In 1934, the much-publicized engagement of Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako to Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe made headlines worldwide, epitomizing the transnational dream of a racially anti-hierarchical world. Starting from this unrealized wedding, this article showcases the voice of Kuroda Masako, a racially equal imperial feminist who tried to foster her vision of women participating in the empire-building process even in new settings like Ethiopia. By featuring her practices, we are able to understand why they resonated not only in the women’s press but also in a much larger intellectual scene that comprised Pan-Asian and Pan-African activists. Because of such significant resonance across various non-governmental actors worldwide, the Kuroda-Araya engagement became dangerous to state-endorsed agendas in many countries, which were unwilling to countenance an unprecedented alliance between Ethiopia, Japan, and the African American community at the expense of Western and white civilization discourse. As a result, the engagement created a rupture between popular sympathy and the state, eventually resulting in Japan’s official disengagement from Ethiopia well before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

The partition of India caused an unprecedented exodus of Hindus and Muslims to the new nations designated for each group. Amid the tempestuous Great Calcutta Killings and the corresponding riots in Noakhali in 1946, many Bengali Hindus living in Noakhali left for Calcutta, leaving their properties behind in what was soon to be the new state of Pakistan. Though many of them longed for home, I argue that displaced Bengali Hindus’ hopes of returning died in the mid-1950s. The article begins by examining the condition of the village of Lamchar in Noakhali at the time of the riots, partition, and afterwards. I then consider Noakhali within the larger historical context of laws relating to properties settlement in East Pakistan and the introduction of passports from 1948 to 1956. Finally, I examine a rare family archive of letters exchanged between Jogendra Roy, a Hindu landowner who fled Noakhali, and Oli Mian, his Muslim neighbour who remained behind. Twenty-six letters sent from Jogendra to Oli document his desire to return home to Noakhali and his later disappointment when this hope was never realized. This dying hope coincided with the East Pakistan government’s decision to take possession of the lands left by those displaced through the East Bengal State Acquisitions and Tenancy Act of 1950. This article concentrates on the complex relationship between Hindus and Muslims, exploring issues of nostalgia, identity, property, and hope, revealing the slow acceptance among displaced Bengali Hindus of the (im)possibility of return.

This article analyses how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created and spread new forms of subjectivity and social belonging in the formative years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949–present). Specifically, it examines how the CCP blended medical and emotional discourses to foster communal hatred of narcotics users and promote social cohesion. Building on scholarship that conceptualizes hatred as a way of producing and animating subjectivity, the article argues that the CCP saw it as a key tool of unification, bringing people together to commit acts of emotional and physical violence against drug users and traffickers. Propaganda officers and police forces worked hard to persuade people to hate drug users and traffickers, writing anti-narcotics songs, plays, and skits to make hating an entertaining and interesting activity for audiences. The article underscores how the CCP encouraged mass participation in the ostracizing and killing of narcotics producers, consumers, and traffickers to spawn a shared social hatred of them, and shows how people responded to state efforts to incite hate. To conclude, the article considers the unlikely agency of some accused drug criminals who resisted the tides of public and state pressure, and challenged their accusers.

This article investigates the developments of hawker discourse and movements across the Malay(si)an peninsula in the first decade of independence. Looking at news coverage and municipal records, it examines the contingent, gendered, and egalitarian qualities of hawking as labour which led to its adoption by people experiencing hardship, and influenced the ways in which municipal authorities and the public discussed hawkers. In effect, hawkers, long significant to the historical and cultural systems of Malayan trade, were recharacterized as vulnerable subjects at the urban margins. The article then explores how local administrations understood and regulated hawkers through categories of location, race, and food, shaping the politics and governance of hawkers in public spaces. To engage with such governance, hawkers formed associations that protested against injustice and established dialogue with municipal and town councils, impelling authorities to consider a more significant inclusion of hawking in street planning. Throughout the period, the potential and limits of hawker inclusion in post-colonial public spaces became subject to significant debate between municipal authorities, political representatives, and hawkers. As local administrations eventually deepened their commitment to support hawkers, they also expanded their regulation, signifying a cautious imperative to legitimate hawkers and influencing the logic of post-independence planned spaces.

The concept of tianxia (All-under-Heaven) has been described as a Chinese version of cosmopolitanism. However, tianxia is a hard-to-define term, with political, cultural, and geographic meanings. From the fifteenth century onwards, maps exist that claim to show tianxia, therefore allowing us to reconstruct how Chinese mapmakers understood tianxia’s geographic extent. Other terms in the titles of maps that show space beyond the borders of the Ming and Qing states include huayi (civilized and barbarian/Chinese and non-Chinese), wanguo (10,000 countries), and sihai (four seas). This article examines the geographic extent of these terms and changes in their usage between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that Ming Chinese mapmakers and scholars presented tianxia as equivalent to the Ming empire and used terms such as huayi and wanguo to advertise the maps as showing regions far away, like western Asia and the Americas. Jesuits in China, on the other hand, applied a broader meaning of tianxia, equating it with the whole globe. During the Qing, the extent of tianxia expanded to represent a cosmopolitan empire connected to a range of surrounding states, embedded in a wider world.

The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.

This article is an attempt to understand the vexed question of how the Boros of Assam have come to define and realize their ‘traditional’ religious identity amid contemporary assertions of Hindu nationalism in India. Since the early twentieth century, shaped by colonial anthropology and the consolidation of Hinduism, there have been attempts to categorize the Boros as either Hindus or animists. Subsequently, there have been efforts on the part of the Boros themselves to assert and consolidate their ‘traditional’ religious practices into a unified religion called Bathou.1 The process has continued in the complex arena of Boro identity assertion. As this article demonstrates, contemporary efforts at the consolidation of Hinduism by the Sangh Parivar and of Bathou by the Boros have often coincided and, at times, collided with each other,therein producing intricate transactions between traditional religionists and the votaries of Hindutva.

