This final chapter takes a closer look at how Indigenous peoples’ pasts were excluded from history research and teaching under the Japanese colonial regime. Imperial historians created an outside narrative – a mix of silencing and othering – that drew heavily on colonial tropes of difference and backwardness. As a result, Taiwanese–Japanese encounters were only reluctantly included in the otherwise expansive historiography of early modern foreign relations. This may seem a contradiction to Murakami’s fascination with Indigenous sources such as the Sinkan manuscripts. Sinkan manuscripts, which refer to land rental agreements concluded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are in itself colonial hybrids, mirrors his obsession with the discoverable written archive and thus another aspect of his scholarly colonialism.

Musk announced Tesla’s decision to go direct to consumers after looking at the history of the legacy car companies with their increasingly onerous dealer networks and the failure of recent EV startups such as Fisker that had tried to sell through dealers. Chapter 2 examines Tesla’s direct sales decision both in Tesla’s own words and with supporting evidence on why selling EVs through franchised dealers is an unworkable business strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that almost every other EV startup has chosen a direct sales approach as well.

This chapter tells the history of European urban heritage by evaluating its conceptual evolution, its relation to the major waves of urbanisation, and its role in shaping the historic quarters and the forms of urban governance as guiding indicators. The growing complexity of urban heritage integrates different types of expertise, social involvement and forms of governance. The urban growth of many nineteenth-century European cities led to their spread and to the replanning of their centres. Whereas many European city centres provided a privileged area for the political instrumentalisation of public remembrance, many became sites of industrial urbanisation. For the latter, deurbanisation usually accelerated after the Second World War due to the mass destruction or by faster industrialisation. From the 1970s, this tendency was reversed, with reurbanisation redefining these neighbourhoods. Although these processes do not entirely follow the same rhythm, they roughly determine four periods divided by the Second World War, the 1970s and 2000. Authenticity – as a historical reference, as a principle of heritage conservation, or as a constructive element of current identity-formations – remained the standard for safeguarding urban heritage and the conceptual bridge between the representation of the historic city and the urban realities in its place.

A transformation of the concept of celibacy led to exclusion of priests sons and other illegitimate men from clerical careers, but the rigour of the rule was increasingly tempered by dispensation.

In the first section of the chapter, basic patterns of urban economic development are presented in general terms. Its conditions and dynamics are discussed from the perspective of the New Economic Geography, historical caesuras of the political/institutional environment, and determining technological trends. According to these dimensions, the overall development is divided into the three phases: the first industrialisation (until the 1880s), the second industrialisation (until 1960/1970s) and more recent post-industrial or post-Fordist developments (since the 1980s). Further sections illustrate the patterns of development, and the summary provides an overview of the most important findings.

Focusing on the implementation of southern seas history (nan’yō shi) at the Japanese imperial university in Taipei under Murakami’s tutelage, the chapter examines the effects of colonial knowledge practices on imperial Japan’s expansion into Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from postcolonial studies and decolonial thought, the chapter maps out how Murakami, along with his students and peers, researched, disseminated, and ultimately marginalized Indigenous and local agency in Southeast Asian and Taiwanese history. It examines the long-term historiographical effects of relying heavily on European colonial records, curricular and language choices, and a general overemphasis on Japanese historical agency.

This chapter examines how Emmanuel Dongala employs the symbol of China in his fiction to criticize one-party rule in the People’s Republic of the Congo. The symbol is part of a larger invocation of Third Worldism as a key geopolitical and intellectual backdrop for African literature during the twentieth century. The chapter explores the contradictions between postcolonialism and “scientific socialism” via the figure of the “African Mao.” As a symbol, Maoism functions as a paradox in Dongala’s work, inspiring idealism and catalyzing disillusionment; it manifests in characterization (dress, speech, and action) as well as in rhetorical figures (stream of consciousness, intertextuality, and malapropism). The chapter shows how the trope of China crystallizes the perils of Congolese postcolonialism when vernacular convention contests the dogma of revolutionary tautology.