by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] […]
Asia
Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné (2016)
by Amina Marzouk Chouchene First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (August 28, 2019) Twenty-first-century Britain brims with a revival of rosy visions of Britain’s imperial past. Nowhere is such a tendency clearer than in the restless efforts to rehabilitate the empire by prominent conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson. Britain’s imperial glories and its benign […]
Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)
By Kellianne King In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. […]
Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)
By Isabelle Headrick The Isle Bourbon and the Isle de France lie in the southern Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. France acquired the islands in 1638 and 1715, respectively, and developed Isle Bourbon as a provisioning stop for grain and livestock for ships traveling between Europe and India. Although these islands […]
The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia by Liam Matthew Brockey (2014)
By Abisai Pérez This book addresses the life of Jesuit father André Palmeiro (1569 [Lisbon] – 1635 [Macau]), who was the first inspector, or Visitor, of the Jesuit Company in India and East Asia with the mission of consolidating and expanding religious conversion in the remote regions of the Portuguese empire. Through the analysis of […]
Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, by Frank Dikötter, Lars Peter Laamann, and Zhou Xun (2004)
By Horus T’an The opium myth is one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. According to the myth, opium is presumed to be a highly addictive narcotic and highly harmful to its users’ health, and Great Britain used its military superiority to impost the shameful opium trade on China […]
Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific
By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45. by Jonathan R. Hunt University of Southhampton First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017). Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly […]
Remembering Dutch Decolonization through Historical Fiction
By Paul Doolan Zurich International School and the University of Konstanz First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (June 14, 2017). On May 8, 2017, the jury of the Libris Literature Prize announced in Amsterdam and live on television that they had unanimously chosen Alfred Birney as winner of the best Dutch language novel of 2016, for […]
Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (2013)
By Aden Knaap, Harvard University The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, […]
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)
By Natalie Cincotta When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior […]
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