Introduction: “Crosscolonial Solidarity?”
In a series of essays on this blog, my intention is to explore some aspects of what I will call “crosscolonial solidarity.” It refers to a feeling of solidarity entertained by and among different colonized peoples across different empires. It bears similarities to, but is not identical with, the sense of anti-colonial solidarity circulating within one given empire, the examples of which have been relatively well-studied as in the case of the history of Indo-Irish solidarity. Forms of crosscolonial solidarity were distinct in the sense that they crossed imperial boundaries: efforts to trace their trajectories, therefore, should be seen as constituting one of the pillars of “transimperial history”, to which this blog is dedicated. “Crosscolonial” as used in my essays is a sub-category of “transimperial.” Whereas “transimperial” covers all kinds of relationships―including those involving colonizing nations as actors―, “crosscolonial” specifically concerns relations among colonized peoples.
My essays on the blog are based on my ongoing historical research concerning the relationship between Indian anticolonialism under British rule and Korean anticolonialism under Japanese rule.[1] My working hypothesis in pursuing this research is that there existed a certain feeling of solidarity between Indians and Koreans as each were engaged in anticolonial activities in their own particular context of imperial subjugation in the early twentieth century. More ambitiously, I also wonder if the example of Indians and Koreans in crosscolonial solidarity can be seen as indicating the existence of something more universal. That is to say, my broader hypothesis is that it was possible for different colonized peoples around the world to develop feelings of solidarity even if they were scattered across different empires and thus endowed with little chance of direct communication with one another. The case of India and Korea suggests that, even in the absence of direct communication, there arose transimperial moments at which a spontaneous sense of anticolonial solidarity unfolded, reflecting the intense emotions that come from the firsthand experience of colonial subjugation and resistance thereto. Crosscolonial solidarity is not easy to historicize because it did not always express itself in the form of “movements” or “networks” of enduring nature. However, the affective moments of the solidarity in question did leave their traces in various forms of writing, including newspapers, magazines, personal correspondence, and literary works. By giving careful attention to these traces, crosscolonial solidarity can be made into a viable subject of research in ways that contribute to the emerging field of transimperial history.
Before we proceed to our case study, a few qualifications are in order to more precisely elucidate what is meant by crosscolonial solidarity. Several inter-related elements characterize crosscolonial solidarity. First, it refers to the kind of solidarity based primarily on the firsthand experience of being colonized, which was equally shared, if in separate contexts, by all the peoples involved. What mattered was experience rather than identity: whether or not the colonized shared a sense of kinship based on race, religion, or culture was of secondary importance. Second, the genesis of this sense of solidarity depended on neither the amount of knowledge they had of one another nor the density of their social or intellectual communication. Situated in different empires, their thoughts and actions under constant imperial surveillance, different colonized peoples often had difficulty acquiring much knowledge about one another, “knowledge” here being used in the empiricist sense of the term. However, it was possible that these peoples felt intuitively connected with each other because they all had visceral knowledge, so to speak, of what it was like to be ruled by a foreign nation against their will. Third, this sense of solidarity was necessarily inclined more towards an idealist notion of relations among different peoples than towards its realist counterpart. It was not about the powerless in the world seeking to become materially powerful―whether militarily or economic―through strategic and selective alliance. Rather it had more to do with a moral critique of power itself from the perspective of those victimized by the powerful. Finally, it was, at least in theory, all-inclusive and egalitarian. Any colonized or oppressed peoples in any empire, large or small, would be unconditionally accepted into the circle of solidarity with equal respect. There could be no hierarchy because it was the very idea of hierarchy, implicit in imperialism that these peoples were protesting against. The idea of crosscolonial solidarity is a working concept whose scope and limits are still being explored, and it remains to be seen whether or not the key elements enumerated above are sufficient for testing my hypotheses. For further historiographical refinement, we would certainly need to look into more cases.
