Empire in Asia

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Asia was the principle focus of empire-builders from Alexander and Akbar to Chinggis Khan and Qianlong and yet, until now, there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive history of empire in the region. Empire in Asia addresses the need for a thorough survey of the topic.
The two volumes of Empire in Asia offer a significant contribution to the theory and practice of empire when considered globally and comparatively and are essential reading for all students and scholars of global, imperial and Asian history.

The two volumes of Empire in Asia offer a significant contribution to the theory and practice of empire when considered globally and comparatively and are essential reading for all students and scholars of global, imperial and Asian history.

Volume I traces the evolution of a constellation of competing empires in Asia from the 13th through to the 18th centuries. It describes the history and characteristic features of imperial regimes in each major sub-region of Asia, from the Ottomans and Safavids in the West, Romanovs in the North, Mughals in the South, the Mongols & their successors in Inner Asia, to the Ming and Qing Dynasties in the East. Volume II covers the long 19th century, commonly seen in terms of 'high imperialism' and the global projection of Western power. It explores the dynamic, volatile and contested processes by which, by the early years of the 20th century, Asian states, space and peoples became deeply integrated into the wider dynamics of global reordering.

Contributors

Brian P. Farrell

Brian P. Farrell is Professor of history at the National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching since 1993. His research and teaching interests focus on the military history of the British Empire, the Western military experience in Asia, and the modern history of Empire in Asia. He is the author of The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940 – 1942 (2005) and The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940-1943: Was There a Plan? (1998), and coauthor of Between Two Oceans: A military History of Singapore from 1275 – 1971 (1999; 2010), plus related edited books, chapters in books, and journal articles. Series editor for Empire in Asia, and coeditor for Volumes One and Two, he is currently working on a coauthored study of Great Powers and the geopolitical reordering of the Asia Pacific in the twentieth century.

Jack Fairey

Jack Fairey's research work deals primarily with the history of the Mediterranean and Eastern Orthodox Christendom, with a particular interest in empires, religion and diplomacy. He was Ted & Elaine Athanassiades Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton in 2005-6, and has previously taught European, Ottoman and Mediterranean history at the National University of Singapore, and before that at Queens University and York University in Canada. His most recent publication, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), examines the role of the Orthodox Church as a locus for competing imperial agendas in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The monograph shows how competition between the British, Russian, French, Austrian and Ottoman governments over religious protectorates and clerical privileges contributed first to the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853–56) and then to secularizing reforms in the Ottoman Empire. His other publications have dealt with the impact of religion and imperial ideologies on group identity in the Balkans, as well as with the intersections of British, French, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean.

Donna Brunero

Donna Brunero is Senior Lecturer in History at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the intersections between maritime and imperial history, with a particular interest in the colonial port cities of Asia and the treaty ports of China. She has published and has forthcoming works relating to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Britons in China, maritime ethnography, and colonial representations of piracy in Asia. She is coeditor of Volume Two of Empire in Asia, the author of Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949 (2006) and has a forthcoming edited volume on material culture and port cities. Her current research project is on the representations of maritime Asia in the 19th century via East India Company journals.

Anthony Disney

Anthony Disney, MA (Oxon.) PhD (Harvard) is primarily a historian of the Portuguese empire in maritime Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about which he has written extensively. His works include Twilight of the Pepper Empire. Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century (1978; second edition 2010), A History of Portugal and of the Portuguese Empire. From Beginnings to 1807 (two volumes, 2009), The Portuguese in India and Other Studies, 1500-1700 (2009) and numerous articles, papers and other shorter works. He has taught at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities in Australia and has been a scholar emeritus at La Trobe since 2010. Anthony has also been a member of the International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History since its foundation in 1978. Currently he is writing a biography of Dom Miguel de Noronha, fourth Count of Linhares, who was viceroy at Goa between 1629 and 1635.

Bruce Lockhart

Bruce Lockhart is Associate Professor in the History Department at National University of Singapore. He trained at Cornell University in Southeast Asian history, and his specialization includes both Thailand and Indochina. His primary interest has always been the monarchy, and he has written a monograph on The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy (Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 1993). Currently he is working on a history of constitutional monarchy in Thailand. He has co-authored the third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Vietnam in the Scarecrow Press series and co-edited The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (NUS Press, 2011). He has also written several journal articles and book chapters on Vietnamese and Lao historiography. As a follow-up to his contribution to this volume, he hopes to look more deeply at French relations with Siam and Cambodia during the reign of King Mongkut (1851-68).

Florence Hodous

Florence Hodous is currently a post-doctoral scholar at Renmin University, Beijing, interested in the history of the Mongol empire and in particular its laws and its religions, as well as cross-cultural contacts between Yuan China and the Ilkhanate in Persia. From 2013 to 2016, post-doctoral scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, researching judges of the Mongol Empire. Publications include: “A Judge at the Crossroads of Cultures: Shi Tianlin,” (Asiatische Studien, forthcoming), “Faith and the Law: Religious Beliefs and the Death Penalty in the Ilkhanate” (in Bruno De Nicola ed., The Mongols’ Middle East, BRILL, 2016), “Clash or compromise? Mongol and Muslim law in the Ilkhanate (1258-1335)” (Studies on the Iranian World II, Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2015), “The quriltai as a legal institution in the Mongol empire,” (Central Asiatic Journal 56, 2012/2013). She completed her PhD “Toluid Dynamics of Asia: Flexibility, Legality and Identity within Toluid Institutions” in 2013 from SOAS, University of London, under the direction of George Lane.

