Although inspired by the nineteenth-century term ‘Silk Road(s)’, the phrase ‘Maritime Silk Road’ has its own origins, connotations, and applications. This article examines the emergence of the latter term as a China-centric concept and its various entanglements since the early 1980s, involving the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political bodies, academia, the ‘open door’ policy, the pursuit of World Heritage listings, and the current ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. These entanglements, the article contends, have resulted in the emergence of what could be called a ‘Maritime Silk Road’ ecosystem in the PRC. The analysis of this ecosystem presented in the article reveals not only the processes through which a narrative on China’s engagement with the maritime world has been constructed over time, but also its association with issues of national pride, heritage- and tradition-making, foreign-policy objectives, and claims to territorial sovereignty. As such, the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ must be understood as a concept that is intimately entwined with the recent history of the PRC and distinct from its nineteenth-century antecedent, which was used as a label for overland connectivity.

While participating in the discourse of world religions, Japanese biographers published accounts of Muhammad’s life in many genres of academic and popular books during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1868–1926). This article unravels how these biographical accounts played a crucial role in facilitating a geographical imaginary of Asia/the East which incorporated both Japan and West Asia. Situated in a radically different context from the Victorian biographers who inspired them, Japanese biographers constantly compared Muhammad to historical figures familiar to them, most notably Buddha and Nichiren, and reinterpreted the life of Muhammad, relying exclusively on European-language sources. In particular, in contrast to another strand of pan-Asianism that stressed peacefulness as an inherent quality of the East, the biographers identified Muhammad’s perceived militancy and the miracles he performed as signs of the values shared by Japan and Islamic civilization. Using the person of Muhammad as a concrete piece of evidence, Japanese biographers reimagined an Eastern civilizational space that could stretch from Tokyo to Mecca.

This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ci) as a site of contention over national sovereignty and belonging. The shrine originated in Sun Yat-sen's aspiration to commemorate the anti-imperial martyrs of the 1911 Republic and in the Nationalist government's attempt to marshal political allegiance in the 1920s–1940s. Upon fleeing from the mainland to Taiwan after losing to the Communist forces in 1949, the Nationalist leadership renovated the Japanese-built National Protection Shrine in Taipei, transforming it into the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine to house the displaced spirits of the national dead. Throughout the Cold War era, the spring and autumn sacrifices performed by heads of state and visits to the shrine by foreign dignities served to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China vis-à-vis the People's Republic of China. Even though the end of martial law in 1987 opened a new era marked by the Nationalist Party's loss of political hegemony, the shrine continued to adhere to the Nationalist Party's ideology and version of history. Far from embodying a place of remembrance and mourning for war victims, the palace-style compound is a site of contested sovereignty exaggerated by China's extraordinary growth and Taiwan's transforming identity. The enshrined dead have found a new role as both an assertion of the island's autonomy and a reflection of its dynamism. The departed, albeit silent, hold power in the malleability of their memories, and each permutation of how the past is remembered hosts its own tension.

This article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

The mid-1950s saw the relationship between China and Indonesia evolve from one of mutual hostility to one of fraternity as a trend of détente emerged out of the Geneva (1954) and the Bandung (1955) conferences. This article explores why and how the two newly independent nations applied art diplomacy to reduce their ideological differences and facilitate their commercial and political rapprochements for the sake of Asian solidarity. Through contextualizing a series of art activities between the two nations, especially China’s reproduction of President Sukarno’s private collection of paintings and Chairman Mao Zedong’s gifts of Chinese ink paintings to President Sukarno, this article argues that interactions in the name of art exemplify how China shaped its modern profile as an independent and industrialized power. It will also show how China deviated from its diplomacy of ‘Leaning to One Side’, formulated in the late 1940s, towards the ‘Peaceful United Front’ of the mid-1950s. More broadly, art relations between China and Indonesia reflect intensive cultural exchanges between the newly independent, yet ideologically clashing, nations of the Third World in the postwar period and offer a multifaceted history of the Cold War beyond the binary paradigm of the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

