Category: Journal of World History

Journal of World History Special Issue: Health, Globally – Free!

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Next week, the World History Association hosts its annual meeting virtually, from July 5 to 9, on the theme “Health, Globally.” The Journal of World History offers an accompanying special collection, free on the Project MUSE platform through summer. Attendees can also receive 30% off select world history titles.

The “Health, Globally” special issue draws together some of the journal’s most frequently cited and downloaded material alongside some less well-known contributions. Together, these articles present a multivalent approach to the study of global health. Some are driven by new scientific breakthroughs that allow previously held assumptions to be challenged and even rewritten. Some consider the history of health to be a debate about culture or the method of communicating knowledge. Some take a global approach to consider issues that touched every corner of the world, and others begin with specific local circumstances and consider how these episodes inform greater debates in world history. 

This special issue provides accessible resources for scholars and teachers worldwide, pulled together by editor Matthew P. Romaniello, who discusses the issue below.  

Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History

University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Matthew P. Romaniello: The World History Association’s President, Laura Mitchell, let me know that the annual conference was going to be organized around the theme of “Health, Globally,” and it just seemed like a perfect fit for a special collection. Pandemics have been a recurring threat throughout history, making this theme not only reflective of the ongoing pandemic but also one with deep roots in the journal’s past.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MPR: I’m just going to quote from the WHA’s original call for papers for the conference this summer because it’s so apt: “The urgency of global public health crises, economic hardship, famine and food insecurity, political instability, ongoing violence, and environmental disasters demand immediate attention and invite measured analysis over long time horizons—a move along temporal scales at which world historian excel.”

UHP: How do you hope people will use this issue?

MPR: We are extremely fortunate that the University of Hawai‘i Press has once again worked with Project MUSE to make the special collection available open access until the end of September. My hope is that these articles will be brought into world history classes this fall to have students critically engage with the impact of health crises throughout history. We all know students are grappling with how their lives have changed in the past year, and these case studies can speak meaningfully to the way past societies have responded to, and recovered from, pandemics.

UHP: In addition to this year’s World History Association meeting, what resources would you point your colleagues to?

MPR: There’s a tremendous wealth of resources available to study responses to past pandemics, both other scholarly works and an enormous body of primary sources. Harvard University made available some of its resources through “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics,” which is a curated collection for the classroom. Many scholars are probably familiar with the open access collection available through PubMed, but the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has rich digital resources available on its website. Between the NLM and the Wellcome Library in London, there’s just an enormous variety of primary sources available. I also recommend browsing the resources identified at the American Association for the History of Medicine, particularly the Syllabus for “A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine,” which lays out a plan for integrating two of the defining issues of the past year—structural racism and health—in one class.

UHP: Finally, a year in, how has the pandemic affected your own research and teaching?

MPR: It’s been a long year. I’ve learned a lot about how to approach virtual and online teaching, but I’m mostly relieved to be back in the classroom this fall. And I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve had to focus on both editing and writing, but I’m optimistic about a return to the archive next year. There’s no doubt we have incredible access to online materials compared to only a few years ago, but there’s nothing quite like being in the archive and making an unexpected discovery!

Join Matthew P. Romaniello for a roundtable discussion with special issue authors Gregory D. Smithers, Nükhet Varlik, and Stephanie Anne Boyle on July 8 at the World History Association meeting.

Health, Globally

Table of Contents

“Health, From the Personal to the Global”
Matthew P. Romaniello

Malaria and the Peopling of Early Tropical Africa
James L. A. Webb

Scientists Doing History: Central Africa and the Origins of the First Plague Pandemic*
George D. Sussman

From “Bête Noire” to “le Mal de Constantinople”: Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State
Nükhet Varlik

Making Global Commerce into International Health Diplomacy: Consuls and Disease Control in the Age of Revolutions
Katherine Arner

The “Pursuits of the Civilized Man”: Race and the Meaning of Civilization in the United States and Australia, 1790s–1850s
Gregory D. Smithers

Domesticating Labor: An Illicit Slave Trade to The British Straits Settlements, 1811–1845
Shawna Herzog

Cholera, Colonialism, and Pilgrimage: Exploring Global/Local Exchange in the Central Egyptian Delta, 1848–1907
Stephanie Anne Boyle

The “Globalization” of Disease? India and the Plague
I. J. Catanach

“One’s Molokai Can Be Anywhere”: Global Influence in the Twentieth-Century History of Hansen’s Disease
Kerri A. Inglis

Population, Geopolitics, and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century
Alison Bashford

Journal of World History Special Issue: Crossing Companies (Vol. 31, Issue 3)

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The September issue of the Journal of World History is a special issue, “Crossing Companies,” guest edited by Felicia Gottmann, a Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle,  and Philip Stern, the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. The issue includes five research articles, in addition to Gottmann and Stern’s introduction to the issue and a special digital-only afterword by Julia Adams and Isaac Ariail Reed (both available free on Project MUSE).

Here, Gottmann and Stern discuss how this special issue came together, editing during a pandemic, why this subject continues to interest scholars and students, and how teachers can use the issue in their classrooms.

University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Gottmann and Stern: The issue was the result of many conversations among a number of scholars researching various novel ways chartered companies crossed national boundaries, some together as part of larger collaborative research projects. We decided that taken together our research would make for an interesting discussion and offered it as a panel for the 2017 American Historical Association annual meeting in Denver. This raised so many interesting points that we decided to we just had to publish the discussion as articles, and commissioned others to supplement. We proposed it as a dedicated special issue to JWH, and the rest is history. This took us three years, but we think it was worth it.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue as editors? 

