The “Paika Rebellion” of 1817 in Orissa, India has been depicted by colonial officers as a local disturbance caused by the dissatisfaction of one powerful individual deprived of traditional privileges who instigated the pāikas. The nationalist reconstruction has depicted the event as a popular freedom movement involving various castes and classes of Orissan society. This has culminated in a current move to declare the “Paika Rebellion” the First Indian War of Independence. I would like to suggest a third perspective, which focuses on the heterogeneities and linkages of the Rebellion. It is important to note that the “Paika Rebellion” was a meeting point of plural genealogies: “tribal” revolts to protect autonomy, “peasant” resistance to secure livelihood, restorative attempts by the traditional landed class, and ruling class efforts to defend and expand authority. Appreciating the plural genealogies of the Rebellion leads to more perceptive understandings of the heterogeneous characteristics of popular movements and their aftermaths in modern India. Lastly, in order to go beyond colonial and dominant-caste centred perspectives, I propose that we name it the “Orissa Uprising of 1817”.

This article examines the conflicts in writing the imperial modern history of China among various stakeholders, particularly Chinese and American historians, and their dealing with a set of personal documents of Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Services (CMCS) during the Qing period. This set of documents is called “Hart Industry” and contains Hart's personal papers and seventy-seven volumes of diaries, among others. Revealing the imperial Inspector-General's view on “westernization” in modern China, the Hart Industry played a key role in the development of the history of modern China throughout the twentieth century. From around 1957 until 1995, the diaries became a source of a highly politicized academic debate between Chinese Communist historians of the People's Republic of China and western historians of the Hart Industry. By providing a “study of studies” on the historiography of the colonial modern history of China, this article argues that the Hart diaries were critical to historians’ understanding of their own academic discourse.

German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter won the 2003 Song Kun-ho Press Award for his reporting of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. He was also the subject of documentaries and the 2017 hit movie A Taxi Driver, which credit him as the first journalist to expose the Kwangju Uprising to the world. In fact, Hinzpeter was one of many journalists who revealed what had happened at Kwangju. Since the production of the 2003 documentary Hinzpeter – the Blue-Eyed Witness to May 1980, interest in the many other foreign journalists who covered Kwangju has been elided, raising the question of why only Hinzpeter's contribution is remembered and celebrated. Using ideas about historical memory developed by Paul Cohen, I argue that a narrative about Hinzpeter's actions in Kwangju has emerged, which has little to do with who first broke the news of the Kwangju Uprising. The story of Hinzpeter's relationship with the South Korean democratization movement as well as the film he shot of the moment Kwangju citizens seized power and established an alternative government to military rule – have become important weapons for the activist generation in an ongoing struggle over the memorialization of the Kwangju Uprising.

Within the Japanese Empire, the Manchukuo bureaucracy was unique for its high level of centralization and standardization. This study argues that Manchukuo's bureaucratic recruitment and training processes molded civil officials into a paramilitary force, dedicated to developmentalism and a radical belief in the transformative power of the state. It approaches the institutional and cultural development of the Manchukuo bureaucracy as an evolutionary process. As pan-Asian radicals, military officials, and reform bureaucrats competed for control of Japan's imperial project, their ideas and agendas merged into a hybrid system of bureaucratic management that served as a model for the wartime empire. Looking past the temporal juncture of August 1945, this study also foregrounds the legacy of the Manchukuo bureaucracy on postwar East Asia. Manchukuo's government institutions recruited and indoctrinated not just Japanese but Korean, Taiwanese, and other imperial subjects in the name of ethnic harmony. Back in their homelands, these men adapted to their experience and training into the foundations of developmental nationalism and authoritarian state structures during the Cold War.

The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic languages. I demonstrate how these circumstances compelled Çobanzade to perform an intellectual migration, from an indigenous Turkic ontology focused on the structural wholeness of the Turkic languages to a rigid application of Marxist-Leninist concepts of socially-determined linguistic classification. I do this with the help of monographs and journal articles published in Crimean Tatar, Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani and Russian, problematizing the multitude of his audiences and loyalties. As such, Çobanzade's story becomes a microcosm of the experience of a broader generation of Turkic writers and scholars. It was a generation that sought to take the greatest benefit from the monumental changes following World War I, and ended up being consumed by the totalitarian state that emerged in its wake. Çobanzade is one victim of many whose scholarly oeuvre can open a window to a heady and bygone period of experimentation and change.

Today, the modern value systems that once held sway have fallen apart, and people throughout the world are wandering in an aimless state. Amidst this, we are pressed to ask, “What kind of a new ethics might we construct?” We need to consider the possibility of an ethics that focuses on the religious view of humankind (previously ignored by modernity), that goes beyond this life, and includes the next life. In this article, I examine the way of being of bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism via the Lotus Sutra. According to the Lotus Sutra, human existence is one that necessarily relates with the other, and this relationship is not confined to this life, but continues from past lives to future lives. Here, I refer to this as “bodhisattva as existence.” On this basis, it is possible to think of an ethics of “bodhisattva as praxis” that considers the benefit of others even after death. This view of bodhisattvas in the Lotus Sutra lives on in Japanese Buddhism and can be said to point to a new possibility for ethics today.

This article is part of my series of articles that deal with the Western and Chinese commercial disputes from the 1880s until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. In contrast to my previous articles, it deals with commercial disputes between American mercantile firms and Chinese trading merchants in the early twentieth century by examining the unpublished Shanghai American consular archives at NARA II (National Archives and Records Administration), College Park, Maryland. Together with correspondence in the North-China Herald (NCH), these archives can be materials for revealing the peculiar behavior of the proprietors of Chinese partnership (joint-share, or hegu 合股) firms. They cooperated with American mercantile firms so long as the assets of American mercantile firms could guarantee their commercial profits. Whenever they were aware that American mercantile firms could no longer guarantee the safety of their commercial assets, they did not hesitate in breaching commercial contracts by means of various tactics. Seen from the American side, it was nothing but a betrayal. Following typical cases in the records, this article reveals the process by which these commercial disputes escalated to such a level that leaders of Chinese mercantile people demanded reforms to the commercial court system at the end of the 1910s.

This essay is an attempt to think through the three revolutions, using Tocqueville's theory of “democracy” as a key. For Tocqueville, democracy is a society with “the equality of conditions” – in other words, a society that has no hereditary status system. In this sense, Chinese society since the Song Dynasty has been “democracy” as Tocqueville himself pointed out repeatedly. In his understanding, contemporary China was a “democratic society” and its form of government was highly centralized “despotism”; in sum, it was “democratic despotism.” Tocqueville was warning against the possible Sinification of America and Europe. Moreover, he thinks what the French Revolution brought about were mainly “the equality of conditions” and the establishment of centralized state power. The Meiji Revolution also realized these two things because it had not been “democratic” and the polity had been federal. On the other hand, in China, both had been actualized since the tenth century. Therefore, the Chinese Revolution which ended up with the establishment of the communist rule is very different from the other two revolutions.