The intricacies of modern compensation procedures that value human life, injury, and property are often overlooked, despite growing demands for reparations and justice following state violence. This article historicizes the legal structures of modern compensation, arguing that the advent of imperial rule was characterized not only by the extraction of material resources and labour, but also by the discriminatory construction and implementation of imperial law, which sought to protect European life, wealth, and property. By focusing on one of the most notorious episodes of violence in British imperial and modern South Asian history – the atrocities committed by British officials in Punjab (1919), including the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre – this article underscores how British officials penalized protests and freedom struggles by legalizing indemnities, taxes, and fines to compensate European families. In contrast, colonial officials grossly undervalued the claims and payments of Indian subjects killed or maimed during state violence, if they did at all. Furthermore, this article reveals how imperial state compensation, managed in relative privacy and buried in legal proceduralism, was rooted in legal structures of intersectional racialized inequality, and political concerns that valued the longevity of imperialism, rather than a meaningful gesture of justice and redress.

Over the past two decades, historians have become increasingly fascinated by the question of what enabled the emergence of a stable model of democracy in post-war Western Europe, characterized by the persistence of pre-war elites and top-down forms of decision-making. This article reveals the importance of the British occupations during and after the Second World War in fostering this model of democracy. It does so by comparing and weaving together British occupation strategies in Germany and Italy between 1943 and 1949. Based on a novel examination of archival sources, it demonstrates that British ruling strategies influenced the form of democracy that emerged in these two states. As such, the article reveals the centrality of ‘indirect rule’ practices and their multifaceted impact. Building on imperial precedents, the occupations were primarily run through pre-existing local elites who commanded authority and influence amongst the population. The article argues that this choice explains why the British produced, first, functioning occupation regimes and, subsequently, contributed to the emergence of remarkably stable democracies. At the same time, however, this ruling strategy aided the creation of political regimes that were elite-led and that strongly limited popular participation, leaving many democratic aspirations unfulfilled.

It is commonly stated that China has 5,000 years of continuous history. It is a claim repeated in textbooks, mini-dramas, and tourist sites across the People’s Republic of China (PRC, also commonly referred to as ‘China’). It formed the narrative foundation for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It is also a ubiquitous claim internationally, recited by global political leaders, in foreign media, and in children’s books. Ironically, it even serves as the tag line for the highly political and anti-communist global dance show ‘Shen Yun’, its posters promising a celebration of ‘5,000 years of civilization reborn’.1 This millennia-long history, often short-handed as ‘Yao-to-Mao’ – the Yao referring to Emperor Yao, one of five founding Chinese rulers who is said to have lived in the third millennium BC, the Mao referring to Mao Zedong, the founder of the PRC – is a story of civilizational continuity in which a politically and culturally unified ‘China’ maintains its fundamental cohesion despite a range of challengers, invasions, and upheavals.2

Between 1958 and 1973, hijackings between Cuba and the US surged, prompting Cuban officials in the early 1960s to propose an extradition agreement for hijackers. However, the US, leveraging its superpower status, dismissed these initiatives, viewing hijackers as political asylum seekers rather than criminals. By the late 1960s, as hijackings escalated from the US to Cuba, the American approach shifted, seeking a bilateral agreement to address air piracy, only to be rebuffed by Cuba, which refused to accept the US’s categorization of specific hijackers as political asylum seekers while classifying others as criminals. Meanwhile, the US pressed its extradition stance through international bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization. These diplomatic efforts underscored broader challenges in US–Cuban relations, with negotiations repeatedly missing opportunities for enhanced co-operation. A pivotal shift occurred after a significant incident threatened both nations, leading to a more balanced perspective between the US and Cuba. This change culminated in the 1973 signing of a ‘Memorandum of understanding’, marking a turning point that significantly curbed hijacking incidents and hinted at potential future improvements in bilateral relations.

The thirteenth edition of Robert Art and Robert Jervis’s International politics: enduring concepts and contemporary issues (2017), a textbook used in the core International Relations class for MA students in the Georgetown Masters in Foreign Service and many other such courses, asserts the following: ‘By the fourteenth century, these Sinicized states [China, Japan, and Korea] had evolved a set of international rules and institutions known as the “tribute system”, with China clearly the hegemon and operating under the presumption of inequality, which resulted in a clear hierarchy and lasting peace.’ This appears in a short article by David Kang, summarizing arguments from his books.1 It appears in a section titled ‘The mitigation of anarchy’, sandwiched between short pieces by Stephen M. Walt (‘Balancing and bandwagoning’), Hans Morgenthau (‘Diplomacy’), Stanley Hoffman (‘International law’), and Robert Keohane (‘International institutions’). This positioning suggests that while international relations in the West involves balancing, bandwagoning, law, and institutions, East Asia runs on the ‘tribute system’.

