This article studies the aftermath of the Second World and decolonization (1945–1960) in the Indo-Burmese highlands, challenging predominant notions of state-building. Using the ‘Zomia’ heuristic, it argues how trans-border Naga tribal communities residing in so-called ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between British India’s Assam province and Burma neither entirely resisted states, nor attracted uniform state interest. This dual refusal of states and social actors reveals negotiated sovereignty practices, using violence. The article illustrates the Naga tribes’ agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states by using mimetic discourses of primitive violence, represented by headhunting. Violence served as a significant means of communication between communities and state agents, amounting to shifting cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices selectively securitized colonial frontiers that became international borders post-decolonization. Gradually, violence and the desire for development invited state extension here. The article reveals that uneven state-building and developmental exclusions by bordering created conditions for violence to emerge. It engages scholarship on ‘Blank Spaces’ to analyse the varying sovereignty arrangements that produced ‘checkered’ zones. It highlights the relationship between spatial history and violence to explain the persistence of coercive development and demands for more borders and states today across highland Asia. It uncovers the embeddedness of violence in creating and challenging developmental and democratic exclusions in post-colonial nation-building projects. The analysis complicates imperial legacies of producing territorial enclosures within democracies, allowing exceptional violence to occur. More broadly, it complicates contemporary geopolitical cartographic contests and stakes of state-possession, using historical methods with approaches from anthropology and political geography.

The 1920s to 1950s was a period of significant transformation and conflict in South and East Asia, marked by the forces of (anti-)imperialism, nationalism, and militarism, eventually escalating into the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. For a long time, internationalist initiatives hoped that de-escalation and peace could be achieved through diplomacy and exchange. Part of this approach included Asian Christians moving in the milieu of Protestant internationalism, a movement long dominated by American organizations and actors, which after the First World War saw a shift towards Asia—both in terms of representation from and interest in the region.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, numerous international conferences, organized by missionary associations and organizations such as the World Student Christian Federation or the international Young Men’s Christian Association, debated the political future of Asia in a changing and increasingly belligerent world. The period also witnessed numerous exchanges of Christian delegations between individual countries. By analysing the interrelated histories of three Asian Protestant internationalists—T. Z. Koo of China, Kagawa Toyohiko of Japan, and Augustine Ralla Ram of India—the article offers an examination of the mechanics of Christian diplomacy before, during, and after war. It shows that Protestant internationalist diplomacy, fellowship, and solidarity were often overshadowed by national and political ideologies. However, the article further argues that, despite its shortcomings, which challenged transnational solidarity and fellowship, Christian diplomacy was characterized by a resilience and reach that allowed its Asian protagonists a remarkable international operating space by providing useful networks, opportunities, and resources.

Revolutionary exports are essential to studying China’s relations with Southeast Asia during the Cold War, particularly regarding communist parties in neighbouring countries that received substantial logistical support from China, enabling them to sustain armed struggles. However, previous research has been limited due to the topic’s sensitivity and the scarcity of Chinese-language sources. This article seeks to uncover the logistical system centred on Mengla, Yunnan, designed to support Southeast Asian communist parties, mainly in Laos. By examining the development of Chinese logistics units and the extensive clandestine aid networks (including road construction) that linked China with Laos, this article argues that China’s integrated civil-military logistics support was pivotal in sustaining armed resistance in Southeast Asia and countering the influence of the United States in the region. Additionally, the article examines the dimensions of the Cold War in Asia from the perspective of the ordinary individuals who were direct participants.

Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of ‘non-Muslim’ marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government’s laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship.

Although some modern popular songs are deliberately composed for the purpose of commentary or protest, most are produced for commercial reasons. However, such songs may nonetheless be adopted by political, cultural, and social movements, and in these cases, fans’ participatory meaning-making has an important role in the songs’ new purpose. Taking the 1935 Korean ballad ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ as a representative example, this article traces how the melancholy love song acquired successive layers of meaning against the backdrop of changing politico-economic contexts throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on political, popular music, and sports histories, I first examine how ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ became known as an anti-colonial anthem under Japanese rule, a position that persisted in postwar South Korea. I then investigate the ways in which fans of the Haitai Tigers, a professional baseball team, utilized the song to express a complex set of emotions and commitments regarding their politically oppressed and economically neglected home region of Chŏlla. Against the backdrop of their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Haitai fans, through their collective singing of ‘Tears of Mok’po’ in stadiums during games, transformed it from a colonial-era pop hit/anti-colonial anthem into a baseball fight song that expressed their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 1990s. Entering the twenty-first century, ‘Tears of Mok’po’ no longer played the same role for the Tigers and their fans, and it receded into historical memory. This change in meaning and association shows how the political and historical meaning-making of popular songs can be constructed, reintegrated, and even dismissed.

