significant hindrance to their sojourn in the Shanghai foreign settlements. In Shanghai the German community recognised the leading role which the Nazi party held and which everyone, even the other foreign communities, seemed to accept. The book also looks at the aspects of their economic, social and political life that Indians led in the colony of Hong Kong and in the Chinese treaty ports.
Despite its grossly tangible historical presence, imperialism is a spectre which haunts the historiography of East Asia by its absence. Despite the redrawing of the maps, the renaming of cities, the creation of new borders, cities, countries, languages and identities, historians of China, Japan and Korea mostly content themselves with placing imperialism within nationalist narratives of subjugation, humiliation, resistance, and liberation. Historians of British or Japanese imperialism have also pared their analyses down
The studies in this book portray what is unmistakably a colonial world. They demonstrate, if proof is needed, that imperialism in East Asia was not a marginal case, nor a pale shadow of what is sometimes thought of as an African or Indian ‘norm’. Empire building was as central a feature of the region’s modern history as it was in tropical Africa or South Asia. Since the 1840s the stakes of empire had been higher, the risks greater, the rewards more enticing and the local resistance more tenacious than in almost any other
resistance of the colonized to this image. After describing the disappointed hopes for a lucrative trade with southern China that largely prompted France’s takeover of the Indochinese peninsula, this chapter will present an overview of the cyclical history of dreams and disappointment that kept the French in South-East Asia for the better part of a century. The Second Empire: the lure
antiquity, and references to the cloth trade can be found in Chinese, South East Asian and Islamic sources, all of which predate the arrival of Europeans as participants in the maritime Asian economy by centuries. 2 Sir George Watt refers to Greek texts that have details of Indian cloth
which colonies and their peoples were represented within, and by, dominant cultures has rarely considered the polar regions. Books and articles have confined themselves to examples from Africa and the Indian subcontinent, with occasional forays into South America, south-east Asia and the south Pacific. The methodologies that have been devised for the study of individual forms of representations have
There are many ways to lose a war. One of the more embarrassing ones is to run out of rubber. That prospect was haunting Americans in 1942 when the country was gearing up its war economy. In the months after Pearl Harbor, Japan had occupied the rubber plantations of South-east Asia, forcing the US to find other suppliers. The search turned into a frenzy. In March
me carry out my employ as a Chemical Engineer in the South East Asian area where we could have the opportunity to tell others about the Lord Jesus Christ and to aid them in physical and material ways’. 65 Volunteer Graduate Scheme Chairman Don Anderson quickly replied, providing encouragement and further information, and suggesting Shedding contact the local volunteer representative to take his application to the next stage. 66
repair stations for Allied ships, especially after the loss of Singapore, repairing more than 13,000. 28 More than 400 troop convoys carrying millions of troops passed through South African ports. Many were the ‘WS’ or ‘Winston’s Specials’ who transported British service men between the United Kingdom, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South-east Asia. 29 Allied service men also went to southern Africa for training. More than 33,500 airmen prepared for active service in South Africa, the largest