Chasing Dragons

About

These two volumes very directly pick up where Empire in Asia left off, at the dawn of the twentieth century. Their purpose is to explain the role and influence of Great Powers and strategic foreign policy in politically reordering the modern ‘Far East’— which we shall refer to as the Asia Pacific, an arc of space stretching from Vladivostok to Burma—with particular reference to Western military power, whose twentieth century starting position was imperial. While we will critically analyze antecedents, the real starting point for the series will be 1900. The vantage point from which the books explore their subject is the definition and articulation of sweeping international fundamental ‘visions’ for reordering an Asian states system--within a changing, now global, political order.

We will examine three such visions: 1) the peace treaties of 1919 and the League of Nations (a corollary being the Washington Agreements of 1922); 2) the United Nations vision of 1945; 3) the Geneva Agreements of 1954. This will allow us to engage the period from the internationalization of China’s relations with the Great Powers through the 1970s, the end of the era when Western Powers sought to use their military power as a principal instrument for politically reordering the Asia Pacific. The three ‘visions’ sketched out broad agendas within which those efforts unfolded; they tried to define ‘the rules.’ Concentrating on three themes— 1) notions of international order 2) concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy and 3) projects for collective security—and bearing in mind the centrality of China and Japan--we will explain why and how these visions, and the power deployed to pursue them, contributed fundamentally to the construction of a post-imperial Asia Pacific, with a states system hard coded into a now global political order.

Team Members

Brian P. Farrell (Co-Principal Investigator)

Brian P. Farrell is Professor of Military History at the National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching since 1993 and is Co-Principal Investigator on the Chasing Dragons project. His major publications include Empire in Asia: A New Global History, 2 vols. (contributing Series Editor and Co-Editor, 2018), The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942 (2015 and 2005), The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940-1943: Was there a Plan? (1998) and Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore From 1275 to 1971 (Co-Author, 2010 and 1999).

Joey Long (Co-Principal Investigator)

Joey Long is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore and Co-Principal Investigator on the Chasing Dragons project. He received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Safe for Decolonization: The Eisenhower Administration, Britain, and Singapore (2011) and a number of articles on the Cold War in Southeast Asia, the history of Singapore, and Asia-Pacific security.

Andrea Benvenuti (Contributor)

Andrea Benvenuti is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Educated at Florence University, Monash University and Oxford University, Andrea Benvenuti currently teaches twentieth-century international history and diplomacy at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research interests lie in the field of post-1945 international history with a strong focus on the Cold War in both Asia and Europe. He recently published Cold War and Decolonisation: Australia’s Policy towards Britain’s End of Empire in Southeast Asia with NUS Press.

Shannon A. Brown (Contributor)

Shannon A. Brown Shannon Brown is Senior Lecturer at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, his work focuses on the history of technology; the intersections between the public and private sectors in connection with security studies and public policy; and contemporary challenges to state sovereignty. At CHDS, he teaches courses on the interagency process, internet and society, and leadership for government executives.

Charles Burgess (Contributor)

Charles Burgess is a PhD candidate in military history at the National University of Singapore. He holds a BA degree in history from American University and an MPhil degree in history from the University of Glasgow. Prior to embarking on his PhD studies, Charles spent nearly 15 years working for the US government in various Asia-focused analytical and operational positions, including a diplomatic position at the US Embassy in Manila. Charles' broad research interests are military, diplomatic, and international history, focusing on grand strategy and coalition warfare. His PhD thesis examines the intersection of anti-Japanese resistance and Allied strategy in WWII in the area now called Southeast Asia.

karl Hack (Contributor)

Karl Hack is Professor of Asian and Imperial History at The Open University, UK. Significant publications include Defence and Decolonisation in Southeast Asia (2001), Did Singapore Have to Fall? (2004, with Kevin Blackburn), Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party (2004, with C.C. Chin), War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (2012, with Kevin Blackburn), and ‘The Malayan Emergency as a Counterinsurgency Paradigm’, JSS, 2009. His next works are ‘Unfinished Decolonisation and Globalisation’ in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming 2019), and a major new history of the Malayan Emergency and decolonisation with CUP (forthcoming 2021).

Marek Rutkowski (Contributor)

Marek Rutkowski is Lecturer in Global Studies at Monash University Malaysia. He completed his PhD dissertation at the National University of Singapore in 2017 on the subject of the International Control Commission in Vietnam. His research focuses on the intersection of the Global Cold War and decolonisation in Asia with an emphasis on non-alignment, development and the role played by Eastern European actors.

Yamamoto Fumihito (Independent Scholar)

Yamamoto Fumihito is an independent scholar based in Tokyo. He earned his PhD in History from NUS in 2010. His book, Nichiei-Kaisen Eno Michi (The Road to the Anglo-Japanese War) (2016), published in Japanese, examines Japanese south-bound policies towards Singapore in the inter-war period. His major publications include Kensho Taiheiyo-Senso to sono Senryaku (Studies of the Pacific War and Its Strategies), 3 vols. (Co-editor, 2013). He is also a translator working on translating major English books into Japanese, including Niall Ferguson’s Empire (2018) and Kishore Mahbubani’s The Great Convergence (2015).

Workshop 2017

Our penultimate Workshop finally sorted out the question of the broad scope and general approach of the project, concentrating on periodization, connecting central theme, and individual areas of concentration. The ideas of the ‘three plus visions’ and the three themes of order, legitimacy and collective security were herein nailed down. Questions that remained under discussion included the nature and importance of the 1954 Geneva conference and agreements, as in how they are to be characterized, and the issue of when, and why, to bring our analysis to a close—our ‘end date.’