Gottmann and Stern: For a subject as broad and involved as that of early modern chartered companies the greatest challenge was that even among all of us, one special journal issue could only skim the surface of what is a broad and expansive subject, so we were constantly feeling like we were leaving out far more than we were putting in. And of course, the final stages of a collaborative issue are hard under normal circumstances; when we started this together in Denver years ago, no one could have anticipated we would be doing it in the midst of a global pandemic. Both of us have small children, which made co-authoring and editing that much more demanding. Even meant even finding times to meet virtually across five time zones when one of us was not on childcare duty or utterly exhausted was… a challenge. Honestly, we couldn’t have gotten through it without the remarkable contributors, and of course the immensely patient and accommodating editors and staff at JWH.

UHP: Why do you think early-modern trading companies continue to interest scholars and students?

Gottmann and Stern: The subject was actually one of great interest many decades ago—in some ways, our special issue is somewhat inspired by the fabulous book on Companies and Trade co-edited by Leo Blussé and Femme Gaastra in 1981. Around the same time, the fantastic work to “bring the state back in,” (to quote another important volume from the 1980s), certainly led to a generation of work that exposed the connections between state and empire formation across the globe. But since then, our attention has been drawn back to the ways in which private enterprises govern like states, making connections around the globe and building empires. While the analogy can be taken too far, the comparison—whether in terms of similarities or contrasts—with a similar phenomenon in the early modern world certainly promises fascinating insights into the origins of modern capitalism and globalization and raises questions about the role and nature of states and multinational companies. The past several decades have also seen increasingly broader interest in, and sophisticated approaches to colonial, imperial, and world history, which has no doubt been part of the renewed interest in colonial companies.

UHP: How do you see this special issue contributing to the field?

Gottmann and Stern: While scholars working on the theaters in which these companies operated, be that the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic World, have long since shown that their operations were resolutely transnational on the ground, those who study the companies qua companies continue to do so with the kind of “methodological nationalism” that Ulrich Beck has taught us to abandon long ago. Our special issue firmly demonstrates that these were transnational enterprises not just on the ground in Asia, Africa, or the Americas but that they were transnational through and through, from their very inception in Europe. So we turn the lens of World History back on Europe, demonstrating it to be part of much wider, not merely, national histories.

UHP: What advice would you give to a teacher who was interested in using your issue in their classroom?

Gottmann and Stern: We would encourage teachers to use this issue as a way into studying history away from national narratives of empire: as a way to motivate students to challenge their modernist assumptions about the coherence of notions of “nations”, “states”, and “companies”. Paired with some of the many surviving great primary sources, be that Ananda Ranga Pillai’s Diary or Bolt’s Considerations on India Affairs, this can be a brilliant way to get students to rethink world history as a history of more than just a world of nation-states.

Read the Journal of World History special issue, “Crossing Companies” on Project MUSE here.

 

Journal of World History JWH 31-3

Crossing Companies

Table of Contents

Introduction: Crossing Companies (Free)
Felicia Gottmann, Philip Stern

Cross-Imperial Trade in Disguise: Overlooked Trade Interactions between the Dutch and the Danish in the Atlantic Trade during the Seventeenth Century
Kaarle Wirta

Between Companies: The Arbitration of 1654 and the Evolution of Corporate Strategy in the East Indies Trade
Andrew Ruoss

Prussia all at Sea? The Emden-based East India Companies and the Challenges of Transnational Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century
Felicia Gottmann

Keeping It in the Family: The Swedish East India Company and the Irvine Family, 1731–1770
Hanna Hodacs

Scandinavian Trade in Canton and “Borrowed Bengal Money”: The Global Role of Minor European Companies Trading in Asia, 1760–1786
Leos Müller

Coda: Crossing Companies, Theories of Agency and Early Modern European Empire (Free)
Julia Adams, Isaac Ariail Reed

Plus book reviews.

New Journal Issues: Asian Theatre Journal, Cross-Currents, Journal of Korean Religions + More (June 2020)

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Asian Theatre Journal 37-1

Asian Theatre Journal

The Field of Ramila, guest edited by Pamela Lothspeich

Volume 37, Issue 1 (2020)

This special issue is intended to briefly introduce the field of Ramlila, as a performance practice and as an idea. It is designed to give a taste of its geographic range and a sample of its multiple and diverse manifestations in India and the Indian diaspora. The Introduction briefly discusses the literary sources of Ramlila, its history, chief styles, and emerging trends. It also includes a synopsis of the story of Ram in Ramlila. Following this, a translation of three scenes from the Lav-Kush Ramlila in Old Delhi, with a critical introduction, sheds light on the mounting politicization of Ramlila by the Hindu Right. Two articles, one on Nautanki and one on Ramayan Gaan, illustrate that Ramlila is a form of theatre very much in dialogue with other forms of popular performance in the Hindi belt and along its linguistic borders, narratively, aesthetically, and ideologically. A review-essay of two documentaries and an interview with an expert on Kumaoni Ramlila further demonstrate the diversity of Ramayan-themed performance, despite the continued homogenization and commercialization of Ramlila. An article on a distinctive Ramlila in Trinidad and another in the United States (North Carolina) speak to the global reach of Ramlila, and its important role in “homemaking.” Finally, a report on a festival to commemorate a Ramayan-themed dance drama (wayang wong) at Prambanan recalls the Ramayan’s early journey from South to Southeast Asia.