In recent years, a new trend of performing a ‘good death’ has swept Japanese society. Popular, especially among the elderly, shūkatsu (終活) refers to the phenomenon of preparing for one's own demise through various practices, in particular, the writing of an ‘ending note (エンディングノート)’. A will designates the beneficiaries of one's estate or property after one's passing, whereas an ending note not only includes financial and legal matters, it goes far beyond that. It contains provisions for the deceased-to-be's end-of-life treatments, such as hospice care, as well as explicit instructions for seemingly mundane details such as the guest list, flower arrangements, and casket for one's funeral. This trend of engaging in shūkatsu can be viewed as a part of the biopolitics of a super-ageing Japanese society in which the elderly are now expected to manage all aspects of their own lives—including the disposal of their bodily remains when they pass away. Yet, as this anthropologically informed analysis discloses, such biopolitics also gives rise to a new set of ethical dilemmas for the elderly and their families, constituting a new form of politics of life and death. Indeed, rejecting the neoliberal injunction to efficiently separate death from life, many elderly try to recover—and resituate—death within the social and ethical realm of the living.

Focusing on wartime journalism and nonfiction, this article analyses how nationalist Indians made sense of the war’s political and moral causes and goals, and how such understandings shaped the war’s longer historical resonance in India. The article centres on the wartime publications of the writer and journalist Dosabhai Framji Karaka, juxtaposing them with those of his colleagues in the nationalist newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle. Tracing the unfolding of the war through Karaka’s eyes, the article delineates the acute dilemma that the Second World War posed for nationalist Indians, between the struggle for liberation from colonial rule and the global struggle against fascism. It suggests that contemporaries perceived this dilemma as a choice between nationalism and internationalism. The war dealt a severe blow to the more fluid and capacious political imagination of interwar leftist internationalism, espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers. While substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the interwar period, this article puts a spotlight on the war, especially the pivotal year of 1942, as a distinct period that should be understood on its own historical terms—terms specific to war, with the urgency that arose from horrendous violence, unpredictable outcomes of battles on multiple fronts, and existential threats to nations and the global order. Such unprecedented pressures and constraints bifurcated the range of possibilities and forced historical actors to make difficult choices. The article shows how, during 1942, Karaka’s position parted ways with that of his peers, who more steadfastly represented the Congress stance.

The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by regular famines and scarcities in India, and famine public works were one of the chief ways for the colonial state to provide relief. Famine public works involved labourers, including a large number of women, working in the construction of railways, roads, canals, and tanks in return for a subsistence wage. The present article contextualizes the practices of famine public works, especially the segregation of famine public works into large departmental and village works, within the intersecting processes of labour, caste, and gender. Drawing on evidence from North Western Provinces and Punjab, the article makes two arguments. First, it shows that segregation in famine works was driven by a shared understanding of the dominant castes and colonial state regarding labour, property, and caste which ensured that village works were reserved for dominant castes. A relational definition of labour was central to the construction of caste respectability on famine works. Second, by comparing the sex ratio of labourers in the two kinds of famine works, the article argues that women's labour was not merely a marker of caste, but constitutive of it.

The emergence in eighteenth-century India of literary compositions that used the elite registers of what was, at the time, called ‘Rekhtah’, and later defined as Urdu, is poorly understood. Conventionally, after an initial infatuation in Delhi with the works of Vali Dakhani,1 a mid-century break is assumed, exemplified by the revision of Zuhur ud-Din Hatim’s Divan as Divanzadah in the 1750s. Scholars have viewed this as a radical intervention in the creation of Urdu, which excised old vernacular models and embraced further Persianization. This article re-examines the evidence, combining methodologies from literary and historical studies. It points to the continuities present in Hatim’s revision, including sustained engagement with Vali, even as Hatim attempted to appeal to new audiences, incorporating new trends alongside older literary models. Foregrounding literary networks and arenas of poetic practice shows the limited impact of the proscriptions and literary criticisms voiced by Hatim’s critics. In studying the contested space of literary aesthetics and linguistic shifts against self-fashioning within changing networks, this article demonstrates that the relationship between the Persianate and vernacular sphere continued to be generative, rather than oppositional or hierarchical.

In the intellectual history of modern Japan, the late 1880s epitomized the Meiji government’s effort to ‘civilize’ through Westernization, driven by the social Darwinian vision of the survival of the fittest. During this period in the United States, the ideas of civilization theory, informed by the very antithesis of the Meiji state’s understanding, surfaced in the life and work of the aspiring young naturalist-botanist Minakata Kumagusu. He imagined a ‘different kind of civilization’ as he re-examined the nature of social evolution in microbes by turning to Indian-and-Chinese-derived knowledge of his home region of Kii, Japan. Buddhism, persecuted by the Meiji regime, most notably enabled his scientific enquiry, while the encyclopedic work of Wakan Sansai Zue (The Illustrated Three Knowledge of Sino-Japan) became another key inspiration. Chinese historiography and Confucian thoughts additionally facilitated his reasoning.

