New Journal Special Issues: The Religiosity of Tonghak, Vietnamese Linguistics + More

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Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society

Special Issue:

Vietnamese Linguistics: State of the Field

The new issue features the following introduction by Trang Phan, John Phan, and Mark J. Alves

The current issue is the result of a workshop held at the Harvard Yenching Institute in April of 2021, entitled Vietnamese Linguistics, Typology and Language Universals, and which featured nineteen linguists working on diverse aspects of the Vietnamese language, ranging from semantics to historical phonology. Our purpose in gathering was to take stock of the great leaps in Vietnamese linguistic research that have occurred over the past few decades, to bring together cutting-edge research from each subdiscipline, and to begin a new collaborative dialogue on Vietnamese linguistics, typology, and language universals. Most of all, it was our belief that the time had come to reconsider Vietnamese linguistics as a unified field of inquiry. As a result, a new academic organization was founded: the International Society of Vietnamese Linguistics.
In the past twenty years, research into the Vietnamese language has advanced exponentially, in tandem with developments in our understanding of syntax, semantics, phonetics, and phonology—both on the synchronic and diachronic levels. Specific work on the Vietnamese language now informs and even leads broader linguistic inquiry in a number of unprecedented ways. These new developments invite a concentration of state-the-field research into a single volume, one that will serve not only to summarize current issues in each subdiscipline of Vietnamese linguistics, but also to initiate a longer, more collaborative conversation about the Vietnamese language.
Our goals in this special issue are thus twofold: first, we seek to provide a snapshot of current research into Vietnamese syntax, semantics, phonology, and phonetics, from both the historical and synchronic points of view, that may serve as a resource for linguists interested in exploring our current understanding of the Vietnamese language. Second, we hope that this issue will also serve as an invitation to all linguists working on the Vietnamese language or related languages to contribute to a broader, more cosmopolitan discussion—one in which discoveries of one subdiscipline may serve to inform or enlighten another.


Find more articles at eVols.

New Journal Issues: “Contagious Magic” in Japanese Theatre, Logistics of the Natural History Trade, Hawai‘i’s Toxic Plants + More

Recognizing Black History Month with Free Journal Content in February

In recognition of Black History Month, we offer the following journals, articles, and reviews. We invite you to explore and enjoy the following journal content online free through February 2022.

Journals Issues:

cover image 41-4

biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly

Volume 41, Number 4 (Fall 2018)

Special Issue: M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives

Introduction by Guest Editors Britney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey:

Understanding the stories presented in this special issue as simultaneously about violence, resistance, (in)justice, and freedom, we center interrogations and representations of individual and collective Black lives to unearth both the possibilities and potential challenges for those living and fighting in the era of the Movement for Black Lives. In our call for papers, we offered these questions: What does “life” mean in the context of M4BL? What is the fundamental
meaning of “lives” when centering those on the margins? Each of these pieces directly and indirectly responds to these questions. As editors, we continually converse about the distinction between Black lives and Black life, while always connecting through our unwavering commitment to both.

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly

Volume 36, Issue 3 (Summer 2013)

Special Issue: “He the One We All Knew”

Guest Contributor Njoroge Njoroge reflects on this issues dedication on the life and thought of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz known to most of Malcolm X. In reference to the compilation of articles in this issue Njoroge explains:

This cluster of essays is another re-discovery of Malcolm, one that attempts to give context and feeling to the life, world, words, and works of Malcolm. The collection is a modest contribution to the ongoing discussion, reevaluation, and interpretation of the life and political thought of Malcolm X. By examining the man and his times, in light of old wisdom and new scholarship, we can come to a better appreciation of Malcolm, the man and the myth. Each of the authors presents us with different “Malcolms”: He the one we all knew.

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Journal Articles:

biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly

Black Biography in the Service of a Revolution: Martin R. Delany in Afro-American Historiography
By Tunde Adeleke
Volume 17, Number 3, Summer 1994

African American Pioneers in Anthropology (review)
By B. C. Harrison
Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2000

Biography and the Political Unconscious: Ellison, Toomer, Jameson, and the Politics of Symptomatic Reading
By Barbara Foley
Volume 36, Number 4, Fall 2013

Digression, Slavery, and Failing to Return in the Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke
By Michael A. Chaney
Volume 39, Number 4, Fall 2016

Obituarizing Black Maleness, Obituarizing Prince
By Steven W. Thrasher
Volume 41, Number 1, Winter 2018

Call My Name: Using Biographical Storytelling to Reconceptualize the History of African Americans at Clemson University
By Rhondda Robinson Thomas
Volume 42, Number 3, Summer 2019

Buddhist-Christian Studies: Official Journal of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies

The Practice of Double Belonging and Afro-Buddhist Identity in Jan Willis’s Dreaming Me
By, Carolyn Medine
Volume 40, 2020

Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom ed. by Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl Giles, and: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care by Pamela Ayo Yetunde (review)
By Carolyn Jones Medine
Volume 41, 2021

Journal of World History: Official Journal of the World History Association

Coloring Universal History: Robert Benjamin Lewis’s Light and Truth (1843) and William Wells Brown’s The Black Man (1863)
By Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Volume 20, Number 1, March 2009

Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris
By Rachel Gillett
Volume 21, Number 3, September 2010

“Town of God”: Ota Benga, the Batetela Boys, and the Promise of Black America
By Karen Sotiropoulos
Volume 26, Number 1, March 2015

MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing 

Six Poems from Harlem Shadows
By Claude McKay
Volume 31, Number 2, (2019)

whatdoesfreemean?
By Catherine Filloux
Volume 32, Number 1 (2020)

Passing the Fire
By Wayne Karlin
Volume 32, Number 1 (2020)

I Investigate Lynchings
Walter White
Volume 32, Number 1 (2020)

Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

The Black Settlers on Saltspring Island, Canada, in the Nineteenth Century
By Charles C. Irby
Volume 36, 1974

New Journal Issues: Biography’s International Year in Review, Buddhist-Christian Studies, China Review International + More

Biography

Volume 44, Issue 1 (2021)

Special Issue: International Year in Review

Remembering Lauren Berlant

Contributors Riva Lehrer, Anna Poletti, and Rebecca Wanzo graciously provided this issue with estate artwork and tributes to Lauren Berlant.