Cross-Currents 9-1 CC Cover

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

Global Island: Taiwan and the World, guest edited by James Lin, Graeme Read, and Peter Thilly

Volume 9, Issue 1 (2020)

In October 2018, the University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program hosted a workshop featuring a wide range of diverse humanities and social science research centered on the theme of “Global Island: Taiwan and the World.” The impetus for the workshop was to reimagine Taiwan outside the traditional confines of comparative and cross-Strait studies that have predominated in academic research on Taiwan. The articles that emerged from the workshop and have been assembled in this issue instead understand Taiwan as an actor embedded within global networks and spaces or, alternatively, as a unique site or producer of globally circulating knowledge. At a time when Taiwan studies is gaining increased visibility, exploring Taiwan’s linkages to the greater world showcases underexplored facets of Taiwan and the potential contributions of this field to interdisciplinary studies of society and culture.

Journal of Korean Religions JKR 11-1

Journal of Korean Religions

Yogācāra Studies of Silla, guest edited by A. Charles Muller

Volume 11, Issue 1 (2020)

One area in particular wherein interest in Korea has been relatively strong since earlier days is that of Silla-period Buddhist scholarship. Within Silla scholasticism, one of the most influential areas has been that of Yogācāra and related studies—which in Korea, tends to include much of what is usually categorized as the Buddhological strain of Tathāgatagarbha. Silla-period scholars were in close contact with their Chinese colleagues on the mainland, reading and writing the same Sinitic script. They had ready access to newly composed texts and translations soon after their production in Chang’an and elsewhere, and they were intimately aware of all of the most pertinent doctrinal discussions and debates occurring in the Tang capital and its surroundings, and were deeply engaged in all of these. One of Silla’s own sons, Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696), was situated in the Tang capital and was working directly with Xuanzang and his team, although sometimes not seeing eye-to-eye with other of Xuanzang’s followers, such as Kuiji 窺基 (632–682). Other Silla scholars, such as Chajang 慈藏 (sixth-seventh centuries) and Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702) (just to name a few of the better-known figures) went to Tang for serious and sustained study, making their own mark, and bringing their new knowledge home to the peninsula.

Journal of World History

Volume 31, Issue 2 (2020)

Research articles for this issue include:

  • The Prestige Makers: Greek Slave Women in Ancient India by Kathryn A. Hain
  • The Medieval Origin of the Factory or the Institutional Foundations of Overseas Trade: Toward a Model for Global Comparison by Louis Sicking
  • Between the Red Sea Slave Trade and the Goa Inquisition: The Odyssey of Gabriel, a Sixteenth-Century Ethiopian Jew by Matteo Salvadore
  • Greatness is Like a Rubbish Hole: Social Frictions and Global Connections in the Early-Swahili World by David Bresnahan
  • How Civic Virtue Became Republican Honor: Revolution and Republicanism in Venezuela, 1800–1840 by Reuben Zahler
  • Decolonizing Global History? A Latin American Perspective (Open Access) by Gabriela De Lima Grecco, Sven Schuster

Journal of World History Special Issue: Roads and Oceans, a 30th Anniversary Collection – Free!

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The Journal of World History launches its first digital-only special issue, a 30th anniversary collection titled, “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History.” The issue is free on the Project MUSE platform through September 2020.

This week, world history scholars would have been gathering in Salt Lake City, Utah for the annual World History Association (WHA) conference, regretfully canceled in light of public health concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. 

This special issue provides accessible resources for scholars and teachers worldwide, pulled together by editor Matthew P. Romaniello. Here, Matt discusses “Roads and Oceans,” a central theme throughout the history of this journal founded by Jerry Bentley, a pioneer in the field who guided the journal through 24 volumes. 

Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History

University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Matthew P. Romaniello: To celebrate the journal’s anniversary, we wanted to highlight a theme that has been important throughout the past thirty years. We reviewed the list of most frequently read articles available through Project Muse and developed three potential themes that would be a good fit. After consulting with a few members of the editorial board, “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History” seemed to best choice to encompass the journal’s history.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MPR: As I mention in the introduction, world history is not contained by border crossings or trade caravans but is instead defined by movement in general. Placing this selection of articles into context with each other opens a discussion on the importance of human migration, cultural exchanges broadly conceived, and the challenge crossing borders, either from state-imposed restrictions or geographic boundaries. As these articles highlight, the progress of history has been toward more exchanges, not obstacles.

UHP: How do you hope people will use this issue?

MPR: One of the most exciting opportunities resulting from this special online format is making older articles available free. While many scholars working at the university level will have access to the journal via their institutions, our secondary school colleagues are not so lucky. Getting more material into the hands of secondary school teachers to share with their students is a wonderful outcome of our anniversary celebration. Having a thematic collection available will lend itself to use at all levels as the basis for an in-depth discussion about the importance of migration and travel throughout the past, an issue that’s only more important in a Covid-19 world.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue?

MPR: The greatest challenge was the journal’s rich past. There are simply too many great articles worth highlighting. The editorial board and I debated a few different themes, any of which would have been capable to featuring ten wonderful articles. I’m pleased to say that the UH Press supports the idea of having a new online collection each year, which not only lets us cover a range of themes but also lets us keep sharing this research with a broader audience.

UHP: In lieu of this year’s World History Association meeting, what resources would you point your colleagues to?

MPR: “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History” is one great resource. It’s a chance to revisit the journal’s past and think about how current conditions are changing our ideas about migration and open borders. The World History Association has been producing new content to help with the current conditions with Under the Baobab, an extended conversation about how the pandemic is changing our research and teaching. And World History Bulletin, another official publication of the WHA, has just published a special issue on teaching during the pandemic.