In recent years, the Japanese public has hailed a new national hero, the late Lieutenant General Higuchi Kiichirō. Unlike other notable military figures of his era, Higuchi’s heroism is unconventional, if not unique. Despite playing a leading role in the defence of Hokkaido against the Soviet Red Army in 1945, it is humanitarian efforts that have cemented Higuchi’s lasting legacy in public memory. Presently, a plethora of publications, TV documentaries, a museum, and monuments praise his actions during the ‘Otpor Incident’, in which he is said to have saved up to 20,000 Jewish refugees stranded in the winter of 1938 along the Soviet-Manchukuo border. This article questions the authenticity of Higuchi’s acclaimed rescue efforts, highlighting discrepancies that cast doubt on the entire narrative. It suggests the possibility of the ‘Otpor Incident’ being a complete fabrication or, at best, an extremely exaggerated account of a minor event, aimed at enhancing post-war personal and national reputations. Critically, this piece contends that Higuchi’s current recognition is part of a strategic move by nationalist groups in Japan to use Holocaust narratives to divert attention from Japan’s history of wartime aggression and colonialism. To substantiate this view, this article assesses the evidence of Higuchi’s involvement in the supposed rescue, examines the narrative’s post-war evolution, and analyses the motives for its initial dissemination and recent surge in popularity.

This article examines how Imperial Japanese military doctors—both Army and Navy medical specialists—employed blood-type analysis in military medicine, from the first military medical publication of blood-type research in 1926 to the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. It explores the military physicians’ quest to investigate the relevance of blood-group knowledge and their attempt to integrate ideas derived from Furukawa Takeji’s Blood Type–Temperament Correlation Theory—the idea that blood type is linked to personality traits—into the operations of the armed forces, a process I term ‘sero-rationalization’. By the mid-1930s, however, escalating conflicts prompted a shift in research priorities. Military physicians increasingly focused on serology and the technological advancements required for blood transfusions, moving away from earlier biopsychological discussions of blood types. This shift reflected an urgent need to address wartime medical challenges, including treating injuries and developing reliable transfusion methods. With the intensification of war by the 1940s, frontline physicians began exploring alternatives to traditional blood typing, such as cross-type transfusions and even animal-to-human transfusions. In their attempts to circumvent the ABO blood-group system in dealing with wartime medical emergencies, military physicians departed significantly from their initial emphasis on serological differentiation. Ironically, the pursuit of sero-rationalization—intended to optimize military efficiency—ultimately proved counterproductive.

Xinjiang’s location naturally makes it a focal point of the Silk Road (hereafter SR). But considering that for the first 60 years (circa 1920–1980) of Chinese archaeology—that is, over half of its development—the SR was rarely mentioned in scientific literature, the impact it has had on archaeological studies of Xinjiang remains unclear and poorly understood. With the eponymous Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) now a decade old and the field of Xinjiang archaeology approaching its centennial, this has become a critical subject of enquiry.

In this article, I recount the history of publication and discourse in Xinjiang, followed by a discussion of recent developments in archaeological practice instigated by the BRI. I contend that consistently using the SR to conceptualize the material record of Xinjiang, a prevalent approach in Eurasian scholarship, is based on flawed and unscientific presuppositions. Even in Chinese discourse today, the SR concept has become secondary to the state objective of building scientific and cultural infrastructure that is Chinese in method and approach, the goal of which is to amplify ‘discourse power’. Although the SR has served as a major banner for unifying studies on cross-cultural contact in Eurasian history, it is laden with complex layers of archaeological history intertwined with a century-old chauvinistic geopolitics that still reverberate globally today. As the scientific role of the SR becomes increasingly muddled, research referencing the SR must navigate the term’s biased presentist connotations to unveil the pertinent historical contexts, or consider alternative frameworks that resist totalizing narratives.

Population resettlement in contested ethnoterritories is an old practice that states have pursued for centuries. There is a nascent theory of demographic engineering to explain the phenomenon, although a robust theory on the issue is yet to be built. Theorists generally agree that states transfer and resettle populations to gain territorial control over contested ethnoterritories. But what is not clear in the current scholarship is how states accomplish this or what techniques they deploy to gain territorial control. To address this theoretical lacuna, it is asserted that states seek to gain territorial control in two ways: ‘right-peopling’ (settlement of ‘preferred people’ to alter the demographic balance of the contested area) and ‘unpeopling’ (the extermination of the existing inhabitants). In this article these pathways to gain territorial control are explained by exploring the case of demographic engineering in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

This article offers an explanation for gendered patterns of work in emerging Chinese cotton spinning mills during the early twentieth century from the perspective of household labour allocation. Female workers were rarely employed in mills in the north of the country, but the Yangtze Delta showed a much higher proportion of female factory labour. Whereas many authors have explained women’s participation from the viewpoint of patriarchal culture, or physiological differences, this article brings to the fore another, largely neglected but important, explanatory factor for differences in labour allocation in modern factories during early industrialization: the development of handicraft textile production in sending regions. In districts where household cotton textile production persisted, fewer women supplied their labour to the urban factories. Landholding size, real wages, and local agricultural-industrial structures contributed to variations in the living strategies of rural households, affecting the deployment of female family members. Our argument is supported by analyses of gender wage ratios and rural–urban income disparities in different parts of China in order to expose the opportunity structures under which households decided to supply their labour to modern textile factories.

