This article examines China’s path to joining the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a private international organization founded in Paris in 1920, of which China was a member from 1931–1949 and from 1994 onwards. The article charts the actors and debates behind two meaningful encounters. The first took place while the Nanjing government was raising funds for economic reconstruction, and the ICC aimed to mediate China’s fundraising efforts through private multilateral channels. The second was in the 1980s, when the People’s Republic was seeking to enter the world trade system. ICC members acted as educators and facilitators of world trade practicalities for the People’s Republic, which eventually rejoined the ICC in 1994. The article draws on Chinese, European, and American source material collected from governments, chambers of commerce, and private businessmen to make a twofold contribution. First, it adds nuance to the narrative of China’s economic internationalization by identifying an important non-governmental diplomatic channel. Second, it questions the ICC’s self-proclaimed identity as a non-political economic organization by showing how the political was indissociable from the economic when it came to China’s membership.

In the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Japan joined the international refugee regime. This timing similarity is puzzling due to the stark differences between the PRC as a communist and authoritarian state versus Japan as a prime example of capitalist development and democratization. Moreover, although both signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Refugee Protocol without major reservations, neither of them has fully implemented these treaties. Discussions regarding the PRC’s and Japan’s engagement with the international refugee regime tend to start with the beginning of the Indochina refugee crisis in 1975. However, this article shows that the early decades of their interaction with the international refugee regime are of crucial importance for a full understanding of the timing and form of accession to the international refugee regime. Although the Southeast Asian refugee crisis played an important role as a trigger, it was the changing character of the international refugee regime and the transformations of state identity in both countries that set the ground for the signing of the refugee-related conventions.

This article makes an intervention in the study of the May Fourth Movement by examining the role the mass media played in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization processes set in motion by China’s experience at the Paris Peace Conference. In contrast with the mainstream narrative that constructs the May Fourth Movement as a spontaneous response to the loss of Shandong at Versailles, this article shows that it was preceded by a proactive diplomatic strategy to mobilize ‘public opinion’ over the Shandong question. The Chinese delegation’s decision to launch a media campaign in support of their diplomatic agendas at Versailles inadvertently turned domestic media into a platform for political debate. As a result of competition between the political elites who dominated the mediascape, discussions over the Shandong question shifted from focusing on international diplomacy to domestic politics in the spring of 1919. An examination of the ‘media war’ during the May Fourth Movement further demonstrates that the political elites’ variable ability to adopt media strategies to shape and channel public opinion resulted in changing the political landscape of the post-May Fourth era. By focusing on the role of the mass media in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization in China’s strategy at Versailles and during the May Fourth Movement, this article forges new connections between the international and the domestic. It also invites further reflections on the nature of the May Fourth Movement by showing that the media was a tool of political mobilization that connected the political elite to the masses.

This article traces the early stages of urban electrification in the French protectorate of Tonkin (in Vietnam’s north) from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. It focuses on Hanoi, where in 1895 the French entrepreneurs Hermenier and Planté secured a concession for lighting the streets of the soon-to-be capital of French Indochina. Before long, the city’s fast-paced development and the concomitant rise in demand for both public and private lighting necessitated contractual amendments and further capital investment in the upgrading of the power station and grid extensions. In 1902, Hermenier converted the business into a joint stock company named the Société Indochinoise d’Électricité with the aim of enabling further growth and geographical expansion. Contractual arrangements were frequently renegotiated and adjusted to new circumstances. However, electricity supplies kept lagging behind the fast pace of demand growth. During the post-First World War years of colonial economic expansion, power failures and blackouts became a routine occurrence and were a frequent target of press coverage. It was only in the late 1920s that electricity supplies improved and turned Hanoi into a city of lights. Although the majority of Vietnamese residents remained excluded from private electricity access throughout the colonial period, electric power quickly became a fact of everyday life for an emerging Vietnamese urban bourgeoisie and served as a marker of modern sophistication. Plans for an interconnected distribution network in the Tonkin delta subsequently also triggered hopes for an electrified future for the countryside.

Mitsukoshi, a famed Japanese department store, opened a Korean Product Showroom in its Keijō (Seoul) branch in 1930. The Korean Product Showroom was the only space decorated in ‘Korean style’ within the Keijō Mitsukoshi building, which was designed in Neo-Renaissance style, much like its flagship store in Tokyo. This showroom offered Korean artefacts as luxury souvenirs aimed at Japanese tourists. The most popular items sold in the showroom were Koryŏ-style celadon ware and lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which Mitsukoshi ordered from local workshops in Korea. Interestingly, the workshops were run by Japanese entrepreneurs and sometimes even employed Japanese artisans. This article examines the inauthentic authenticity of ‘Korean style’ and ‘Korean products’ that the Japanese produced and consumed in colonial Korea. It does not imply that only Koreans are entitled to represent Korean culture. There have been many studies asserting that Korean culture was destroyed and distorted from its ‘original’ forms by Japan’s cultural genocide during the colonial period. This article neither is interested in repeating such criticism nor focuses on recuperating genuine Koreanness. Rather, it explores why the Japanese desired ‘pure Korea’ and how that desire shaped ‘Korean style’ and ‘Korean products’ through Keijō Mitsukoshi’s Korean Product Showroom and its products.