UHP: Finally, how have the closures affected your own research and teaching? How are arranging your work in light of this year’s events?

MPR: Like so many of us, transitioning to full-time online teaching overnight was a huge change, but thankfully I’m getting a handle on our “new normal” by teaching this summer. I had enough time and support from my institution to try some new things and rethink how my courses are structured. For my scholarship, I can only say it’s a great time to be an editor, because all of the work is online so it’s not a dramatic shift. I’m pleased to have a new edited volume, Russia in Asia: Imaginations, Interactions, and Realities, getting published this summer in addition to the new JWH collection. It’s starting up a new research project that’s taken a backseat for the moment, but there is a wealth of online materials to get started with.

Journal of World History 31-2

Roads and Oceans

Table of Contents

Roads and Oceans: An Introduction
Matthew P. Romaniello

Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History
David Christian

A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam
Xinru Liu

Siena on the Silk Roads: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Mongol Global Century, 1250–1350
Roxann Prazniak

The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World, 1400-1750: Jurisdictional Complexity as Institutional Order
Lauren A. Benton

Ages of Sail, Ocean Basins, and Southeast Asia
Jennifer L. Gaynor

The Company’s Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621-1662
Tonio Andrade

Pirates and Kings: Power on the Shores of Early Modern Madagascar and the Indian Ocean
Jane Hooper

The Culture of Culture Contact: Refractions from Polynesia
I. C. Campbell

Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century
Patricia Risso

Journal of World History, Vol 31, No. 1 (2020)

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Special Issue

Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms

Edited by Philippa Hetherington and Glenda Sluga

The twenty-first century is awash with diagnoses of the end of liberal internationalism. In both popular and academic manifestations, declarations of liberal internationalism’s ‘crisis’ tend to assume that the term has a stable meaning that is clearly differentiated from illiberal internationalist variants. The aim of this special issue of the Journal of World History is to interrogate this assumption. We argue that a historical view of internationalism highlights the interrelation between and the mutual dependence of liberal and illiberal internationalisms since 1880. Taken together, the essays collected here position the politics of internationalism at the centre of a new historiography that rejects an axiomatic relationship between the liberal and the international. They seek to rethink how liberal and illiberal cooperated, co-mingled and co-produced one another on the international plane.

Research Articles

Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms
Philippa Hetherington, Glenda Sluga

Liberals, Socialists, Internationalists, Jews
Abigail Green

“Neither East Nor West,” Neither Liberal Nor Illiberal? Iranian Islamist Internationalism in the 1980s
Timothy Nunan

Urban Planning and the Politics of Expert Internationalism, 1920s–1940s
Phillip Wagner

The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism: The Legacies of the League of Nations Reconsidered
David Petruccelli

Constructing the ‘City of International Solidarity’: Non-Aligned Internationalism, the United Nations and Visions of Development, Modernism and Solidarity, 1955–1975
Ljubica Spaskovska

Liberal and Illiberal Internationalism in the Making of the League of Nations Convention on Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace
David Goodman

India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946–1962
Alanna O’Malley

Book Reviews

The Little Ice Age and the Demise of Rome: Lessons for the Anthropocene?
Roger L. Albin

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (review)
Frank Zelko

Europe and the European Union in Times of Growing Scepticism
Martijn Lak

Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 by Aidan Forth (review)
Mark Condos

Trading in Faith: Christianity and Globalization?
Philip Jenkins

 

Journal of World History 31-1
Journal of World History,
Vol. 31, Issue 1

Pictured on the cover: Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, photograph taken in June 2019. The photograph marks a transition for the Journal of World History, highlighting Utah as the new home of the journal office as well as the site of World History Association annual conference in 2020. The image is a precursor of a complete cover redesign in 2021.

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Journal of World History, Vol 30, No. 4 (2019)

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This issue of the Journal of World History includes the following scholarly articles:

Economic Conquest of the Pacific: Revisiting the Tacna-Arica Plebiscite of 1925–1926
By Robert Niebuhr

This article surveys the Tacna-Arica plebiscite period (1925–1926) by taking into consideration the regional history alongside increasingly important global trends. While the contest between Peru and Chile highlights the battle between primordial versus constructed nationalism, it also places contested notions of nationalism alongside a growing spirit of internationalism. Woodrow Wilson’s proclamations at the end of World War I, especially his focus on self-determination and justice, directly inspired leaders in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru to seek a finalization of the Tacna-Arica dispute. Despite the hope that Wilsonian principals would win the day, traditional concepts such as economics and power proved victorious, which underscored the fragility of humanitarian rights and justice between the world wars. This investigation into how global trends influenced Tacna-Arica are placed alongside contemporary comparisons of plebiscites held in Europe between the world wars.

Igniting Change in Colonial Indonesia: Soemarsono’s Contestation of Colonial Hegemony in a Global Context
By Arnout H. C. Van Der Meer

In 1913, Javanese public prosecutor Soemarsono clashed with his colonial superior by refusing him traditional deference, donning European clothes, and actively engaging in nationalist associations. These actions culminated in an overhaul of the appearance of Dutch hegemony and a widespread emancipatory social change in colonial Indonesia. This history is best appreciated from a world historical perspective that includes both long-term historical processes that shaped Soemarsono’s world, such as the Indianization of Indonesia, the spread of Islam, and Western colonialism, as well as contemporary global developments, such as the rise of Japan, the Chinese revolution, Islamic Modernism, and the appeal of democratic principles. Soemarsono’s awareness of these global perspectives enabled him to successfully ignite change in colonial Indonesia. His story provides an approach that allows historians to emphasize how individual agents make history in a world historical context.

