By Inaya Khan Colonialism not only encouraged the emigration of white populations from Europe to Africa but also circulations of such populations within the African continent itself. Kenya was formally annexed as a Crown colony in 1920 – a twentieth century experiment in the exertion of British hegemony, predominantly through agricultural settlement rather than trade. […]
What do the words for “lion” (狮子shīzi), “spinach” (菠菜bōcài), and “grape” (葡萄 (pútáo) all have in common in Chinese? They all derive, directly or indirectly, from either Persian roots or are otherwise etymologically or conceptually linked to Iran. Just how far back can ties between ancient China and early Iranian societies in Central Asia be […]
By Marcel Koschek Capturing networks and movements may be particularly difficult when they stretch across different countries and the sources seem unproductive at first glance. However, this piece will attempt to make precisely such a transnational movement accessible and also visualisable. The movement in mind here is the Esperanto movement. Esperanto – a planned language […]
By Argyrios Sakorafas The second half of the 19th century signifies the dawn of a new era, marked by unprecedented changes in the social, economic and technological level.[1] These changes, combined with the establishment of a capitalistic market and the steady rise in income per capita, produced a new range of consumer goods, such as […]
By Aaron Peters During the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) as Japan was extending its wartime empire across China and Southeast Asia to the borders of British India, a Japanese-language history of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 was published in May 1942 under the title, “India’s Independence War” (Indo dokuritsu sensō, 印度独立戦争). Its author was a man […]
By Maureen McCord Why did so many South Asians, in the early years of the nineteenth century, choose to become indentured laborers, signing five years of their lives away to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius? Previous work on the earliest years of Indian indentured labor—a labor practice which eventually spread from this small Mascarene […]
By Pallavi Das At the close of 2019, when the world was preparing to ring in the new year, two scourges were preparing to intensify their impact upon the world. On one hand, was the novel coronavirus that was wreaking havoc in China. On the other, was the locust infestation that had been plaguing the […]
By Dhevarajan Devadas Standing shuttered along Keppel Road today, the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station has witnessed the passing of Singapore’s colonial, post-war and post-independence eras. Once envisioned as “one of the most important nodal points in the whole world’s scheme of communications”, the station was buffeted by the evolution of transportation and the immense political […]
By Lula Murphy On a misty morning in 1982, Argentine forces disembarked on the Falkland Islands, beginning a war with the UK that ended with a death toll of 649 Argentine soldiers, 255 British soldiers, and three islanders.[1] However, the 74-day conflict which began that 2nd April was a new chapter in an older dispute […]
By Pablo Pryluka In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth. After signing an agreement with an MIT team, they developed a computational model that predicted the imminent collapse of planet Earth: the growing population was about to drain all the available resources and create a demographic collapse. Claiming such an apocalyptic […]