Although inspired by the nineteenth-century term ‘Silk Road(s)’, the phrase ‘Maritime Silk Road’ has its own origins, connotations, and applications. This article examines the emergence of the latter term as a China-centric concept and its various entanglements since the early 1980s, involving the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political bodies, academia, the ‘open door’ policy, the pursuit of World Heritage listings, and the current ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. These entanglements, the article contends, have resulted in the emergence of what could be called a ‘Maritime Silk Road’ ecosystem in the PRC. The analysis of this ecosystem presented in the article reveals not only the processes through which a narrative on China’s engagement with the maritime world has been constructed over time, but also its association with issues of national pride, heritage- and tradition-making, foreign-policy objectives, and claims to territorial sovereignty. As such, the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ must be understood as a concept that is intimately entwined with the recent history of the PRC and distinct from its nineteenth-century antecedent, which was used as a label for overland connectivity.

In the intellectual history of modern Japan, the late 1880s epitomized the Meiji government’s effort to ‘civilize’ through Westernization, driven by the social Darwinian vision of the survival of the fittest. During this period in the United States, the ideas of civilization theory, informed by the very antithesis of the Meiji state’s understanding, surfaced in the life and work of the aspiring young naturalist-botanist Minakata Kumagusu. He imagined a ‘different kind of civilization’ as he re-examined the nature of social evolution in microbes by turning to Indian-and-Chinese-derived knowledge of his home region of Kii, Japan. Buddhism, persecuted by the Meiji regime, most notably enabled his scientific enquiry, while the encyclopedic work of Wakan Sansai Zue (The Illustrated Three Knowledge of Sino-Japan) became another key inspiration. Chinese historiography and Confucian thoughts additionally facilitated his reasoning.

What interconnected all of these strands was what the author refers to as ‘queer nature’: the basis for truths whose ontological and experiential qualities resembled the microbe slime mould. Similar to this microbe that captured Kumagusu’s imagination, with queer nature the process of knowing defied the epistemological dichotomies and hierarchies that were fundamental to the social Darwinian theory of evolution. Experientially, it attracted the knower’s attention, induced their desire for intimacy with strange and curious others, and propelled greater intellectual enquiries. The article thus demonstrates a queer theory of intellectual history rooted in modern Japan, whose intellectual lineage derived from India and China instead of the West.

Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India.

By looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its claim for economic sovereignty, internally and externally. It led to a 17-month-long official trade deadlock, especially in the eastern region of partitioned Bengal. It ended when the two governments established an exchange ratio for the two rupees, no longer at par with each other. This interactive delinking of currencies was symptomatic of the improvisational decoupling of the colonial subcontinent’s post-colonial states. In tracing its trajectory, this article contributes to the inconsiderable literature on why devaluation did not happen in Pakistan, revises the rationale offered, and presents the event as a contingent exercise in economic decolonization, generative of a post-colonial sovereign difference.

This article discusses and analyses the Barger archaeological expedition of 1938 to the princely state of Swat. It argues that archaeology in princely, as well as in British, India did not originate and develop in a unilinear manner. This understanding is in line with the recent realization of variations in the historiography of native India. Given this, an attempt has been made to situate the Swat state in relation to British paramountcy. Miangul Abdul Wadud, the first British-recognized ruler of the state, was aware of colonial power relations and had a friendly attitude towards the British. He dealt with Swat’s archaeology with political and dynastic expediencies in mind. Since there was no proper legal and institutional dispensation in place in the area, the Frontier government officials and the political administration at Malakand treated the Barger expedition as a local matter, beyond the legal jurisdiction and disciplinary apparatuses of the colonial state. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the related laws were, thus, kept out of the entire enterprise. All this ensured a smooth transfer of antiquities to England at a time when strong legal-institutional and ethical dimensions to archaeology were in place within British India and in some princely states.