In the specific case of Indo-Korean solidarity, however, the characteristics above are important, not least in order to clarify the relation between this particular solidarity and the kind of solidarity promoted by “Pan-Asianism.” At least in my own paradigm of transimperial history, the kind of Pan-Asianism led by the Japanese is not counted as an example of crosscolonial solidarity. Certainly, this Pan-Asianist movement used anticolonialism as its banner and its participants included individuals and groups from societies subjugated under Western imperialism. For all its emphasis on cultural commonality and solidarity in resistance, however, there was an implicit hierarchy within the advocated unity among Asian peoples. This is because Japan, the movement’s self-proclaimed leader, was not a colonized nation. Japan was one of the imperial powers―even if it was not “Western”―and the Pan-Asianist movement was based on a strategic alliance supported by Japan’s military and economic power. The Japanese people themselves had no experience of being colonized by a foreign nation: if anything, they were colonizers, their own government being responsible for inflicting colonial suffering upon other peoples in East Asia. It was in this sense that, as an anticolonial ideology, Japanese Pan-Asianism was fundamentally self-contradictory. In fact, it was partly through critical engagement with this contradiction that the solidarity among Indians and Koreans manifested itself. Unlike its Indo-Japanese counterpart, which opposed British but not Japanese colonialism, Indo-Korean solidarity challenged both colonialisms simultaneously, and was thus more universal and more truly anticolonial.
To examine how Indo-Korean solidarity can be seen as an example of crosscolonial solidarity, Part 1 of this series focuses on the “Indian press” and its response to both the colonization of Korea by Japan and Korean resistance to that colonization. By the “Indian press” I refer to English language periodicals―newspapers and journals―owned and edited by Indians under British colonial rule. The periodicals analyzed in my research include such newspapers as The Indian People (Allahabad) [later renamed The Leader], The Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), and The Kaiser-i-Hind (Bombay), as well as journals such as The Modern Review (Calcutta). Unlike its “Anglo-Indian” counterpart, owned by Britons, the Indian press was broadly anticolonial. As this essay shows, there was a tendency among many editors and contributors involved in the Indian press to show solidarity with the struggling Koreans whilst condemning Japan’s rule, which was viewed as just as imperialist as that of any colonizing nation, including Britain.[2]
1. Universal Anti-imperialism
1-1. Japan not a Hope of Asia
It is well-known that many Indians, including those who later became highly critical of Japanese imperialism, were overjoyed at Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). This affective response was a reflection of the extent to which Indians had grown resentful of imperial rule in Asia by such “white” nations as Britain. The fact that an Asian nation defeated a white nation was interpreted as giving hope for liberation to all Asian peoples, most of whom had fallen under Western domination. The standard historical narrative has long told us that Indians retained the idea of Japan as the hope of Asia until as late as the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. But this narrative ignores the fact that there was another dimension to the Russo-Japanese War. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese statesmen had wanted to place Korea under Japan’s exclusive control, and the war with the Russians had been fought partly to settle the question of which of the two imperial nations should control Korea. In fact, after its victory against Russia, Japan soon set out to colonize Korea―another Asian nation―with the examples of the “colonial protectorate” in Western empires as its models.