From Anna Poletti’s More Flailing in Public:

For me, Berlant’s publications and their way of speaking with colleagues enacted and theorized core tensions that preoccupy lifewriting studies: what it means to be a person in public—sometimes alone, sometimes in a collective, sometimes in search of collectivity. Always thinking from, and beyond, psychoanalytic insights into the disorganizing experience of desire (largely through object-relations), Berlant explicated the kinds of stories about the good life that permeated American culture, and explored what happened to people’s belief in culture, politics, and themselves when they tried to live those narratives, or discovered those narratives were structurally unlivable (The Female Complaint; Cruel Optimism). Berlant’s early work on trauma (“Trauma and Ineloquence”) and their interviews (with Jay Prosser, and with Julie Rak and me) are the places where the relevance of their deep attention to the politics of “fantasies of the good life” are most clearly connected to lifewriting scholarship. Margaretta Jolly’s special issue of Biography on “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” published ten years ago, shows us how productive Berlant’s theory of the importance of being and feeling intimate in public can be for studying life writing, particularly online.

Oceanic Linguistics

Volume 60, Number 20 (2021)

This new issue contains a squib titled, “Three Puzzles for Phonological Theory in Philippine Minority Languages” by Jason W. Lobel, Robert Blust, and Erik Thomas.

An excerpt from this squib reads as follows:

In viewing language as an object of scientific inquiry, description alone has never been enough to satisfy most researchers. Once observations about one language are compared with those about another, there is a desire to generalize, to make statements about what is common and what is not, and therefore about what is expected and what is surprising in language content, structure, or change. In terms of theory construction, expected observations follow from basic assumptions about how language works and how it is embedded in the larger context of human neurophysiology and behavior. Much progress has been made in recent decades concerning the phonetic forces that give rise to phonological processes, and there is widespread agreement about many of these. This note describes three well-documented phonological processes in languages spoken by aboriginal Filipino populations along the Pacific coast of Luzon that do not conform to current theoretical expectations about what is a likely or even a possible diachronic process. Each of these is part of a larger context of sound change which does conform to theoretical expectation, although the details are complex, and still not widely reported in the literature. For this reason, a brief background survey of vocalic changes triggered by voiced stops will be given first, followed by the puzzling changes that depart from this more general pattern.

Find more research articles, squibs, and reviews at Project MUSE.

Pacific Science

Volume 65, Number 4 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

Population Divergence and Evolution of the Hawaiian Endemic Sesbania tomentosa (Fabaceae)
David M. Cole and Clifford W. Morden

Eleotris (Teleostei: Eleotridae) from Indonesia with Description of Three New Species Within the ‘melanosoma’ Neuromast Pattern Group
Marion I. Mennesson, Philippe Keith, Sopian Sauri, Frédéric Busson, Erwan Delrieu-Trottin, Gino Limmon, Tedjo Sukmono, Jiran, Renny Risdawati, Hadi Dahruddin, and Nicolas Hubert.

Three New Records of Marine Macroalgae from Viet Nam Based on Morphological Observations and Molecular Analyses by
Xuan-Vy Nguyen, Nhu-Thuy Nguyen-Nhat, Xuan-Thuy T. Nguyen, My-Ngan T. Nguyen, Viet-Ha Dao, and Karla J. McDermid.

The Structure and Dynamics of Endangered Forest Bird Communities in the Mariana Islands
Robert J. Craig

And the following article is available on Open Access:
Modeling Scenarios for the Management of Axis Deer in Hawai‘i
Steven C. Hess and Seth W. Judge

Find more research articles at Project MUSE.

Journal of World History, Vol 32#3

Special Issue: Development in World History – Development as World History
Guest Editor: Iris Borowy

Table of Contents

Introduction by Iris Borowy 
The introduction to this issue is free to read online!

Children in the Development Debate: The Role of UNICEF from 1947 to the First UN Development Decade 
by Angela Villani

Socialist Internationalism, World Capitalism, and the Global South: Soviet Foreign Economic Policy and India in Times of Cold War and Decolonization, 1950s–1960s
by Andreas Hilger

The Middle Zone: The 1964 UN Conference on Trade and Development and the Australian Responsecover image
by Nicholas Ferns

From Bullets to Bricks: Chinese Foreign Aid to Guyana During the Mao-Era, 1972-1976
by Jared Ward

Human Excreta: Hazardous Waste or Valuable Resource? Shifting Views of Modernity
by Iris Borowy

Book Reviews

Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel
Reviewed by Benjamin Reilly

Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith
Reviewed by Pinar Emiralioğlu

Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State by Radhika Mongia, and: Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67 by Stan Neal
Reviewed by Jamie Banks

Contested Territory: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam by Christian C. Lentz
Reviewed by Matthew Masur

 

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.

For information on how to submit your manuscript or to subscribe, please visit the journal homepage.

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

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.

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

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.

 

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

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!

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, Vol 31, No. 1 (2020)

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.

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

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)

Romaniello returns to the Journal of World History

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