Book Spotlight: “Nordics in Motion: Transimperial Mobilities and Global Experiences of Nordic Colonialism, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51/ 3, (2023)”
This special issue on Nordic transimperial careers and experiences investigates Nordic people operating in the world of empires ranging from Southeast Asia to Africa, and from Europe to the Caribbean and North America.[1] It focuses on border-crossing individuals, addressing inter-imperial questions of race, otherness, and the civilizing mission, and tying into existing networks, while seeking to create new ones. Nordics … Read More
Japanese Past, Nepalese Future: Pan-Asian Diplomacy and Japan-Nepal Relations, 1931–1939
“Nepal is a closed country.” These were the first lines penned by Byodo Tsushō, a Japanese Buddhist monk who published an account of his travels in Nepal in the 1935 issue of the Pan-Asianist journal, Dai Ajiashugi.[1] Three years earlier, Byodo Tsushō was sponsored by the Hongan-ji sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism to study in India and traveled throughout Burma, … Read More
Book Spotlight “Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires, Ithaca 2022”
Born in 1885 into a modest Romanian-speaking family in Transylvania, Liviu Rebreanu needed to learn both Hungarian and German to acquire a basic education in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After getting higher education, he also learned the “foreign languages” taught through the imperial school system. To become a Romanian-language writer, he … Read More
Together against the “Winds of Change”: Cooperation between South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal during the Decolonization of Southern Africa
With the end of the Second World War began the final stage of formal European colonialism – the age of decolonization. In the 1950s and 1960s, several states in Asia and Africa gained independence and European colonial empires began to crumble. By the mid-1960s, only Southern Africa seemed to have been forgotten by this development. In the Portuguese colonies of … Read More
Book Spotlight “Transimperial Histories of Knowledge: Exchange and Collaboration from the Margins of Imperial Europe, Comparativ 31/5-6 (2021)”
This thematic issue developed in the midst of the pandemic. We, the co-editors of the issue, embarked on our respective PhD projects at the Chair for Global History at ETH Zurich in the fall of 2019. By summer 2020, we were trying to find ways to do advance in our research and work collaboratively despite Covid restrictions that hindered much … Read More