Playing Politics with the Youth: Aga Khan III’s Use of Colonial Education and the Ismaili Girl Guide Movement in British Colonial Tanganyika, 1920–1940
By Alia Paroo

This article assesses how Ismaili Muslim leaders in British colonial Tanganyika utilized Guiding and Victorian schooling philosophies in an attempt to negotiate for advancement within the colonial structure. Aga Khan III understood the role that followers were expected to play in the “Great Game” of imperialism and attempted to use cooperation to broker for increased opportunities within the system of subjugation. This article sets out to analyze then how the Aga Khan and his representative leaders in British colonial Tanganyika used youth programs to operate within these liminal spaces, in turn revealing the ongoing negotiations that took place between colonizer and the colonized.

Bombs in Beijing and Delhi: The Global Spread of Bomb-Making Technology and the Revolutionary Terrorism in Modern China and India
By Yin Cao

In early 1910, Chinese revolutionaries attempted to assassinate the regent of the Qing Empire by planting a bomb near his residence in Beijing. Two years later, an explosive of a similar type was used by Indian revolutionaries in their attempted assassination of the viceroy of the British Raj in Delhi. Investigating these two seemingly unconnected events demonstrates that radical political activists in both China and India acquired their explosive-making skills from diasporic Russian revolutionaries in Japan and France respectively after the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Although both assassination attempts failed and have largely been marginalized in the national narratives in both countries, the transnational connections between Chinese and Indian revolutionaries in their pursuit of learning the portable dynamite technology overseas sheds light on how modern Chinese and Indian history can be analyzed in a single framework. Staging Chinese and Indian revolutionary terrorism in the context of the cross-boundary circulation of dissident ideologies and technologies in the early twentieth century reexamines marginalized aspects of China’s 1911 Revolution and the Indian Nationalist Revolution that can be written as connected transnational history.

Putting Words in the Emperor’s Mouth: A Genealogy of Colonial Potential in the Study of Qing Chinese Diaspora
By Nicholas McGee

The Qing emperor Qianlong’s supposed response to the 1740 massacre of roughly 8,000 Chinese civilians in Dutch Batavia represents perhaps the most famous quotation by any Chinese emperor concerning the diaspora. Tracing a genealogy of the quote, this article contends that it was in fact invented and deployed by eighteenth and nineteenth century British authors in service of a discourse that framed Chinese migrants as ideal potential colonial recruits and the Qing state as secretly desiring their recruitment. Only in the twentieth century was it taken up by Chinese authors, who mourned the Qing’s failure to capitalize on this colonial potential in their efforts to construct a diaspora-centered national identity. Legacies of this translingual discourse endure, especially in the narrative that the Qing state forbade its subjects from going overseas, and disowned those who did so, until forced to allow Chinese indentured labor recruitment following the Second Opium War (1856–1860).

Plus book reviews.

Journal of World History 30-4
Journal of World History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2019)

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Romaniello returns to the Journal of World History

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The University of Hawai‘i Press welcomes Matthew P. Romaniello back to the Journal of World History. Romaniello, a Russian and world historian at Weber State University, was first appointed as associate editor by founding editor Jerry Bentley in 2011. Following Bentley’s retirement, Romaniello produced volumes 23 through 25 and served as the Center for World History director.

Romaniello now takes over the helm from editor-in-chief Fabio López Lázaro. Professor López Lázaro, from the University of Hawai‘i, edited the journal from 2014 to 2019 along with co-editors Kerry Ward from Rice University and Cátia Antunes from Leiden University. Michele Louro from Salem State University served as managing editor and Wensheng Wang from the University of Hawai‘i as Book Reviews Coordinating Editor.

The Journal of World History, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, has long been the leading research journal in the field of world history, often featuring approaches to economic and world systems. Looking ahead, Romaniello sees the opportunity for the Journal of World History to further include the scholarship of other comparative and transnational subfields of history, including medical, environmental, and social and gender history.

Prior to Weber, Romaniello spent eleven years at the University of Hawai‘i, where he was promoted to full professor. He has published two monographs,  Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), and is currently finishing a monograph on a study of health and illness in the Russian Empire, examining state regulation of colonial bodies. He is also the co-editor of four volumes of collected essays, with two more currently in production, and twenty articles on a variety of topics, but particularly in commodities history and material culture, the history of medicine and knowledge exchanges, and colonialism. In addition to his previous work with the Journal of World History, Romaniello has served as editor at Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberia Studies. 

The Journal of World History publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas. Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association.

Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Journal of World History 30-4

Journal of Word History, Vol 30, No. 3 (2019)

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Figure 2 from "Traveling Anthropophagy: The Depiction of Cannibalism in Modern Travel Writing, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries" by José María Hernández Gutiérrez, this issue: Ptolemaic Map of Africa (Geography, 1511). Anthropophagi are supposedly present in the southeast according to the map. Source: Rare Maps.
Figure 2 from “Traveling Anthropophagy: The Depiction of Cannibalism in Modern Travel Writing, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries” by José María Hernández Gutiérrez, this issue: Ptolemaic Map of Africa (Geography, 1511). Anthropophagi are supposedly present in the southeast according to the map. Source: Rare Maps.

