History

The Philippines was once famous for its reef-ringed islands, white beaches, and lush forests. In less than a half-century, these were degraded by deforestation, over-fishing, and destructive fishing. This rapid harvest of ecologically and economically critical natural resources brought droughts, deadly flash floods, and the collapse of fisheries and the timber industry. Regional rural economies weakened, sending hundreds of thousands of ecological refugees to cities where they overwhelmed the urban infrastructure. Today, the Philippines stands as an example of the profound and sweeping consequences of environmental degradation. This book documents this tragic trajectory, but the story it tells is not one of hopelessness and inevitable defeat. The book traces the struggle for natural resource conservation in the Philippines, from isolated villages to large cities, illustrating innovative ways that conservation and economic growth can effectively coexist. It describes how individuals and institutions at all levels of Philippine society have responded to the environmental change, and gives background information on environmental policy. It argues that recent initiatives to conserve or rehabilitate resources — by local and national government, non-governmental organizations, or communities — can be an important part of sustainable development and nation-building. It also questions whether western environmentalism, which can pit environmental protection against economic need, is appropriate for developing countries. The book offers in-depth case studies of environmental governance and sets the consequences of rapid industrialization and environmental change in their historical context.

This book reopens the question of consular jurisdiction and extraterritoriality in China and Japan. The book combines recent findings in Qing history on the nature of ethnicity and law with the history of the treaty ports in both China and Japan, especially Shanghai, Yokohama, and Nagasaki. Extraterritoriality was not implanted into East Asia as a ready-made product but developed in a dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions, which are best understood within the complex triangular relationship between China, Japan and the West. A close reading of treaty texts and other relevant documents suggests that a Qing institution for the adjudication for Manchu-Chinese disputes served as the model for both the International Mixed Court in Shanghai and the extraterritorial arrangements in Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in 1871. The adaptability of Qing legal procedure provided for a relatively seamless transition into the treaty port era, which would have momentous consequences for China’s national sovereignty in the twentieth century. There was no parallel to this development in the Japanese case. Instead, Japanese authorities chose not to integrate consular courts and mixed courts into the indigenous legal order, and as a consequence, consular jurisdiction remained an alien body in the Japanese state, and Japanese policymakers were determined to keep it that way.

After 1949, the British Empire in Hong Kong was more vulnerable than the lack of Chinese demand for return and the success of Hong Kong's economic transformations might have suggested. Its vulnerability stemmed as much from Britain's imperial decline and America's Cold War requirements as from a Chinese threat. It culminated in the little known ‘1957 Question’, a year when the British position in Hong Kong appeared more uncertain than any time since 1949. This is the first scholarly study that places Hong Kong at the heart of the Anglo–American relationship in the wider context of the Cold War in Asia. Unlike existing works, which tend to treat British and US policies in isolation, this book explores their dynamic interactions — how the two allies perceived, responded to, and attempted to influence each other's policies and actions. It also provides a major reinterpretation of Hong Kong's involvement in the containment of China. The author argues that, concerned about possible Chinese retaliation, the British insisted and the Americans accepted that Hong Kong's role should be as discreet and non-confrontational in nature as possible. Above all, top decision-makers in Washington evaluated Hong Kong's significance not in its own right, but in the context of the Anglo–American relationship: Hong Kong was seen primarily as a bargaining chip to obtain British support for US policy elsewhere in Asia. Using a variety of British and US archival material as well as Chinese sources, the author examines how the British and US government discussed, debated, and disagreed over Hong Kong's role in the Cold War, and reveals the dynamics of the Anglo–American alliance and the dilemmas of small allies in a global conflict.

A collection of thirteen chapters by leading scholars in the field, this book examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France’s secular “civilizing mission,” it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries’ interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions—from the Ottoman Empire and the United States to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean—this book explores how France used missionaries’ long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. This book offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, colonial, and religious history.

On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army attacked and captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, planting the rising-sun flag atop the city's outer walls. What occurred in the ensuing weeks and months has been the source of a tempestuous debate ever since. The book examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing — whether to deplore it, sanitize it, or even ignore it — has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. The study traces the evolving, and often conflicting, understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. This study suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China. While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the “Rape of Nanking” is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. The book analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.

The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the ‘domiciled community’, which was made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.

During the nineteenth century, the proportion of UK migrants heading to empire destinations, especially to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, increased substantially and remained high. They included so‐called ‘surplus women’ and ‘children in care’, shipped overseas to ease perceived social problems at home. However, empire migrants also included entrepreneurs and indentured labourers from south Asia, Africa and the Pacific (plus others from the Far East, outside the empire), who relocated in huge numbers with equally transformative effects in, for example, central and southern Africa, the Caribbean, Ceylon, Mauritius and Fiji. The UK at the core of empire was also the recipient of empire migrants, especially from the ‘New Commonwealth’ after 1945. Analysis of these several flows shows that migrants— whatever their origins— similarly responded to pressures at home, perceived opportunities overseas, and, in many cases, the recruiting efforts of governments and entrepreneurs; and they all eventually benefited from improved forms of transportation. All shared similar challenges in transferring and adapting their cultural identities, and the rewards of migration likewise varied among them, as an analysis of return migration reveals. But differences are also evident, since many non‐white migrants were recruited into the lower level of a dual labour market headed by a white elite, and immigration controls limited non‐white entry even of British subjects into the ‘white’ dominions, and later into the UK. Legacies remain, but political change and shifts in the global labour market had eroded by the 1970s the once intimate relationship between migration and empire.