This article investigates Japanese imperialism in northeast China through its road construction infrastructure projects within its railway auxiliary zone (1906–1932) and Manchuria at large (1932–1945). The materiality of roads unveils a history of how Japanese engineers adapted to local practices and absorbed local knowledge in building physical infrastructure and developing their technical expertise. These engineers engaged with local practices rooted in pre-existing social and natural environments to facilitate road construction. At the same time, in Manchuria their technical expertise in construction was built on the absorption and subsequent erasure of local workers’ vernacular craft. Rather than the physical realization of an imperialist, top-down vision of modernization, imperial infrastructure projects were in fact hybrid productions of technical expertise, and local vernacular knowledge and skills. By constructing roads, engineers helped to expand Japan’s political and economic influence in northeast China, assert domination over Chinese residential areas and business interests, and coerce Chinese subjects into complying with policies and rules issued by Japanese administrations. The materials of roads—gravel, granite flagstone, and concrete—illustrate a complex relationship between Japanese imperial agents and local environments.

Following victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the Meiji government sought to expand its maritime influence in Northeast Asia by developing pelagic fisheries in the newly acquired Kwantung leased territory, but it encountered immediate resistance from the Qing court, which had just embarked upon ambitious reform to strengthen maritime defence through the building of a national fishing industry. The dispute first emerged as a clash between Japanese and Chinese fishery protection companies on the seas adjacent to the Chinese city of Xiongyue. It then gave rise to a protracted Sino-Japanese legal debate on the question of whether the Xiongyue fishing ground was in the free sea or part of Chinese territorial waters. However, the 1912 settlement agreement made no mention of the legal status of the fishing ground. By examining this oft-neglected dispute, this article not only provides a rare East Asian case that illustrates the tension between the requirements of national sea borders and the principle of navigational freedom, but also explores how the Meiji and Qing governments perceived and practised international maritime law at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that neither government viewed international maritime law as the only referential framework to solve the dispute, especially when it contributed little to the conflict settlement and contradicted their perceptions of the historical relations between East Asian countries.

The Ming-Qing transition (1618–1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was a source of inspiration for writers across East Asia. Unofficial, contemporary histories written by Ming and early Qing subjects made their way by land and sea to Korea and Japan, where they were either adapted for domestic audiences or used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition.

This article makes the argument that unofficial, contemporary history-writing about the Ming-Qing transition in China, Korea, and Japan was part of a regional trend towards an intellectual culture of contemporaneity. While scholars have focused on the transition and its impact upon notions of cultural centrality, it should be emphasized that these notions emerged alongside developments encouraging the production and circulation of contemporary, cross-cultural knowledge and information. In other words, the flourishing of print, diversification of reading audiences, and evolution of new modes of knowledge-production and transmission formed a background against which demand increased for updated information about a shared world. Participation as producers (writers and editors) and consumers (readers) in this seventeenth-century culture of contemporaneity was restricted by language, schooling, and economic standing. Nonetheless, a transnational history perspective will show that the unofficial, multi-vocal, and multilingual historiography of the Ming-Qing transition encourages a re-evaluation of not only the intellectual history of East Asia, but also the history of the transition.

While participating in the discourse of world religions, Japanese biographers published accounts of Muhammad’s life in many genres of academic and popular books during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1868–1926). This article unravels how these biographical accounts played a crucial role in facilitating a geographical imaginary of Asia/the East which incorporated both Japan and West Asia. Situated in a radically different context from the Victorian biographers who inspired them, Japanese biographers constantly compared Muhammad to historical figures familiar to them, most notably Buddha and Nichiren, and reinterpreted the life of Muhammad, relying exclusively on European-language sources. In particular, in contrast to another strand of pan-Asianism that stressed peacefulness as an inherent quality of the East, the biographers identified Muhammad’s perceived militancy and the miracles he performed as signs of the values shared by Japan and Islamic civilization. Using the person of Muhammad as a concrete piece of evidence, Japanese biographers reimagined an Eastern civilizational space that could stretch from Tokyo to Mecca.

Kerala is a well-recognized ‘model’ of human development in the world. In this article, I look at a crucial aspect of this development, which is often approached in a positivist fashion of statistical aggregation alone: consumption. Instead, there is a need to study the meanings that surround it. I delineate the many forces, particularly the new material infrastructure, that have driven consumption in the last three decades, especially the last one. With increasing integration into global market forces through migration and investment, and cultural imaginations, I show that there is a tectonic change in consciousness about consumption, marked by fantasies, desires, and, contrarily, feelings of excess and ambivalence. I argue that the non-market sector has also played an important role in consumption. There is an increasing generalization of certain ideas about consumption as well as disenchantments across classes. But critically, I contend, there are caste, class, and gender disparities in consumption as well as differences in the meanings attributed to it. Thus, consumption is a socially meaningful, but discrepant, space. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in a town in central Kerala, supplemented with quantitative data.

