Empires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.

Discussions of the difference between Indigenous and Western legal systems, and the subsequent potential weaving of the two, have become a focus of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) law academics and practitioners in recent years. Furthermore, industrial relations may have the potential to further some of this weaving within the world of work. This paper explores the weaving of tikanga Māori (Māori legal systems) and English-derived state law within Aotearoa NZ workplace personal grievance processes, by explaining the meaning of tikanga Māori concepts and their potential application to workplace personal grievance processes. It asks: what is the tikanga Māori take–utu–ea (∼cause–reciprocation–satisfaction) framework in relation to workplace personal grievances? What role could such a framework potentially have in ensuring reciprocal, mana (status)-enhancing approaches for personal grievance processes? This paper shows how current workplace personal grievance processes in Aotearoa NZ often produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and such outcomes are not conducive to maintaining or improving employment relationships. Such processes not only uphold obligations and duties to Indigenous peoples in a workplace context but also improve outcomes for all working peoples. Overall, this paper contributes to an emerging, broader discussion about the world of work and current grievance systems, and how these are unsuitable for the modern era, concluding that Indigenous solutions offer much prospect.

Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

Global health law in theory and practice can either work to ameliorate the devastating consequences of colonialism, class hierarchies, and structural racism in health, or it can ratify and exacerbate them. It can protect, under protect, overprotect, or fail to protect – it is not and cannot be neutral. Global health law reflects the choices and practices of States and other actors, which includes both action and inaction. Inaction or silence on the part of global health law is a choice that ratifies the status quo of coloniality, class exploitation, and structural racism in health.

This article describes and examines six decades of the study of Asian laws around the world to construct a global map of the field. It demonstrates that Asian legal studies have been increasingly institutionalized, as evident in the global proliferation of centers, programs, associations, book series, journals, and courses. Substantively, Asian laws scholarship has grown into a sophisticated system of varied learning, including jurisprudence, legal history, comparative law, law and society, law and economics, and international law.

The institutional and substantive development of Asian legal studies follows a few common patterns corresponding to legal, social, and economic developments in the region. These include the formation of Asian legal studies during the post-World War II and post-colonial period between the 1950s and 1970s; its transition during the post-Cold War period between the 1980s and 1990s; and the transformation of the field in the context of globalization in the 21st century, projected as the “Asian century.”

Global studies in Asian laws are driven by both a deontological search for new knowledge and the instrumental necessity for a wide range of international, national, and individual actors. Instrumentalism, however, tends to play a stronger role in shaping Asian legal studies, and this pushes the focus toward large and developed jurisdictions and emphasis on contemporary legal issues.

As a consequence, Asian legal studies as a discipline displays two opposite trends: integration and differentiation. On the one hand, various specific areas of Asian laws deal with common cross-cutting themes, including religion, colonialism, pluralism, authoritarianism, and development, which renders them integral parts of the larger system. On the other hand, as the scholarship has grown to a greater level of complexity, disciplinary balkanization has become discernible. Different areas of Asian laws have different institutional, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings.

The future development of Asian legal studies requires the inclusive study of different areas of the laws of different Asian peoples. This inclusivity is premised on a balance of the considerations of necessity and the intrinsic pursuit of knowledge of Asian laws.

This paper examines the suffrage rights of mukosekisha: Japanese who are not listed in a household registration (koseki). It explains that Japanese who are not listed in a household registration do not enjoy the right to vote unless they are recorded in a resident record (jūmin hyō), which differs from the household registration. Moreover, a provision in the Public Offices Election Act enacted soon after World War II may prevent some Japanese who are not listed in a household registration from exercising their right to vote even if they are recorded in a resident record. This out-dated provision should be amended to allow the right to vote of Japanese who are not listed in a household registration but are recorded in a resident record.

The murderous mayhem following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which resulted in infamous Korean massacres, was most commonly known and commemorated in Japanese at the time using the term Chōsenjin sawagi, which ambiguously evoked a disturbance involving Korean people. Although both Chōsenjin sawagi and “panic” represent contested lenses for viewing the atrocity, this essay revisits the event and its narration through an approach informed by the local multi-semantic sign sawagi and the transnational framework of colonial panic. By highlighting overlooked connections and continuities that run through the vocabularies and stories of a culture of colonial fear and insecurity, it is possible to apprehend the Chōsenjin sawagi as a colonial panic attack that hit the imperial center, but also a revolt against the logic of integrated empire that echoed the 1919 March First Independence Uprising in Korea, another event discursively contained within the framework of sawagi.