 

This issue of the Journal of World History includes the following scholarly articles:

The Globalisation of Franciscan Poverty
By Julia McClure 

This article explores the Franciscans’ attempt to translate their local conception of poverty into a world order between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Studies of Franciscan poverty have generally been confined to Europe and to the Middle Ages, yet the pursuit of poverty also shaped the Franciscans’ global interactions across the medieval and early modern periods. This focus provides an alternative perspective not only on the history of the Franciscan Order but also on global history, which has often been conceptualised as the European expansion of commodities, money and markets. Economic expansion was in dialogue with an overlooked story of resistance to, and questioning of, the phenomena of money and markets, and the attempt to realise a vision of the world based upon a unifying, yet unequal, notion of poverty.

The First Global Turn: Chinese Contributions of Enlightenment World History
By Alexander Statman

This article argues that certain Enlightenment approaches to world history developed through engagement with Chinese texts. In the eighteenth century, two French savants, Michel-Ange le Roux Deshauterayes and Joseph de Guignes, read original Chinese language histories and deployed them to ask and answer world-historical questions. Deshauterayes drew from the sixteenth-century historian Nan Xuan to argue that the mariner’s compass was invented in ancient China and diffused to the west. De Guignes looked to Ma Duanlin’s fourteenth-century encyclopedia to explain how the Huns came from Central Asia to threaten the Roman Empire. Their conclusions and their methods contributed to Enlightenment historiography through the works of philosophes such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon. Enlightenment authors not only learned about China; they also learned from China.

Traveling Anthropophagy: The Depiction of Cannibalism in Modern Travel Writing, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
By José María Hernández Gutiérrez

Travel writing had a significant impact on the way cannibalism was to be interpreted and diffused from the sixteenth century onwards. By analyzing how much our current understanding of anthropophagy owes to the discourse of travel writing and the simultaneous interaction between concept and medium, a better understanding of its implications in philosophical, political and scientific discourse can be perceived. It also elaborates on how we built self-identification through the uses of fears and cultural stereotypes. A quick glance at the structure of travel writing helps conceptualize how the encounter with Native Americans by Christopher Columbus transformed the Western perceptions of cannibalism and determined relations with other peoples in the following centuries, from Polynesians to Africans. The repercussions of this dialectical process are still palpable today.

The War is Our War: Antifascism among Lebanese Leftist Intellectuals*
By Sana Tannoury-Karam

In the years preceding and during the Second World War, the Lebanese left founded and spearheaded a vibrant antifascist struggle in the Lebanese and wider Arab public sphere. Examining how Arab leftists organized against, debated, and rejected fascism and Nazism challenges the narrative of Arab cooperation with fascism. It also takes issue with viewing antifascism as simply reactive to fascism. Rather, this article shows that antifascists drew upon pre-war and interwar intellectual frameworks of nationalism and anticolonialism to create counterhegemonic discourses against fascism. It argues that those who opposed fascism were operating within a terrain of interconnected and overlapping structures of oppression that they saw facing their societies, specifically the nexus between colonialism and fascism, and their relation to Zionism. Lebanese antifascists built east-east networks of activism to create linkages between the Arab liberation struggle and other oppressed nations, thus converging their nationalist and internationalist projects.

Plus book reviews.

 

Journal of World History 30-3
Journal of World History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2019)

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Journal of World History Special Issue: Other Bandungs (Vol. 30, Nos. 1&2)

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FIGURE 1. Sjahrir arrives for the Asian Socialist Conference. Left to right: Ali Algadri, SutanSjahrir, U Ba Swe, and U Kyaw Nyein (Sjahrir Family Collection.
In “Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956” by Su Lin Lewis, this issue. Sutan Sjahrir arrives for the Asian Socialist Conference. Left to right: Ali Algadri, Sutan Sjahrir, U Ba Swe, and U Kyaw Nyein (Sjahrir Family Collection).

Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War 

Excerpted from the Editors’ Introduction:

On the cover of the Jakarta Reporters Club handbook to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference is an iconic photograph of a rickshaw driver looking up at a large billboard, featuring a map of the 29 participating nations stretching from China to Ghana. Bandung was once a colonial resort town, nestled in the mountainous tea plantations of West Java, and gained notoriety during the Indonesian Revolution, when Indonesians burned down part of their own town in response to the Dutch reoccupation of the city. Over six days in April, however, the modernist hillside bungalows housed not wealthy Dutchmen but the leaders of Asia’s largest powers. The city itself was overrun with diplomats, statesmen, journalists, and photographers enacting a spectacular moment of resurgence for nations emerging from colonial rule.

This special issue examines “other Bandungs”: conferences in the 1950s and 1960s that convened the decolonising world in different constellations. All the gatherings examined in this issue have in common that they were not styled as intergovernmental affairs. They did not convene heads of state, even though several of them were covertly or overtly state-sponsored. And none of them were completely disconnected from the state: delegations included civil servants, members of parliament, representatives of local and provincial governments, opposition leaders, government advisors, and state-appointed representatives. Together, they show the presence of a much broader Afro-Asian enthusiasm. While some of the early conferences foreshadow Bandung and solidify the connections that made the official conference possible, later conferences self-consciously claimed to be expressions of the Bandung Spirit, or at the very least located themselves vis-à-vis the Bandung conference.

Read the full introduction to the special issue by guest editors Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte here. 

Articles

A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism
Rachel Leow

Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956
Su Lin Lewis

Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ in 1950s Asia
Gerard McCann

“The People’s Bandung”: Local Anti-imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage
Carolien Stolte

Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference
Reem Abou-El-Fadl

Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History
Hanna Jansen

Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan
Ali Raza

Plus book reviews.

