Japanese Past, Nepalese Future: Pan-Asian Diplomacy and Japan-Nepal Relations, 1931–1939

Category: Essay 0

“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

Indians and Koreans in Crosscolonial Solidarity: Part II. Rabindranath Tagore and His Transimperial Encounters

Category: Essay 0

Introduction Part II of my blog series continues to explore Indian feelings of “crosscolonial solidarity” with Korea, focusing on how such feelings are manifested in the emotions, ideals, and deeds of one person, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)―a polymath intellectual most famous for his poetry, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Tagore visited Japan multiple times, in 1916, … Read More

The Dawn of Asian-African Internationalism: India, China, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference

Category: Essay 0

Between 23 March and 17 April 1947, the Asian Relations Conference was convened in New Delhi. In the aftermath of WWII, a moment in which the declining Western empires and the emerging independent states intersected, entangled, and collided, this Conference arguably sparked the rise of Asian-African Internationalism.[1] The latter movement soon became a distinctive political force during the early Cold … Read More

Book Spotlight “Kontroverse Gewalt. Die imperiale Expansion in der englischen und deutschen Presse vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg [Contested Violence: The Imperial Expansion in the English and German Press before the First World War], Wien 2019”

In the decades prior to the First World War, as the imperialist powers sought to increase their influence around the world, both Great Britain and Germany frequently employed military force to uphold colonial rule or to expand the territory or influence of their empires. In the colonizing states, newspapers often covered these military actions at length and the imperialist ambitions … Read More

Book Spotlight “Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912, Växjö 2018”

My doctoral dissertation, Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912, was defended at Linnaeus University (Växjö, Sweden) in 2018 and has recently been made available open-access online.[1] It discusses questions that have only become more relevant in the midst of the rapid expansion of transimperial history in the past several years. Initially, I planned to conduct a … Read More

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