The Meiji era (1868–1912) marks the initial process of Japan's passage into modernity through Westernization, and its identification as a modern nation-state. As part of the process of identifying with European discourses, of altering its position in Asia, and of adopting Western models and values, Japan changed its political, social and cultural dispositions towards industrialization and capitalism, as well as towards nationalism and colonialism, cultural and artistic creation.

Over the course of modernization, and of adapting various Western discourses on science and culture, Japan accepted several new approaches, especially those setting Europe apart and above from the rest of the world. As a result, Japan saw the rise of racial discourses, which eventually contributed to the state's imperial expansion into Asia.

Japan's path to modernity was a twofold movement: on one hand, it was an internal struggle for association with Western civilizations and adoption of their modernity. On the other hand, Japan sought to conceptually distance itself from Asia, only to return a few decades later as a conquering and imperial power. In the Japanese imagination, European cultures served as a perfect model for its own reformation, yet, at the same time, Japan found itself on a pendulum movement between Europe and Asia. Japan distanced itself from what it perceived as a primitive, underdeveloped region and its cultures, while simultaneously seeking to include China and India in its vision of a unified Orient, a stronghold of Asian cultures positioned against the Occident. Ultimately, Japan's self-definition came about through the notion of Otherness: the concept of “Japan” was defined primarily against the background of European civilization, but also, against a range of other cultures, including China and the United States, as well as its own immediate past of Tokugawa Japan.

In the first stage, the primary task was to set Japanese culture apart, and essentialize “Asia” as its Other. The desire to associate Japan with the West then led to a sense of Japan's “inferiority” (especially in terms of technological and scientific achievements), at the same time that Japanese leaders adopted a Western position in claiming “superiority” over Asia. The double movement of association (with Europe) and disassociation (from Asia) produced a new subtext to the binary opposition between the advanced and sophisticated, versus the primitive and simple-minded. This double movement, much like the binary logic that drove Western colonialism, laid the foundations for racial ideologies and imperial practices in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyū, Korea and Taiwan, Manchuria and China, as well as the South-Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

The articles in this issue look at the roots of the discourses on race in the Meiji era, in tandem with the Japanese empire's development in the latter part of the 19th Century. These concepts of race and empire lay at the center of Japan's racist ideologies and imperialist fantasies, and now serve as the focus of our discussions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

Japan's attitude towards Okinawa during the Meiji and Taishō periods defied concrete definition. Although nominally a prefecture, Okinawa retained a semi-colonial status for two decades after its annexation in 1879. Despite the fact that Okinawan people accepted Japanese rule with little resistance, which ultimately turned into active support for the assimilation policy, Japanese policy makers never lost their distrust of Okinawan people. Similarly, Japanese society did not fully embrace them, perceiving them as backward and inferior, and even questioning their Japanese-ness. The experience of discrimination strengthened the Okinawan people's motivation to fight for recognition as true Japanese citizens. Local intellectuals, such as historian Iha Fuyū, embarked on a mission to prove that Okinawa was and always had been Japanese.

From a certain perspective, Okinawan modern history falls into the paradigm of colonization or integration under the Japanese nation-state. The crucial clue to understanding Okinawa's case lies in the fact that it was a poor country, with little natural resources to offer. Unlike Hokkaido, there was no mass migration from mainland Japan to Okinawa. Unlike Taiwan and Korea, Okinawa did not attract skillful and ambitious administrators. Accordingly, Okinawa was turned neither into a model colony, nor a modern prefecture, but remained a forgotten and abandoned region.

Japan has nominated the Sado Gold Mine for UNESECO World Heritage inscription despite South Korean opposition due to Japan's refusal to recognize the role of wartime Korean forced labor at this location. Japan's previous industrial World Heritage inscription is criticized for similar denials of forced labor history. In this way, the Japanese government has embarked on a “history war” against Korea and the memories of the wartime victims of forced labor. In addition to providing victim testimony, historical sources and local and Korean research reveals that Mitsubishi forced Korean laborers to work in deadly conditions in the Sado mines. Korean forced laborers were taken to Sado Island where they faced racial discrimination and abuse. This article explains why Japan chose to worsen relations with Korea by nominating the Sado mines for World Heritage inscription while concealing the use of forced Korean labor and examines evidence of forced labor at the site.

The success of the Meiji regime elite in placing Japan on the road to unprecedented rapid economic development is for all to see in the public history displayed within the port districts of Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki. Silence marks the history of how important these port-rail-communications developments were to the restoration of Japan's own sovereignty and the simultaneous stripping away of others. This work explores the state and left-unstated reasoning behind Meiji Japan's elevation to become the first non-western power utilising the authors photography of the public history of Japanese ports and their indispensable rail and communications connections.