Careful examination reveals that the Indian press became highly critical of Japan only a few years after the Russo-Japanese War, rather than being blindly carried away by the hope that Japan would lead other Asian peoples in their struggles against imperialism. Since mid-1907 the Indian press started to pay closer attention to Japanese colonialism in Korea. This was due to the “Hague Secret Emissary Affair” of 1907. Korean Emperor Gojong, indignant at Japan’s treatment of Koreans following the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905, which had made Korea a protectorate of Imperial Japan, sent three emissaries to the 1907 Hague Peace Convention to protest Japanese diplomatic maneuvers. The emissaries were blocked from taking part in the conference as the nations at the Hague viewed Japan as Korea’s international representative, and in the fall-out Japan tightened its imperial rule over Korea and forced Gojong to abdicate, eventually leading to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. From this time on, the Hague Affair continued to serve as a reminder to Indians that Japan was an imperialist nation, subjugating other peoples for self-aggrandizement. On 21 July 1907, three days after the abdication of Emperor Gojong, The Indian People deplored what it saw as the imperialist tendencies of Japanese rule, urging Indian readers not to cloud their judgment on account of Japan’s victory over Russia two years before: “When we wax eloquent over the might of Japan we feel jealous of her achievement but we have not yet given much thought to Japan as a ruler of other nations. In Korea the protectorate established by Japan is rapidly becoming a foreign rule and is already very irritating.”[3] On 22 August 1910, Japan effectively annexed Korea, formally making it part of its colonial empire. The Indian press condemned Japan’s action. On 9 October 1910, The Indian Social Reformer described Japan’s policy as deriving from “selfishness” and criticized it as an act of “absorbing her [Korea] and killing her personality as a nation.”[4]
The realization by these Indians that Japan was ruling another Asian people against their will made them call into question their own idea―entertained since the Russo-Japanese War―of Japan as a potential leader in Asia’s fight against imperialism. The Oriental Review wrote, “Our countrymen had gone into raptures over the victories of Japan”. “Unfortunately,” it continued, Japan came under “the intoxicating fumes of Imperialism”. It was now “an arrogance and hauteur” which characterized “the conduct pursued by Japan towards Korea.” “Oriental races had great hopes of Japan,” but now, “Japan has proved a further illustration of the ruin of the soul of a nation through the sin of Imperialism.”[5]
Long before it started to be advocated as a movement on a global scale, what would become known as the Japanese variety of “Pan-Asianism” had been given a pre-emptive blow by “Asians” themselves. Articles in the Indian press show that not all “Asians” were ready to overlook Japanese imperialism just because they were fighting against “Western” imperialism. It is certainly true that some Indians, Rash Behari Bose among them, advocated Indo-Japanese collaboration under the aegis of Pan-Asianism. But there were also others who did not see why Indians should join a Pan-Asianist movement while knowing that Japan subjugated Asian peoples, as exemplified by the case of Korea. Thus, in 1928, two years after the first conference for this movement was held in Japan, The Modern Review asserted:
Japan is strong enough to be the most powerful supporter of such a [Pan-Asianist] league, but she is also the greatest obstacle to its pursuing and realizing any high political ideal. […] Japan follows the imperializing and exploiting methods of the West. Unless Japan sets herself right with Korea and Formosa, and with China as regards Manchuria, how can she honestly and sincerely protest in one voice with the other countries of Asia against the policy, methods and deeds of the West in this vast continent?[6]
1-2. Condemning all Colonizing Nations
One important feature of the Indian press was that its critique of Japanese colonial rule was deeply influenced by Indians’ own firsthand experience of colonialism under British rule. For example, in an article published in 1908, The Amrita Bazar Patrika took a critical stance regarding Japan’s brutal behavior in Korea, but while doing so it simultaneously emphasized that Britain’s behavior in India was no better. In fact, The Patrika devoted a large portion of this article to an exposé of just how repressive Britain’s own government of India was.[7] In this way, some articles appearing in the Indian press identified parallels between British and Japanese colonialism, subjecting both to anti-colonial critique. This mode of double critique found its sharpest articulation in an article contributed by political scientist Sudhindra Bose to The Modern Review regarding Japan’s suppression of the March First Movement—a protest movement by Korean citizens calling for independence from Japan—in 1919. When he wrote this article, he was still deeply haunted by India’s own traumatic experience of colonial violence at Amritsar, which had occurred in the same year. He compared the colonialism of the British and Japanese empires, but his aim in doing so was not to argue that one is less bad than the other, but to criticize both with equal force. The real issues, for Sudhindra Bose, were the “frightfulness itself” caused by state violence and the “fundamental political and economic issues.” “At bottom,” he stated, “the policy of the autocratic government in the two countries remains practically the same.”[8]