This article examines the intertwined processes between China’s making of anti-slavery laws and the evolution of international legislation against slavery in the early twentieth century. By tracing international interventions into domestic servitude issues in Chinese communities both in China and Southeast Asia, the article analyses how the international legal regime was absorbed into the domestic laws of late Qing and Republican China. Drawing on two threads of scholarly discussion—namely, the histories of humanitarian internationalism and modern China’s legal reform—this article argues that late Qing and Republican jurists intentionally maintained an ambiguous definition of domestic servitude. This ambiguity served to affirm the humanitarian governance of the modern state while simultaneously preserving social customs, in defiance of international law.

This article investigates marriage as a site for the historical study of time. Focusing on Hindu marriage in South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the article studies (a) how the moment of a marriage is made and documented through what the article calls ‘temporal practices’, and (b) how, once this moment is made and documented, it is put to use in and for a marriage ceremony. The article has three sections. In the first section, it discusses the device used to measure the time of the marriage ceremony: the water clock. This section also addresses how the water clock was used, and who used it, within the marriage ceremony; and registers a shift in the nineteenth century from the water clock to the mechanical clock. In the second section, the article discusses documentary practices that record the moment of a marriage and addresses historical changes related to these practices in the nineteenth century. In the third section, the article examines the work that the moment of a marriage does once it has been brought into being and documented. This section argues that the moment of a marriage frames and makes efficacious a certain action through which the bride and groom are transformed. The article concludes by arguing that the moment of a marriage temporally regulates the activities of the marriage ceremony and explores how this moment reconfigures relations to the past and future for the bride and groom.

This article is an outcome of a search for the Tamil plantation woman in Malaysia and her voice—her stories and memories, in her own words. Through the plantation songs of Tamil workers in Malaysia, first collated and published in the 1980s, we explore the experiences and memories of these women, singing about their lives and work in the Malayan plantations. As memory-work, these songs constitute an oral history that provides an uneasy counter to hegemonic discourses like that of the colonial planters who employed the women, or the nationalist historiography of India and Malaysia where they are sidelined and reduced to figures of abject victimhood in the clutches of colonial capitalism, or the post-colonial discourse where their memories and experiences constitute a shameful past that obstructs optimism for the future. Tamil plantation songs call for a comparative approach to history and memory—between the position of the woman and that of the man, or the labourer and the supervisor/planter, as well as more problematic and shifting positionalities like seducer and the seduced, or the victim and the perpetrator.

This article examines how the British colonial administration and the local Chinese population interacted around the issue of obscene prints in 1900s–1930s Singapore, with a particular focus on the policing of the female nude. The notion of obscenity acquired different meanings as prints crossed geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. What was deemed ‘obscene’ in Republican Shanghai or Edwardian London was not necessarily viewed the same way in colonial Singapore, and vice versa. By tracing the contradictory assumptions about the relationship between nudity and obscenity in a multiracial and multicultural colonial context, this article demonstrates that obscenity regulation in Singapore was intimately tied to what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘the rule of colonial difference’,1 with race being the most obvious marker of difference. On an institutional level, the rule of colonial difference led to a division of regulatory labour that ultimately rendered Chinese salacious materials invisible to the British colonial government in the early twentieth century. In terms of definitions of nudity and obscenity, perceived racial–cultural differences—central to the rule of colonial difference—were used both to justify and to contest the public display of naked female bodies to non-Western audiences. This situates the Singapore case within the broader scholarship on obscenity regulation and colonialism, and offers fresh insights into the difference in imperial models of obscenity regulation. By exploring how obscenity regulation was premised on the process of racial ‘othering’, this article also highlights race as an underexplored factor in existing scholarship on obscenity regulation.

In 1934, the much-publicized engagement of Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako to Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe made headlines worldwide, epitomizing the transnational dream of a racially anti-hierarchical world. Starting from this unrealized wedding, this article showcases the voice of Kuroda Masako, a racially equal imperial feminist who tried to foster her vision of women participating in the empire-building process even in new settings like Ethiopia. By featuring her practices, we are able to understand why they resonated not only in the women’s press but also in a much larger intellectual scene that comprised Pan-Asian and Pan-African activists. Because of such significant resonance across various non-governmental actors worldwide, the Kuroda-Araya engagement became dangerous to state-endorsed agendas in many countries, which were unwilling to countenance an unprecedented alliance between Ethiopia, Japan, and the African American community at the expense of Western and white civilization discourse. As a result, the engagement created a rupture between popular sympathy and the state, eventually resulting in Japan’s official disengagement from Ethiopia well before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.