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

Together against the “Winds of Change”: Cooperation between South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal during the Decolonization of Southern Africa

Category: Essay 0

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 “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

Routes of Violence: Transimperial Mobility and Colonial War in the British, German, and Dutch Empires, c. 1880–1914

Category: Essay 0

In autumn 1900, the German colonial officer Robert von Krieg was travelling in the deep interior of what was then the colony of German East Africa. At Rubugwa, in the district of Tabora, his expedition of askari soldiers and porters must have been rather astonished to come upon a group of camping uniformed colonial soldiers, so-called “Sudanese,” who declared they … Read More