Journal of World History 30 1&2 cover

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Journal of World History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2018)

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This issue of the Journal of World History includes the following scholarly articles:

Daud Shah and Dar ul-Islam: Transnational Elements of Socio-religious Reforms among Muslims in the Madras Presidency*
By Sundara Vadlamudi

Colonial British India witnessed a large increase in the formation of socio-religious reform movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The major religious groups in British India sought to address the criticisms of Christian missionaries, enact responses to changing social and economic conditions under British imperialism, and attempt to resolve problems in their communities. This article examines the work of Daud Shah, an advocate for socio-religious reforms among Tamil-speaking Muslims in the Madras Presidency and the Bay of Bengal littoral. Existing research on Shah has examined his work within the context of social and political developments within the colonial Madras Presidency. This article argues that a proper assessment of Shah’s contribution to socio-religious reform can only be made by including the transnational aspects of his reform efforts, including sources of his religious knowledge and the impact of his actions on the diasporic community of Tamil Muslims in the Indian Ocean.

Divide to Unite: Ou Jujia, New Guangdong, and Provincial Consciousness in 1900s China
By Ying-Kit Chan

Under the “revolution paradigm” of existing Chinese historiography, Han Chinese intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are viewed as either supporting or resisting monarchical rule in Qing China (1644–1912). This article examines the implications of Guangdong intellectual Ou Jujia’s (1870–1912) magnum opus, New Guangdong, for late Qing politics. New Guangdong called for Guangdong’s independence from the Qing so that it could later reunite with other provinces as a federated China. Although Ou Jujia’s attempts to launch an independence movement had remained marginal to the reformist and revolutionary visions of governance and national unity, he embedded provincial consciousness in the modern, Western-inspired language of federalism. By suggesting that Guangdong could become a unique model province of a reformed China, Ou Jujia defined the “province” as the basic unit of Chinese federalism and made it central to discussions of China’s future in the 1900s.

Mysterious Ships, Troublesome Loans, and Rumors of War: The Tokugawa Arrest of Suetsugu Heizō Shigetomo
By Timothy Romans

By the late seventeenth century, independent maritime organizations such as the Suetsugu could not survive the changing dynamics of an East Asian maritime world that became increasingly polarized by Tokugawa Japan and the Qing Empire. Through their alliance to the Zheng family, the Suetsugu sought to maintain an independent network of merchants, smugglers, and pirates. Suetsugu connections to the Zheng family expanded Tokugawa commercial relations to ports throughout Asia. However, when the Qing conquered China in the mid-seventeenth century, Tokugawa Japan came to increasingly fear war with this emerging empire. The activities of the Zheng family and their allies, the Suetsugu, nearly brought East Asia to the brink of conflict in 1676. Instead of risking war with the Qing Empire, the Tokugawa chose to arrest and banish Suetsugu Heizō IV to maintain the stability of their regime within a multipolar international framework that was East Asia’s new reality.

Taking Children, Ruling Colonies: Child Removal and Colonial Subjugation in Australia, Canada, French Indochina, and the United States, 1870–1950s
By Christina Firpo and Margaret Jacobs

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French colonial government in Indochina and the settler colonial nations of the United States, Australia, and Canada all engaged in the systematic removal of Indigenous and/or mixed-race children from their families. All four governments placed the children in institutions that were meant to sever ties to their home communities, re-educate and assimilate them, and then slot them into particular roles in the colonial social order. By comparing child removal programs in these four colonial contexts, we contend that diverse colonial administrations used child removal as a key strategy of governance to address various political and demographic problems. In the settler colonial nations, child removal functioned primarily as a means of eliminating Indigenous identities, cultures, and land claims. In Indochina, the French carried out child removal to create a French colonial elite that would reside permanently in the colony. This comparative approach reveals significant insight into colonial practices, including authorities’ preoccupation with intimate family lives and children’s upbringing, how officials and reformers turned   to benevolent discourses to describe violent and coercive practices, how Indigenous women suffered from particular vilification, and how authorities removed Indigenous and/or mixed-race children to manage racial dynamics. The article particularly demonstrates the value of collaborative and comparative scholarship.

Plus book reviews.

 

Journal of World History Vol. 29 Issue 4
Journal of World History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2018)

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Journal of World History, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2018)

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This issue of the Journal of World History includes the following scholarly articles:

Oil Boom: Agriculture, Chemistry, and the Rise of Global Plant Fat Industries, ca. 1850–1920
By Jonathan Robins

Fats extracted from plants and animals are an important and understudied part of the industrialization of the “global North” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Demand for soap, lamp oil, candles, lubricants, and other products drove European and American efforts to extract fats from animals across the continents and oceans, and by the late nineteenth century a proportion of this fat entered the North’s food supply. Simultaneously, demand for edible and industrial fats appeared to be outstripping supplies. Plants emerged as an important source of fat in this period, as new technologies allowed plant fats to be transformed into more versatile and edible products. The transition to plant fats represented an important move down the food chain for Northern consumers, allowing for the efficient use of existing resources, as well as contributing to the ongoing extraction of raw materials from the tropics.