When criticizing Japanese colonialism, the writers in the Indian press did not compare it with colonialism by other nations in ways that spared the latter of criticism. As launched from the perspective of a colonized people, their critique of colonialism was indiscriminate in the sense that it did not aim to defend one version of colonialism over others. This distinguished the Indian press from the British press, which, particularly after the 1910 annexation of Korea, criticized the Japanese method of colonial rule as being less civilized or sophisticated than Britain’s own. In fact, Indian writers were well aware that criticism of Japan by Westerners was self-serving, accompanied by an assertion that its own colonialism was superior. For example, when The Daily News, a British newspaper, mentioned the “oriental ruthlessness” with which the Japanese empire absorbed Korea, The Modern Review could not help objecting, and asked, “So far as conquest and annexation go, in what essential aspect is occidental superior to orientalism?”[9]
The Indian press was also aware that other colonizing nations and their press would not support Korean independence, but remain characteristically silent on Korea’s claims. As an Indian contributor to The Amrita Bazar Patrika pointed out, the colonial subjugation of Korea under the protectorate “was done by Japan with little or no protest from the World Powers. Poor Korean patriots went to Europe, tried to lay their case before the Hague Tribunal but nobody gave them any hearing.”[10] The Indian critics knew that, ultimately, these nations were self-consciously no different from Japan in looking for new territories to grab. As the Bombay-based newspaper Pàrsi put it, “it is certainly extraordinary that no single protest [against Japan’s annexation of Korea] has been made by any of the great powers of Europe. Perhaps their conscience tells them that they would have done no less.”[11]
The ultimate target of this Indian transimperial critique was colonialism at large, not just Japan’s or even Britain’s. Potentially, all nations responsible for colonialism’s global spread came under criticism. What was alarming for the Indian press was the fact that there were an increasing number of nations, including Germany, Belgium, and Italy, that were following in the footsteps of established colonizing nations such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The Indian press saw Japan, with its increasingly imperialist treatment of Korea, as just the latest addition to the list of these nations. As The Kaiser-i-Hind put it, “So Japan, the cynosure of the civilised world, is showing her cloven hoof in Korean administration. Let us watch and see what further developments take place. Everywhere History seems to be repeating itself.”[12] In the eastern part of Asia, Japan had now adopted the role of pursuing what Western nations had done elsewhere in the region. For the critics writing in the Indian press, Japan’s colonization of Korea was an unsettling sign that imperialism was closing in on all regions of the world, subjugating peoples everywhere.
2. Solidarity with the Korean People
2-1. Affect and First-hand Experience
With the above understanding of how the Indians viewed what the Japanese did, let us next explore how the same Indians regarded the Koreans. How did these Indians view what Koreans were feeling and what they were trying to do under Japanese rule? The Indian press did not simply report on Koreans by way of conveying the facts of what was happening to their country. Included in articles in the Indian press were many passages that were emotionally charged. Korea’s loss of sovereignty was not simply treated as a “matter of fact” in these articles. Rather, what is striking is a sense of mourning. Often, this emotional response was a direct consequence of India’s own collective experience of the same kind of loss. For example, the treatment of the Korean Emperor under Japan’s protectorate rule reminded Indians of the British treatment of the deposed emperors of the Mughal empire. Noting how the Korean Emperor was in a perpetual state of fear since his forced abdication, The Kaiser-i-Hind wrote on 16 June 1907, “Poor Emperor! Such is his fate. It recalls the days of the ex-Kings of Oude and Delhi who were state prisoners!”[13] Given their own traumatic loss of sovereignty to Britain, the Indian response to Japan’s takeover of Korea could not help but be emotional. As The Indian People put it on 28 July in the same year, it is as those “who have lived in subjugation for centuries [that we] sympathize with the Koreans who are being ruthlessly deprived of their liberty.”[14] It was with the same feeling that Indians viewed Japan’s annexation of Korea. As Bombay-based Gujarati put it on 4 September 1910, “This much is certain that an ancient kingdom has disappeared from the face of the globe, and for this Asiatics cannot but be sorry.”[15]
What is important is that such emotive reaction on the part of Indians was triggered by the recognition that Koreans were being subjected to the same condition which Indians themselves had long endured. The sense of sympathy for Korea’s loss had little to do with the liberal-bourgeois kind of sympathy, where the “civilized self” is supposedly capable of hypothetically putting itself―through the power of sensibility and imagination―in the shoes of “others” who experience suffering. Insofar as Koreans were seen as suffering because of colonization, there was nothing imaginative or hypothetical in Indians identifying the Korean experience as similar to their own. For a long time, colonial subjugation had been the daily reality that Indians had to cope with.
