The sudden Mongol withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 has been explained by historians in several ways and no consensus about the reason has ever been reached. Contrary to some previously expressed opinions, it was not an unparalleled event: a similar withdrawal from a successful invasion of the Song empire in southern China occurred in 1260. The parallels between the events of 1242 and 1260 are instructive, and strongly suggest that the deaths of the Khaghans Ögödei, in 1241, and Möngke, in 1259, were the basic reasons for breaking off the campaigns. The full explanation is more complex, however. The Mongol invasions of Dali and Annam in the 1250s are also briefly examined, and it is pointed out that a Mongol army led by Uriyangkhadai successfully invaded Song from Annam in 1259, a fact that has often been overlooked.

Current scholarship often describes early Ottoman historiography as a phenomenon initiated and conducted by the Ottoman state. In particular, the unprecedented growth in the number of Ottoman history books composed during the reign of Bayezid II (1481–1512) is viewed as such. Modern historians commonly argue that in the aftermath of the Kilia and Akkerman victories (1484), Bayezid II decided to propagate a new Ottoman ideology and commissioned Ottoman history books to be written for this purpose. This article argues that there is not enough evidence to suggest that Bayezid II orchestrated or directed this upsurge in history production. The premises of Halil İnalcık's earlier studies in particular, upon which much of our understanding of the subject was built, do not hold.

Recent epigraphic discoveries shed new light on merchant groups in early medieval Bengal, a region whose history in the period from the mid-sixth to the thirteenth centuries is shrouded in obscurity. The present article attempts to provide a better delineation of this history with additional information from new inscriptions, and presents a transcription, translation and discussion of the Rajbhita stone inscription which records the activity of an association of merchants called vaṇiggrāma. The history of merchant groups in early medieval Bengal can be delineated as a process of the ruralization of urban elites in its early phase, and of the organization of merchants located in rural space towards specialized groups comparable to jātis in its later phase. The new inscriptions enable us not only to fill gaps with new information, but also give us perspectives from which we can go beyond unilineal simplicity.

Sculpture as an artistic medium was widely employed in the arts of Greece and the Hellenistic East, but played only a minor role in ancient East Asia. This changed dramatically with the First Emperor of China who marked his ascent to the throne in 221 bc with the erection of giant bronze sculptures outside his palace and the installation of thousands of terracotta figures in his tomb. The current text sets out to investigate the sudden and short-lived surge of sculpture making in third-century bc China and places it in the context of developments across Asia of the time. The text joins art historical, archaeological and textual evidence to investigate whether the First Emperor's extraordinary interest in sculpture may have been the result of contacts with the contemporary Hellenistic world.

In Itō Sei's (1905–69) “Yūki no machi” (Streets of ghosts, 1937), a narrator returns to his native town of Otaru, Hokkaido, where he experiences a hellish and hallucinatory encounter with people from his past. He is forced to confront shameful aspects of his youthful life that he had tried to repress. In this paper, I propose that a close examination of the story sheds useful light on the real fears, tensions and expectations surrounding colonialism that had become an integral part of Japanese culture and society during the late 1930s. Structures of colonialism, which speak of uneven power relationships between a dominant centre and a distant weaker locality, are spelt out, for example, through the railway network and racist ideology that appear in the story. I also explore the story's depiction of a colonial relationship between mainland Japanese culture centred round Tokyo and the peripheral outpost of Hokkaido. More generally, I suggest that the story illuminates a global power configuration between Japan and its colonies that was entering an increasingly aggressive and bellicose phase during the late 1930s.

In Korea green-glazed celadon ceramics were manufactured during the Koryŏ kingdom (ad 918–1392), but by the end of the fourteenth century their manufacture ceased and they virtually disappeared from view until the 1880s when they began to be unearthed from tombs and other sites. This led to increased interest in them from Koreans, and especially the Japanese, Americans and Europeans. Focusing on British collections, this article outlines the collecting practices of Korean celadon wares from the time of their discovery in the 1880s to the market boom of the 1910s, culminating in the decrease in their availability in the 1930s. It will be argued that the desire for celadon wares was socially conditioned and that celadon were collected for a range of different, though not unrelated reasons, ranging from collectors' pursuit of unique Korean artworks, to their want of genuine antiquities and aesthetic perfection.