Spectacular Power in the Early Han and Roman Empires
By Rebecca Robinson

During their long reigns, Emperor Wu of the Western Han and Augustus of Rome respectively performed two spectacular ceremonies, the feng and shan sacrifices and the ludi saeculares. The performance of these ceremonies took place during a larger process of reforms to each state’s religious institutions and marked the culmination of these reforms. While there is no direct connection between the two rulers or their respective ceremonies, some of the salient characteristics can be compared. In both cases, the rulers claimed to revive ancient ceremonies, but incorporated new narratives of rulership into their performance. These spectacular ceremonies, performed in front of audiences, demonstrated the exalted position of the ruler, as well as the acceptance of the elites to the new order.

Beyond ‘Tribal Breakout’: Afghans in the History of Empire, ca. 1747–1818
By Jagjeet Lally

The narrative of ‘Tribal Breakout’ has allowed world historians to avoid narratives of the ‘decline of the East’ and the ‘rise of the West’—but only by casting Afghans as tribals whose incursions destabilized the Asian empires. This essay seeks to retrieve the constructive agency of Afghans during the so-called ‘colonial transition’ in South Asia. Their seizure of plunder was disbursed via the patronage of commercial groups, while careful economic management even led to economic expansion in a manner typical of some eighteenth-century states, thereby lubricating long-distance trade between south and central Asia. This was part of a process of Afghan state formation rooted in developments within the Mughal Empire, was typical of a process of imperial expansion evident in the histories of other empires, such as the Mughals, Ottomans, and Qing, and, thus, yields much to scholars interested in the patterns and processes of early-modern empires in general.

Plus book reviews.

Journal of World History 29-3 cover
Journal of World History, Volume 29, No. 3 (2018)

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Three International Journals Celebrate 30th Anniversary

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(HONOLULU, Hawai‘i)  The University of Hawai‘i Press celebrates the 30th Anniversary for three influential university-based journals—The Contemporary Pacific, Journal of World History, and Mānoa—in collaboration with the Center for Pacific Island Studies, Department of History, and the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

In the past three decades, these journals have attracted a growing, global audience for more than 6,300 articles read in over 170 countries. The Journal of World History served as a pioneer in the field of world history and continues to publish quality peer-reviewed articles and special issues quarterly. Research published in The Contemporary Pacific has shaped an entire field of Pacific Studies and has often demonstrated foresight and long-lasting relevance. Indeed, the journal kicked off its first issue in 1989 with an article on the potential impacts of climate change in the Pacific. Also among the journal’s most cited pieces are features published in its political reviews section which document the local and regional politics of Pacific Islands states. Mānoa brings to light new translations of international literature, highlighting the work of both emerging and established translators and authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel laureates. In 2018 alone, works from the three journals garnered more than one-quarter million downloads.  

The journals were founded in 1989 in response to the university president’s call to expand the journals published by UH Press. “Since being awarded the modest, three-year start-up funding, these journals now annually reach tens of thousands of researchers, scholars, students, and the general public,” said Joel Cosseboom, Interim Press Director & Publisher.

A special celebration was held at College Hill on March 13, commemorating the 30th anniversary of their founding. Learn more about The Contemporary Pacific, Journal of World History, and Mānoa below and at www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals.

The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs, edited by Alexander Mawyer

ISSN: 1043-898X  / E-ISSN: 1527-9464  Published twice a year.

Founding Editorial Team: Robert Kiste, Terence Wesley-Smith, David Hanlon, Brij Lal and Linley Chapman. Awarded Best New Journal (1990) from the Association of American Publishers. The journal editorial office is supported by the Center for Pacific Island Studies.

The journal covers a wide range of disciplines with the aim of providing comprehensive coverage of contemporary developments in the entire Pacific Islands region, including Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. It features refereed, readable articles that examine social, economic, political, ecological, and cultural topics, along with political reviews, book and media reviews, resource reviews, and a dialogue section with interviews and short essays. Each issue highlights the work of a Pacific Islander artist.

The Journal of World History: Official Journal of the World History Association, with editor-in-chief Fabio López Lázaro

ISSN: 1045-6007 / E-ISSN: 1527-8050  Published quarterly.

Founding Editor, Jerry Bentley with Imre Bard as Book Review Editor. Awarded Best New Journal (1990) from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The journal editorial office is supported by the Department of History.

JWH publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas. Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association.

Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, edited by Frank Stewart

ISSN: 1045-7909 / E-ISSN: 1527-943X Published twice a year.

Founding Editors, Frank Stewart and Robert Shapard.  Works in MĀNOA have been cited for excellence by the editors of such anthologies as Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Pushcart Prize. The journal editorial office is supported by the Department of English.

Mānoa is a unique, award-winning literary journal that includes American and international fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays of current cultural or literary interest. An outstanding feature of each issue is original translations of contemporary work from Asian and Pacific nations, selected for each issue by a special guest editor. Beautifully produced, Mānoa presents traditional alongside contemporary writings from the entire Pacific Rim, one of the world’s most dynamic literary regions.

University of Hawai‘i Press

The University of Hawai‘i Press supports the mission of the university through the publication of books and journals of exceptional merit. It strives to advance knowledge through the dissemination of scholarship—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—with a primary focus on Asian, Pacific, Hawaiian, Asian American, and global studies. It also serves the public interest by providing high-quality books and resource materials of educational value on topics related to Hawai‘i’s people, culture, and natural environment. Through its publications, the Press seeks to stimulate public debate and educate both within and outside the classroom.

UH Press is a member of the Association of University Presses and the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. The Press has also partnered with museums and associations to bring new or out-of-print titles into circulation, and offers publishing services for authors and partnering organizations.

News Release Date: March 19, 2019
Media contact: Pamela Wilson, Journals Manager
Pwilson6@hawaii.edu 808-956-6790

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