Moreover, whilst these contributors to the Indian press felt remorseful about Korea’s loss of sovereignty, they did not regard Koreans as passive victims, or endeavor to evoke sympathy for Koreans in the eyes of their readers. Rather, Indian writers focused on Korean affairs because Koreans were showing signs of anticolonial resistance. At a time when Indians themselves were protesting against imperialism, what mattered was that Koreans were also found to be fighting back. It is important to remember that the Hague Affair, which first brought Japanese colonialism to the attention of the Indian press, had itself been caused by an act of resistance on the part of the Korean emperor. It was Koreans’ resistance to the colonial condition, not just their victimhood, that gave birth to Indians’ sense of solidarity with Koreans.
2-2. Solidarity in Resistance
The critics of Japanese rule writing for the Indian press did not fail to mention that Koreans were determined not to give in. Following the Hague Affair, many Koreans protested by deploying a range of methods―not unlike those adopted by Indians―from passive resistance and appeals to the international community to armed resistance and revolutionary activities in other nations. According to Satish Chandra Basu, a Bengali then studying in the United States as a graduate student, the various instances of resistance “show to what extent Korean feeling has been roused against the Japanese occupation of Korea.”[16] In an article published in the August 1908 issue of The Modern Review, Basu criticized Japan for the imperialist nature of its protectorate rule, at the same time telling his Indian readers that Koreans were resisting imperialism in just the same way that colonised peoples did in the British empire. Seemingly aware that Japanese rule in Korea had often been compared with British rule in Egypt, he wrote that the Korean people “do not want the so-called protection of the Japanese just for the same reason that the Egyptian nationalists resent a British protectorate in the land of the Pharaohs.”[17]
Satish Chandra Basu wrote his article at the time of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. Although by the 1910s, the movement had subsided, after the First World War, Indian resistance gained momentum again with Mohandas K. Gandhi’s form of passive resistance, called satyagraha (“holding firmly to truth”). In this context, it is not surprising that some Indians positively viewed Korea’s March First Movement as an example of peaceful passive resistance. In April 1919, a correspondent for the Madras-based newspaper New India had an opportunity to hear about the March First Movement from a Korean student studying in London. The Japanese authorities attempted to belittle the significance of the movement by describing it as no more than an agitation led by a group of misguided individuals, mostly Christian converts. Through its interview with the Korean student, however, New India gave voice to the Korean side of the story, emphasizing the movement’s country-wide scale and systematic nature:
Hitherto, the anti-Japanese feeling has only taken the form of peaceful passive resistance on a national scale. […] The authorities were thus confronted with the problem of a widespread but perfectly passive demonstration by an unarmed but unanimous people.[18]
Unmistakable in this passage is a hint of admiration for the way in which the Koreans made their independence claim felt. Several inter-related points were emphasized as exemplifying the elements of a desirable form of anticolonial resistance. First, it was a nation-wide movement involving a substantial portion of the general population, not just a handful of revolutionaries operating on their own. Second, it was a non-violent movement. Third, it was carried out with a remarkable degree of organization among its participants.
