Global Connections: Routes and Roots - Böcker

Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas explore the diverse cultural, religious, and economic flows that shaped the early modern Philippine milieu. By zooming in from the global to the local, this book offers eleven fascinating Philippine case studies of early modern globalization.

The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism (LAI) attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures such as Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. This volume is the first to capture the global history of the LAI by bringing together contributions by scholars researching the movement from various regions, languages, and archives. Told primarily from the perspectives of those on the peripheries of empires, the volume argues that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism during the interwar years and remained an inspiration for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global south.

"In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Practitioners of these disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner’s The Written World, Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, or the three novels that encompass Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, have rekindled a variant of history and literature’s embrace in a global register. This book probes recent scholarship concerning reflections on global history and world literature in the wake of these developments, with a primary focus on India as a site of extensive theoretical and empirical advances in both disciplinary locations. Inclusive of reflections on the meeting points of these disciplines as well as original research in areas such as Neo-Platonism in world history, histories of violence, and literary histories exploring indentured labor and capitalist transformation, the book offers reflections on conceptual advances in the study of globalization by placing global history and world literature in conversation.

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. This book turns the lens on these other visions, and the transnational interactions which emerged from various other gatherings of the 1950s and 1960s that existed beyond the realm of high diplomacy, while blurring the lines between state and non-state projects. It examines how Afro-Asianism was lived by activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, as well as political leaders in building a post-imperial world – particularly women. As a whole, this collection of essays examines the diversity of Afro-Asian ideals that emerged through such movements, untangling the personal relationships, political competition, racial hierarchies, and solidarities that shaped them. By visualising political Afro-Asianism and its proponents as a living network, a fuller picture of decolonization and the Cold War is brought into view.

This book explores the making of Buddhism in modern Indonesia. Buddhism started a second life during the turbulent years of late colonial and independent Indonesia. This study argues that Buddhism re-emerged as the result of key local actors and transnational networks, in which both women and men had leading roles. Modern Buddhism brought together and into conflict the many ethnicities, nationalities and schools of Buddhism present in Indonesia. Chinese-Indonesian communities, European society, Theosophists and international Theravada Buddhist organisations took the lead in rooting Buddhism firmly in Indonesia. Budding Buddhist networks engaged with the growing sense of nationalism and modernity in the Dutch colony. Newly founded Buddhist organisations generated new forms of knowledge production and transformed Indonesian Buddhist practices, material cultures and literature, thereby bringing together Buddhism in Indonesia and global Buddhism. After exploring Buddhism revival in the colonial period, this study examines how Buddhism continued to develop in post-independence Indonesia. It shows the crucial role of inter-Asian Buddhist networks and the continued growth of Indonesian Buddhist organisations in 1950s. From its smaller niche in late colonial period, Buddhism reached switfly branched out widely across independent Indonesia's ethnic communities.

The contributions assembled in this volume present cutting-edge research that examines the network of Indo-American interconnections over a wider time frame. The case studies stretch into the early decades of the American republic hinting at a longer history of mutual influence and exchange, beyond the registers of 'the American century' of globalization. By bringing together academics working across disciplines ranging from history to cultural and literary studies, comparative religion, political science and sociology, this volume thus foregrounds and historicizes the complex, multi-sited, polyvalent nature of the Indo-US encounter. At the same time, the book explore the possibilities of methodologically engaging with established categories—such as the nation, the imperial and Empire—and test alternative typologies to better understand this encounter. Taken together, our authors reconstruct the myriad ways in which Americans and Indians have engaged with each other through trade, diplomacy, intellectual comradeship, missionary evangelism and revolutionary fervor.

The task of ending famine in India was taken up by many at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only decades earlier, famine in India had been believed to be a necessary evil. Now it was the reason for the increasing activities of doctors, nutritionists, social reformers, agricultural experts, missionaries, anti-colonial activists and colonial administrators, all involved in temporary relief and finding permanent solutions to famine.

Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West's influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence. Only by understanding its past entanglements with the world can we understand South Asia's increasing global importance today.

Between 1848 and 1914 around 5,800 Swiss Mercenaries enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL) to fight in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Following the traces of these mercenaries beyond the confines of the Dutch Empire, this book elucidates the complexities of the nineteenth-century military labour markets and provides an intricate examination of the mercenaries’ socio-cultural backgrounds, their motives, and their engagement with local communities and authorities. In doing so, it reveals the profound effects of colonialism not only on the colonies themselves, but also on the social, economic and cultural landscape of the European hinterland.

At the end of WWI, millions of military and civilians were displaced across Europe, the south of the Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. While the majority made their way home, genocide, revolution, and post-war instabilities complicated the repatriation of prisoners of war from Russia and the Central Powers and pushed Russian and Armenian refugees into exile. In response, an array of international organizations intervened: three of them, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Nations, and the International Labor Organization, implemented humanitarian, political, and legal measures to protect prisoners of war and refugees. This book tells a story of failures and innovations, where humanitarians interacted with the persons assisted in refugee camps, agricultural colonies, trains, and harbors, which were often situated "at the doors of Europe" in order to preserve peace at its heart. Diplomatic negotiations and mundane practices of care concurred in the emergence of a plural, discordant, and partial governance of refugee protection.

Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Black Transnationalism and Japan introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often expressed in the form of decolonization movements, this volume introduces various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred on the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism.

This edited volume highlights the work of a new generation of scholars who have reignited the study of the Indonesian left, and the PKI in particular, across continents and disciplines. It reinterprets the Indonesian left and its associated organisations not simply as a local and national phenomenon but as a force of global relevance. Historiographically, the history of the left has always been constructed in conversation and contestation with, on the one hand, the colonial and postcolonial state and, on the other, the communist epicentres of Moscow and Beijing. Moving beyond party-centered narratives, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how diverse global networks and ideologies were translated and transformed within very local and situationally-specific environments. In doing so, they foreground the contributions of people and organizations often relegated to the margins of the PKI, illuminating the Indonesian left as a dynamic site of transnational and local interaction.

Between 1848 and 1914 around 5,800 Swiss Mercenaries enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL) to fight in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Following the traces of these mercenaries beyond the confines of the Dutch Empire, this book elucidates the complexities of the nineteenth-century military labour markets and provides an intricate examination of the mercenaries’ socio-cultural backgrounds, their motives, and their engagement with local communities and authorities. In doing so, it reveals the profound effects of colonialism not only on the colonies themselves, but also on the social, economic and cultural landscape of the European hinterland.

"Bodies beyond Binaries' advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body. Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, and religion intersect and dialogue with supposedly binary categories of corporeality such as ruled and unruly, emotional and trained, mobile and confined, and respectable and deviant. Problematised and transcended, these categories reveal their ambiguous and malleable nature. Bringing together a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars working on different Asian regional and transregional foci, 'Bodies beyond Binaries' offers insights that are not simply relevant across Asia and within colonial settings, but also question Western-centric and culturally essentialist perspectives on the history of the body."

This book tells the story of Indian, Burmese, and Indonesian socialists who fleshed out radical imaginaries of regional and global change in hotels and hill stations, commissioning risky flights and organising cantankerous conferences to do so in a rapidly globalising age – the 1950s. These activists took the achievement of independence in their countries to presage systemic political shifts in favour of egalitarianism and democracy which it fell to them to expedite. The work documents a distinctive passage in the history of world socialism and asks scholars to look afresh at the multifaceted agendas that animated actors in what was an experimentative as much as an ideological decade. South and Southeast Asian non-state actors forged internationalisms which moved them, and contemporaries, even as political possibilities narrowed amid climates of Cold War cynicism. These anti-imperial visions merit further historical study if the entwinement of past with present is to be fully appreciated.