This review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a broader environmental history, increasingly sensitive to ideological and institutional influences. The development of the cultural tradition, originating in art historical analysis of the ‘landscape idea’ as a culturally specific ‘way of seeing’, is traced through a rich proliferation of studies connecting landscape with memory, national identity, and governance, and through feminist, postcolonial, and history-from-below perspectives. The pervasive influence of the spatial, mobilities, and material turns is highlighted but phenomenology’s focus on experience perhaps challenges the cultural tradition’s premises more fundamentally. Although historians were slower than anthropologists and archaeologists to adopt phenomenology, medievalists and early modernists have applied it rewardingly to topics such as the settings of elite buildings, peasant landscape perceptions, and collective landscape memories. Few modernists have yet embraced phenomenology but it has great potential here given the abundant life-writing sources available. While scope remains for further convergence between research traditions, British landscape history is therefore in an exciting phase of methodological renewal.

This essay argues that contemporary Taiwan, as a democratic, functionally independent polity, constitutes the crucial exception to disavowals by the Republic of China (ROC) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) of imperialist claims and ambitions. As such, it explores how the ideal of a single China spanning the Taiwan Strait (‘one China’) depends on the erasure of a (proto-) national Taiwanese identity, and possibly the suppression of the people who claim it. ‘One China’ narratives seek to naturalize Taiwan’s absorption into the ROC in the 1940s and its potential future annexation by the PRC, hiding the pressures placed on Taiwanese people today to give up their hard-fought democracy, as well as the bloodshed that would be involved in any military conquest.

In June of 2019, millions of Hong Kongers took to the streets. What began as a protest against an extradition bill quickly evolved into a broader movement to safeguard Hong Kong’s autonomy from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Protesters pointed with increasing alarm to the fast disappearance of Hong Kong’s distinct legal system, political system, and civic culture as well as the erosion of the borders, both physical and abstract, that separated the territory from the mainland. The 1997 handover was designed to safeguard Hong Kong’s local autonomy after the end of British colonialism, these demonstrators claimed, and Beijing’s government was threatening that promise.

In On not speaking Chinese, cultural studies scholar Ien Ang characterizes migrant scholars as ‘tactical interventionists’; instead of making counter-hegemonic claims, they usually bring out the contradictions and the violence inherent in all posited truths. In the spirit of this claim, I thought long and hard about how to make the best use of my connections to both worlds – my lived experience of growing up in China and my access to academic resources in English-language academia. As James Gethyn Evans will show in his essay in this roundtable, ‘decolonizing’ the field of Chinese history should involve the dual tasks of questioning the hegemonic narratives propagated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government and the concentration of knowledge production in the Global North. Without the participation of PRC-based scholars, the current ‘decolonization’ movement would become a Western enterprise just like colonization.

Charu Mazumdar seemed like an unlikely leader for a violent guerilla organization. Born into a family of landlords in India’s West Bengal in 1918, his slender frame gave him the look of someone more used to studying than directing armed insurgency. Yet, Mazumdar justified his violent leadership in West Bengal during the 1960s and 1970s by referencing the writings of Mao Zedong – known collectively as Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism – as inspiration for his revolutionary actions. Mazumdar declared that ‘the foremost duty of [Indian] revolutionaries is to spread and propagate the thought of Chairman Mao’, and that ‘China’s path is our path, China’s chairman is our chairman.’ While Mazumdar had no claim to Chinese ethnic or linguistic belonging, his activities – along with the actions of thousands of others – manifested as a result of the transnational connections and entanglements between Maoism, its translation and propagation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and its reception by revolutionaries across the world.

This roundtable explores the potential of decolonization as a framework for understanding and addressing the problems of traditional narratives of Chinese history. We came together with the contention that the hegemonic narrative of Chinese history, which emphasizes 5,000 years of civilizational unity, is both misleading and harmful. A decolonization framework, we posited, could help illuminate past injustices and give us the tools to create better and more just histories about China.