Focusing on soy sauce exports from Hong Kong to the United States, this article traces the origin of the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label to the US-led embargo on Chinese goods during the Korean War and explores the repercussions the recent Sino-US conflict generated on the label. By examining the history of an enterprise embroiled in two episodes of global trade disruptions, this article reveals how politically motivated US trade policies steered businesses in Hong Kong to pursue commercial opportunities by leveraging geopolitics, both global and local. Strategically capitalizing on Hong Kong’s position during the Cold War that allowed local exports to the United States, Hong Kong entrepreneurs created an international product chain. When the latest Sino-US trade war erupted, Trump’s elimination of the distinction between China-made and Hong Kong-made exports coincided with a wave of local consumerism in Hong Kong and unintentionally imbued meaning into homegrown products. From a commercially expedient marker aimed at satisfying the US government’s anti-China trade requirements, the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label has recently been repurposed as a badge of local pride and perseverance as Hong Kong/mainland tension escalated. Necessitated by global trade policies and infused with connotations of shifting geopolitics, the malleable ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label signified not only reactions to US policies but also fluid Hong Kong/China relations. In successive rounds of US-initiated trade disruptions, the place-of-origin label reflected Hong Kong’s changing place in global geopolitics and the city’s position vis-à-vis the PRC.

Using evidence regarding the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India we put forward new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for a Hindutva project and a new framework that proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. We assert that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analysed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among ordinary middle-class people and are expressed in micro-level psychological changes at the individual level. The consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India is being authored not only by parties or the state, but also by societal actors, specifically, ordinary middle-class Indians. Hindu nationalism has been spreading in micro-public spheres in a time of apparent peace and between elections, and with the participation of willing supporters. Building on our fieldwork and research in psychology and history, our conversations have also helped us to identify profiles of different types of nationalists, which we categorize as willing ethnic-nationalists, hardliners, bystanders, and moderates. Further, we suggest the need to focus on inter-linked micro-level mechanisms such as diffusion and emulation of Hindu-centric beliefs and ideas, mobilization by hardliners and organizations, and impunity resulting from protection by state agencies, which helps to create willing ethnic-nationalists and sustains Hindu nationalism. Evidence regarding social interactions from a variety of survey organizations concurs with our findings and our ethnographic material allows us to delve deeper into varieties of Hindu nationalist support across diverse ordinary people.

The emergence in eighteenth-century India of literary compositions that used the elite registers of what was, at the time, called ‘Rekhtah’, and later defined as Urdu, is poorly understood. Conventionally, after an initial infatuation in Delhi with the works of Vali Dakhani,1 a mid-century break is assumed, exemplified by the revision of Zuhur ud-Din Hatim’s Divan as Divanzadah in the 1750s. Scholars have viewed this as a radical intervention in the creation of Urdu, which excised old vernacular models and embraced further Persianization. This article re-examines the evidence, combining methodologies from literary and historical studies. It points to the continuities present in Hatim’s revision, including sustained engagement with Vali, even as Hatim attempted to appeal to new audiences, incorporating new trends alongside older literary models. Foregrounding literary networks and arenas of poetic practice shows the limited impact of the proscriptions and literary criticisms voiced by Hatim’s critics. In studying the contested space of literary aesthetics and linguistic shifts against self-fashioning within changing networks, this article demonstrates that the relationship between the Persianate and vernacular sphere continued to be generative, rather than oppositional or hierarchical.

This article examines the durable, yet largely overlooked, claims of Bahu Begam (1727–1815) to dynastic wealth and authority in the Awadh nawabi (1722–1856), a North Indian Mughal ‘successor state’ and an important client of the East India Company. Chief consort (khass mahal) to Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula (r. 1754–75) and mother to his successor Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), Bahu Begam played a well-documented role in the regime’s tumultuous politics, particularly during Warren Hastings’s tenure as the Company’s governor-general (1773–85) and his later parliamentary impeachment. But despite her prominent political influence, little attention has been paid to the substance of her persistent claims to proprietorship over revenue rights and the immense fortune in her custody, as well as her broader assertions of authority over Awadh’s male rulers. Taking those claims seriously, this article contends that the begam rooted her arguments in notions of natural deference to maternal authority and generational seniority, evolving dynastic traditions of co-sharing sovereignty and fiscal resources, and her particular history as a principal financier of the Awadh regime. In so doing, the article argues that the begam’s claims reflect the shifting conceptual language of late-Mughal Persianate political discourse and the ambivalent position of elite women as dynastic financiers and state-builders in early colonial South Asia.

The political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist nationalists, on the one hand, and proponents of greater secularization, on the other. In the 2019 general election, political entrepreneurs ‘particized’ these religio-political differences, which has far-reaching implications for majority-minority relations, to an extent that appears unprecedented in recent Thai political history. This argument is developed through an analysis of the platforms, policies, and rhetoric put forward by political parties contesting the election, which concluded an almost five-year period of direct military rule. This analysis suggests we need to pay greater attention to the role of political parties and electoral competition in maintaining and contesting the secular settlement in Thailand.