What interconnected all of these strands was what the author refers to as ‘queer nature’: the basis for truths whose ontological and experiential qualities resembled the microbe slime mould. Similar to this microbe that captured Kumagusu’s imagination, with queer nature the process of knowing defied the epistemological dichotomies and hierarchies that were fundamental to the social Darwinian theory of evolution. Experientially, it attracted the knower’s attention, induced their desire for intimacy with strange and curious others, and propelled greater intellectual enquiries. The article thus demonstrates a queer theory of intellectual history rooted in modern Japan, whose intellectual lineage derived from India and China instead of the West.

Mecca is often conceptualized as a destination for the ḥajj or a source of leverage for both western and Ottoman imperial states, and in the twentieth century, for Saudi national foreign policy and Islamist movements. While building on such transnational angles, this article views the city as a convergence point for diaspora populations, an intermediary site that has received and redirected the mobilities of sojourners, refugees, and exiles from different parts of Asia throughout the manifold turnovers of the twentieth century. The article focuses on a community of first- to third-generation settlers in the Hejaz who trace their other homes to different places in China proper. Using archival documents, travelogues, and ethnographic interviews, the article argues that the routes to Mecca, coupled with imaginaries of the city as a home place for Muslims worldwide, served as a rare constant orienting force that sustained two-directional mobilities of Chinese Muslim diasporas through the wars and revolutions of modern times.

This article traces the early stages of urban electrification in the French protectorate of Tonkin (in Vietnam’s north) from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. It focuses on Hanoi, where in 1895 the French entrepreneurs Hermenier and Planté secured a concession for lighting the streets of the soon-to-be capital of French Indochina. Before long, the city’s fast-paced development and the concomitant rise in demand for both public and private lighting necessitated contractual amendments and further capital investment in the upgrading of the power station and grid extensions. In 1902, Hermenier converted the business into a joint stock company named the Société Indochinoise d’Électricité with the aim of enabling further growth and geographical expansion. Contractual arrangements were frequently renegotiated and adjusted to new circumstances. However, electricity supplies kept lagging behind the fast pace of demand growth. During the post-First World War years of colonial economic expansion, power failures and blackouts became a routine occurrence and were a frequent target of press coverage. It was only in the late 1920s that electricity supplies improved and turned Hanoi into a city of lights. Although the majority of Vietnamese residents remained excluded from private electricity access throughout the colonial period, electric power quickly became a fact of everyday life for an emerging Vietnamese urban bourgeoisie and served as a marker of modern sophistication. Plans for an interconnected distribution network in the Tonkin delta subsequently also triggered hopes for an electrified future for the countryside.

This article looks at lawsuits surrounding two Chinese cemeteries in the mid-twentieth century South Korean cities of Incheon and Seoul as crucial sites to examine the post-colonial legal construction of national citizenry based on property rights. While different legal rationales were employed in each case, the two Chinese cemeteries were relocated to the periphery of each city as a consequence of the litigation. In Incheon, it was argued that the cemetery was owned by Chinese nationals whose land rights were ambiguous and hence open to question, both during the colonial and post-colonial period. On the other hand, in Seoul, rights to the cemetery were at stake due to its association with Japanese nationals, whose holdings were regarded as ‘enemy properties’ in the post-colonial years. Not only were the lawsuits symbolic events that foreshadowed the displacement of Chinese residents from what was considered to be Korea's national land, they also revealed an operative ambiguity in the post-colonial legal system, readily exploited as a tool for discrimination. Drawing upon an analysis of these cases, I argue that the Chinese cemeteries served as a reminder that uncertainty and ambiguity were on tap in the legal workings of post-colonial society, manifested in blunt efforts to define its legitimate members and dictate who is entitled to be buried within a nation's borders.

