Klaus Dittrich opens this first issue of 2016 with an article on Europeans and Americans in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910. Concentrated in Seoul and Chemulp’o, this largely Anglo-Saxon community consisted mainly of diplomats, experts in the service of the Korean government, merchants and missionaries. Dittrich argues that the two key characteristics of the European and American residents in Korea were the fact that they self-identified as bourgeois or middle-class, and that they were involved in multiple levels of border crossing: as long-distance migrants between Europe or Northern America and East Asia, as migrants within the East Asian context, and as representatives of different Euro-American nationalities living together in Korea. Next, Stefan Hübner likewise looks at long-distance connections in East Asia in this time period, but from a very different perspective: the global sportive ‘civilizing mission’. Hübner focuses on changes in American philanthropy during the Progressive Era and the YMCA’s promotion of its global sports program during the 1910s and 1920s. In order to satisfy donors, YMCA and Christian progressive media presented clear-cut success stories about spreading Western sports, emphasizing the superiority of Western scientific and rational approaches to public health and leisure as well as knowledge transfer to local elites. During the First World War, Asian sports events were presented as a peaceful contrast to the European battlefields while in years after the war, YMCA writers turned Asian athletes into a vanguard, promoting the YMCA’s experience gained in this region as a guarantee to donors that an expensive expansion of its sportive “civilizing mission” would lead to similar achievements elsewhere.
From here, we move into interwar Asia. Maria Framke argues that India’s freedom activists and intellectuals were deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experiences with Fascism and National Socialism. Nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology, but also expressed their distress with the imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. Here article focuses on the ‘global biography’ of one Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate the interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism. With Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, we remain in interwar Asia but move to the Dutch East Indies. During the interwar years, the imperial powers viewed long-range radio technology as an instrument to strengthen empire, as it enabled broadcasters in the European metropoles to reach large audiences via the ether. His contribution focuses on PHOHI, a Dutch company that pioneered global radio broadcasting. This radio station was founded by a group of influential entrepreneurs in order to strengthen ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies by reaching out to colonial expatriates. As a case study, it demonstrates how geopolitical and ideological considerations shaped both the organisation and the content of Dutch intercontinental broadcasting.
The last two articles in this issue deal with the decolonization of business and industry. First, Arjo Roersch van der Hoogte en Toine Pieters look at the dominant role of the Dutch East Indies in the worldwide supply of cinchona bark, the raw material for quinine. The cultivation of cinchona became the backbone of a Dutch transoceanic enterprise that dominated the international quinine market. But in the two decades after the Second World War, this production and trade network collapsed, and this article seeks to explain its fall. The authors argue that the globalization of cinchona bark production created new sources and new networks of control that were increasingly less associated with a specific nation-state than with multinational companies. At the same time, their study shows that the economic decolonization of Indonesia forced a process of deglobalization that affected the international business networks that had developed around the cinchona-quinine network earlier in the century. As such, this study shows a mix of globalization and deglobalization happening in tandem with Indonesian decolonisation and agricultural globalization. In the closing article of this research section, Chibuike Uche looks at the nationalization of business interests in Tanzania. Under President Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian government ordered the British multinational corporation, Lonrho Limited, to leave the country. The ‘official reason’ was Lonrho’s ‘continued defiance of the United Nations mandatory sanctions against Rhodesia and the expansion of its business interests in South Africa.’ Uche attempts to document the rise of Lonrho in Tanzania up until the nationalization; the factors that influenced the compensation negotiations process between Lonrho and the Tanzanian government; and the role the British government played in this episode.
The Editors