2-3. The Idealism of Universal Equality
Overall, it was with a sense of anticipation that the Indian press regarded the Korean resistance against Japanese rule. Indians’ emotional identification with Koreans as victims of and resistors against imperial subjugation was seamlessly connected with a recognition of freedom as a shared aim of the future, however dismal the chances of gaining that freedom might look at the present moment. The Indians were not blindly emotional; their discordant feelings about a world at the time dominated by imperialism were modulated by a hope to create a new world together with all those others who were also oppressed. It was in this context that the Indian press also responded positively to Korean efforts in 1919 to bring their cause onto the international stage at the Paris Peace Conference. In May 1919, the London correspondents of several Indian newspapers reported on the efforts of the Korean delegates. The correspondent for The Hindu (based in Madras) wrote, “I am told that one of the most persistent though unrecognized, delegations in Paris at the present time is the small group of Koreans who are claiming the independence of their country.”[19] The London correspondent of The Leader wrote positively about the petition by the Koreans at the conference, which demanded “[recognition of] the Korean claims for liberation from Japan and the reconstitution of an independent state, […] the abrogation of the annexation treaty [on the ground that it was] concluded in circumstances of fraud and force which vitiated its validity.” The correspondent noted that “the petition is presented in the name and on behalf of the Republican Government of Korea and of over eighteen million Koreans.” Aware that the Korean claim was made in the spirit of national self-determination, which was in vogue at the time due to the influence of Wilsonian internationalism, he added, “The petition seeks to justify the claims of Korea by analogy with conditions pertaining to Poland and Alsace-Lorraine.”[20]
Korea mattered to Indians as it emerged as an embodiment of the ideal of peaceful pursuit of self-determination. As The Modern Review put it in August 1919:
Korea came under the yoke of Japan ten years ago. Ever since that time, she has been ruled by the Japanese military governors with severity. The dawn of peace, however, gave her a new gleam of justice and roused her with the principle of self-determination. So that, imbued with the new idealism of liberty, she drafted her Declaration of Independence.[21]
It is notable that this statement emerged in the context of a person from one colonized people writing about another colonized people. The “yoke” of imperialism and the “severity” of colonial rule were not matters of suffering endured by a distant other; they were something Indians themselves had experienced directly. Therefore, such ideas as “justice” and “self-determination” were not something imagined in the abstract. To be sure, the “new idealism of liberty” mentioned here echoed Wilsonian internationalism. However, as expressed from the vantage point of crosscolonial solidarity, it was far more than the mere extension of a theoretical ideal imported from the “civilized world.” The universalism inscribed in the above passage was the result of a sublimation of firsthand experience of loss and suffering shared by Indians and Koreans alike, and for that matter, shared as well by oppressed peoples found in any empire.
(The end of Part I)
Further Reading
Cemil Aydın: The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-İslamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New York 2007.
Elleke Boehmer: Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction,Oxford 2002.
Kesewa John: Caribbean Women and the Ethiopian Solidarity Campaign, in: Women’s History Network, 21 October 2019, URL: <https://womenshistorynetwork.org/caribbean-women-and-the-ethiopian-solidarity-campaign-by-kesewa-john/> (Accessed: 20 January 2022).
Erez Manela: The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford 2007.
Satoshi Mizutani: Transimperial Genealogies of Korea as a Protectorate: The Egypt Model in Japan’s Politics of Colonial Comparison, in: Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 32 (2019), pp. 22–49, URL: <https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/e-journal/articles/Cross-Currents%2032%20-%20S.%20Mizutani_2.pdf> (Accessed: 20 January 2022) .
Tansen Sen, Brian Tsui: Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s, New Delhi 2020.
[1] The aim of these essays is to introduce some aspects of “transimperial history” to general readers as well as to professional historians, and is not to present detailed historical arguments to prove my hypotheses. A research paper with full details is currently under preparation, which I intend to publish in the near future.