This article revisits Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of nationalism as well as his interventions on the theme of samaj. The claim is that contained within Tagore’s reflections on nationalism and samaj is a vision of political community that is stipulated as an alternative to the one espoused by the nation-state mode of politics. Tagore’s formulations of the possibilities within samaj suggest his commitment to normative orders grounded in a notion of relationship as a basis for social cooperation. Tagore contrasts and prioritizes the relationship-based orientation of samaj with what he calls the ‘mechanical’ emphasis of forms of community associated with the nation-state. Tagore articulated his views during the high noon of anti-colonial nationalism in India, and he offers a striking secular and modern political alternative to nationalist visions of community, which I classify as upholding a vision of societal politics. In underscoring the modern and political bases of Tagore’s critique of nationalism and his endorsement of social and political forms related to samaj, I suggest that it would be a mistake to classify Tagore’s perspective on nationalism and samaj as reflecting anti-political, or local-traditionalist, or aesthetic responses to the problems attached to national models of community.

Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.

This article argues that the genealogy of modern anti-caste critique is incomplete without a contextualized and close reading of Jatibhed Viveksar, a nineteenth-century Marathi-language text written under the pseudonym Ek Hindu (‘One Hindu’ or ‘A Hindu’). One of the first lower-caste commentaries in the Marathi print-world, the treatise clearly departed from the earlier iterations of non-Brahman caste politics in western India and laid the groundwork for what later came to be known as the ‘anti-caste movement’. I demonstrate how Jatibhed Viveksar engaged with preceding expressions of caste politics in western India by disputing two commonly deployed concepts in early modern caste controversies: first, the received proscriptions against varna sankara (or the intermixing of castes) and, second, the idea that the Shudras were the progeny of the ‘moral failure’ of varna sankara. Ek Hindu argued that not just the Shudras, but the Brahmans too have mixed-caste ancestors and thus cannot claim purity of lineage. Moreover, the author wrested the Shudras from a constellation of negative meanings by deploying the ‘Aryan invasion narrative’; he represented them as indigenous heroes who were vanquished by the Aryan-Brahmans. The conceptual innovations, intellectual sources, and frames of thought mobilized by Jatibhed Viveksar have significantly shaped the common sense of the ensuing articulations of anti-caste politics.

A variety of wormwood, Artemisia cina, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian Turkestan. Santonin, a drug derived from it, was in high demand. Flowers harvested by Kazakhs were handed over to intermediaries to be processed in Europe, but from the 1880s entrepreneurs from different parts of the Russian empire established their own chemical plants in Chimkent and Tashkent. They pressured the Russian imperial government to restrict the rights of the Kazakhs on land where Artemisia cina grew, and grant them the exclusive right to exploit this resource. These entrepreneurs used conservationist arguments and advocated a ‘cultured’ approach to the management of natural resources located on supposedly ‘State land’. These attempts collided with the usage rights of the Kazakhs, as defined by Turkestan’s governing Statute. By shifting the argument to the political, rather than legal, level, the industrialists eventually gained a monopoly to the exclusion of local entrepreneurs and even assumed State-like functions. This article reconstructs this controversy and allows a glimpse into the evolving claims to natural resources in the ‘periphery’ by both Tsarist colonial power and the Kazakhs themselves. The article also explores the features of autochthonous and Russian entrepreneurship and situates Turkestan in a web of trade connections to the global pharmaceutical industry.

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang (‘Great Northern Wilderness’) in the country’s northeast. The term ‘Beidahuang’ refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation’s borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China’s northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership’s turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia.

The Ming-Qing transition (1618–1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was a source of inspiration for writers across East Asia. Unofficial, contemporary histories written by Ming and early Qing subjects made their way by land and sea to Korea and Japan, where they were either adapted for domestic audiences or used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition.

This article makes the argument that unofficial, contemporary history-writing about the Ming-Qing transition in China, Korea, and Japan was part of a regional trend towards an intellectual culture of contemporaneity. While scholars have focused on the transition and its impact upon notions of cultural centrality, it should be emphasized that these notions emerged alongside developments encouraging the production and circulation of contemporary, cross-cultural knowledge and information. In other words, the flourishing of print, diversification of reading audiences, and evolution of new modes of knowledge-production and transmission formed a background against which demand increased for updated information about a shared world. Participation as producers (writers and editors) and consumers (readers) in this seventeenth-century culture of contemporaneity was restricted by language, schooling, and economic standing. Nonetheless, a transnational history perspective will show that the unofficial, multi-vocal, and multilingual historiography of the Ming-Qing transition encourages a re-evaluation of not only the intellectual history of East Asia, but also the history of the transition.