Frederik Vermote

Frederik Vermote is an Assistant Professor Asian and World History at Fresno State University and a research fellow at the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. His research interests include Jesuit finances and travel between Europe and China during the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. His forthcoming and most recent publications include “Travellers Lost and Redirected: Jesuit Networks and the Limits of European Exploration in Asia” (Itinerario: The Journal of the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction); two book chapters on financing Jesuit missions in Brill and Oxford edited volumes; “Cash or Credit: Jesuit Money Flows during the Dawn of a Global World” (Mercantilism and Account Keeping: Comparative Analysis of the Periphery-Core Structure and its Impacts on Indigenous Market Players); and an article titled "Dangers and Limitations of Jesuit Travel Throughout Eurasia During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" (The World History Connected). Vermote’s book manuscript Moving Money and Missionaries in a Global World: The Jesuit Financial Networks between Europe and Asia is under contract with Brill.

Jinping Wang

John P. DiMoia

John P. DiMoia was Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore NUS from 2008 to 2016, and is now affiliated as a researcher with Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), based in Berlin. He works on the history of (1) medical practices (biomedical, “traditional”) and (2) the development of systems of infrastructure in Northeast Asia (eighteenth to twenty-first century), especially for energy and the two Koreas

Murari Kumar Jha

Murari Kumar Jha is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Historical Studies, Nalanda University, India. Earlier, he worked as a post doctoral fellow at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. He received training in history at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His forthcoming monograph deals with the Ganga River, the Mughal empire’s successes and failures along the river, and the interactions between the regional economy along the eastern tracks of the Ganga and the maritime global economy of the Bay of Bengal during 1500 – 1800 CE.

Odd Arne Westad

Odd Arne Westad is ST Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has won the Bancroft Prze, the Michael Harrington Award, and, for his book The Global Cold War, the Akira Iriye International History Book Award. His most recent major publications include Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (2012) and The Cold War: A World History (2017).

Paul Werth

Paul Werth is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, specializing in the history of the Russian Empire. He has held fellowships in Washington, North Carolina, Sapporo, and Munich, and for five years he was editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. His previous work has focused primarily on problems of religious diversity and toleration in Tsarist Russia, and his major publications include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (2002); The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (2014); and, in Russian, Orthodoxy, Unorthodoxy, Heterodoxy: Sketches on the Religious Diversity of the Russian Empire (Moscow, 2012). Having recently completed a term as head of his department, he is now researching a book on the significance of the seemingly obscure year 1837 for Russian history, while also contemplating future projects linking the histories of Russia and China.

Peter Borschberg

Peter Borschberg teaches history at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in Europe-Asian interactions in the early-modern period, mainly with a geographic focus on Southeast Asia. His is the author of several studies including The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the Seventeen Century (2011), as well as Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (2012).

Robert Bickers

Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol, and works on issues at the intersection of modern Chinese history, and the history of colonialism and empire. His books include Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003), The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (2011), and Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Foreign Domination (2017). He directs the “Historical Photographs of China” digitization project (www.hpcbristol.net) and currently leads a Hong Kong History Project. Britain’s imperial presence in Asia was an intermittent feature of his family history from 1885 for over a hundred years.

Sher Banu Khan

Sher Banu Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Malay Studies Department at the National University of Singapore. She received her advanced master's degree from Leiden University and her Ph.D. from Queen Mary, University of London. Her research interest is the Malay world and Southeast Asia in general in the early modern period focusing on state-formation, cross-cultural encounters, gender studies and Islam. She has published in numerous journals and chapters in books amongst which are “Ties that Unbind: the Botched Aceh-VOC Alliance for the conquest of Melaka 1640 – 1641”(Indonesia and the Malay World); “What Happened to Syaiful Rijal?” (Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde); “Men of Prowess and Women of Piety: The Rule of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh 1641 – 1675” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies); and “The Jewel Affair: The Sultanah, her Orangkaya and the Dutch Foreign Envoys” (M. Feener, P. Daly and A. Reid, eds, Mapping the Acehnese Past). Her latest book is titled Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641 – 1699 (2017).

Thomas David DuBois

Thomas David DuBois is a historian of modern China and transnational East Asia. He is the author of Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Hawaii 2005), and Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (Cambridge 2012), and most recently, Empire and the Meaning of Religion in Northeast Asia, Manchuria 1900-1945 (Cambridge 2017), as well as about two dozen scholarly articles on the legal, commercial and religious history of Northeast Asia. His popular and scholarly has been published in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian translation. His current project on China’s animal industries is conducted in conjunction with scholars at Hulunbuir University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Past Events

Reading Group

One major component of Empire in Asia: A New Global History is an active reading group, involving all project members. The project aims to reconsider the historical experience of empire in Asia, with particular reference to scholarship devoted to analyzing narratives, and systems, of world and global history. The major workshops the project will conduct are exercises in working through to a set of common questions and concerns that contributors can be asked to apply in their own particular study. Exploring the literature will thus help us lay a common intellectual foundation for conceptualizing our own question-driven approach to studying the historical experience of empire in Asia. We are less concerned with the field identified as "post-colonial" studies than with engaging global perspectives on what constituted an empire, and the evolution and operation of forms of supranational systems.

Empire in Asia

About

Contributors

Past Events

Reading Group

References