[2] Maria Framke has argued that the Indian press was critical of Japanese rule in Korea during the period between 1915 and 1920. My own research not only confirms her argument but also indicates that the same Indian attitude dated back at least to the year 1907. See Maria Framke: Vorbild oder Feindbild? Die Wahrnehmung Japans in Indien von 1915–1920, in: Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 34 (2011), pp. 103–120.
[3] Korea and Japan, in: The Indian People, 21 July 1907, p. 1.
[4] Article from The Indian Social Reformer, 9 October 1910, in: Report on Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 8th October 1910, p. 15.
[5] Article from The Oriental Review, 31 August 1910, in: Report on Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 3rd September 1910, p. 16.
[6] Pan-Asiatic League, in: The Modern Review, January 1928, p. 126.
[7] Alleged Japanese Oppression in Korea, in: The Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 March 1908, p. 6.
[8] Sudhindra Bose: Japan in Korea, in: The Modern Review, December 1920, pp. 579–87, here p. 586.
[9] The Annexation of Korea, in: The Modern Review, September 1910, p. 345.
[10] Rai Jedunath Mozumdar Bahadur: Home Rule under the British Flag (VIII), in: The Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 August 1917, p. 6.
[11] Article from Pàrsi, 16 October 1910, in: Report on Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 15h October 1910, p. 10.
[12] Koreans Intense Hatred of the Japanese, in: The Kaiser-i-Hind, 16 June 1907, p. 12.
[13] The Korean Emperor a Prisoner in his Palace, in: The Kaiser-i-Hind, 16 June 1907, p. 12.
[14] Indian feeling towards Japan, in: The Indian People, 28 July 1907, p. 1.
[15] Article from Gujarati, 4 September 1910, in: Report on Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency for the Week Ending 10th September 1910, p. 11.
[16] Satish Chandra Basu: The Arrival of the American Fleet in the Pacific Waters and its Historic Significance, in: The Modern Review, August 1908, pp. 134–139, here p. 138.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Nationalism in Korea, in: The Amrita Bazar Patrika, 29 April 1919.
[19] Japan’s treatment of Korea, in: The Hindu, 22 May 1919 (reprinted in: The Amrita Bazar Paprika, 19 June 1919).
[20] Korean Claims for Liberation: Reconstitution of Independent State, in: The Leader, 22 May 1919, p. 4.
[21] Korea’s Declaration of Independence, in: The Modern Review, August 1919, p. 219.
Satoshi Mizutani is Professor at the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies, Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan). He has engaged in transimperial history for over a decade. He has explored theoretical issues on the ‘transimperial’, endeavoring to establish it as a viable theme/field of historical research. His case studies concern the interactions across the British and Japanese empires among both the colonizing and colonized peoples from these two empires. He has published on the ‘politics of comparison’, analyzing how Japanese administrators, scholars, and journalists saw British colonialism in their efforts to formulate a suitable method of rule to be applied to Taiwan and Korea. Currently, Mizutani’s research explores the convergence of anti-colonial sentiments and ideals across different colonized contexts across the two empires in question. In particular, it focuses on the mutual awareness and sense of anti-colonial solidarity shared by Indians and Koreans since around 1907, using articles that appeared in the Indian and the Korean press as primary sources.
Select publications:
- Introduction to ‘Beyond Comparison: Japan and Its Colonial Empire in Transimperial Relations’, in: Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 32 (2019), pp. 2–21 (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/e-journal/articles/Cross-Currents%2032%20-%20Introduction_3.pdf)
- Transimperial Genealogies of Korea as a Protectorate: The Egypt Model in Japan’s Politics of Colonial Comparison, in: Cross-Currents: East Asian History and
Culture Review (e-journal) 32 (2019), pp. 22–49 (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/e-journal/articles/Cross-Currents%2032%20-%20S.%20Mizutani_2.pdf)
- Anti-Colonialism and the Contested Politics of Comparison: Rabindranath Tagore, Rash Behari Bose and Japanese colonialism in Korea in the inter-war period, in: Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16/1 (2015) (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577741).
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.