This article examines the translation of foreign films in cosmopolitan Shanghai from 1896 to 1949. Silent films were introduced to China at the end of the nineteenth century, and live narration was provided to allow Chinese audiences to better understand Western shadow plays. With an increasing number of foreign films exhibited in Shanghai theatres, distributors and exhibitors made printed film plot sheets and experimented with the use of subtitles. With the arrival of sound cinema, experiments with techniques such as simultaneous interpretation, voiceover, and dubbing were also conducted. At this time, Shanghai was a semi-colonial city, where the languages spoken included the Shanghai dialect, Cantonese, standard Mandarin, and English, among others, and where the written Chinese language was transitioning from classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese. Film translation is perceived as a space where the mediation between the foreign and the local is materialized. Using materials such as official regulations, newspapers, memoirs, and archives, this article examines various modes of foreign film translation in Republican Shanghai to demonstrate the ways in which the vibrant translation activities of early cinema mediated between languages and cultures, connected local audiences with the foreign, and constructed a cosmopolitan cultural scene.

With the establishment of the treaty ports in 1842, contact between China and the Western world intensified. In Shanghai, the most extensive exchange of knowledge and ideas took place between the missionaries of the London Missionary Society and their Chinese assistants. By working and translating for the missionaries, these traditionally educated men gained intimate insights into the West and Western learning and established close personal relationships with the missionaries. But in the process, they also became outcasts, as working for Westerners was viewed critically by their contemporaries. This article sets out to analyse the way in which Jiang Dunfu 蔣敦復 (1808–1867) and Wang Tao 王韜 (1828–1897) processed and accommodated these cosmopolitan experiences in Shanghai in their prose autobiographies.

Since 2013, the female playwright Li Jing has presented to the public a number of dramatic works which number among the most discussed plays in Chinese theatre circles. This article sketches an approach to her first work, Daxiansheng, which is based, thematically, on the life and work of the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun. By focusing on dramaturgical aspects of this play, such as the material and perspective selected for the story; the interweaving of all kinds of texts; the fragmentation and reassembling of the characters; the design of various contrasting modes and atmospheres; as well as the method of participation of both author and audiences, this article foregrounds the aspects of cosmopolitan theatre displayed both by Li Jing’s work and by contemporary Chinese drama more broadly.

This article explores the roles imperial women played in the practices and systems of the northern states during the Sixteen Kingdoms (304–439) and Northern Dynasties periods (386–581), two of the most politically turbulent periods in Chinese history. The article will focus particularly on the absence of crown princesses and intermarriage practice in Northern Wei, and the appearance of coterminous empresses in Former Zhao and Northern Zhou. While a vast scholarship has viewed the rulership strategies and policies of the Northern Dynasties as a process of Sinicization, or one-sided acculturation, this article considers the perspective of the northern rulers who were aware of a multicultural populace. In an effort to shore up their power in court and rule effectively over a dispersed, heterogenous population, these northern rulers enforced agendas employing imperial women as the medium through which to engage elites of diverse backgrounds and tie these groups to their imperial families. Imperial women served in critical roles that brought to the court a delicate balance among various powerful factions, lending stability to the reigns of emperors and promoting cosmopolitanism in a period prior to Tang (618–907).

Karakorum, in present-day Mongolia, was the first capital of Mongol empire and has often been portrayed as the cosmopolitan city par excellence of its era. This portrayal is primarily based on the description of the city as a multicultural community in a travelogue written by the Franciscan monk William of Rubruck, who spent some time there in 1254. This understanding of cosmopolitanism stems from a colloquial sense of the term and does not take into account its history and layered meanings. Based on a discussion of the term, this article presents an approach to cosmopolitanism suitable for archaeology, namely by examining the practices of ‘lived cosmopolitanism’. Taking the archaeological evidence from Karakorum as a case study, the author explores the cultural fields of city layout and architecture, cuisine, religion, and funerary rites to answer the question of whether and how the people of Karakorum were cosmopolitan. The discussion shows that it is of the utmost importance to distinguish between social groups and their status. While the Great Khans can be viewed as cosmopolitans of their time, the commoner population of Karakorum appears rather to have been segregated into different groups. The material evidence so far points to low degrees of engagement among different groups within the city. Yet, the discussion of cosmopolitanism reveals deeper insights into the social realities of the city’s inhabitants and unresolved questions in the study of this important city.

Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

Since 1930s scholarship, the historiography of Kitan Liao has increasingly interpreted ethnicity as a factor in polity and policy, an interpretation that has depended upon retrospective constructions of Liao and Jin by, largely, the Qing imperial court of the eighteenth century. Archaeological evidence now demonstrates that the documentation itself was fragmentary and in all likelihood unrepresentative of the identity concepts that prevailed at various class strata of the Kitan Liao empire. On the ground, prominent aristocrats, including many from the lineage of Han Derang (or the Han of Jizhou), are shown to be derived from the status and wealth of each man in his own time. Identities drawn from ancestry, language, place of origin, or folk customs were characteristic of dependent populations, not of aristocrats. Stratified identities, by horizontal rank and not partitioned vertically by imputed ethnicity, appear to be evident in many histories of northeast Asian regimes from Northern Wei to the very early Qing. They were characterized by a continuous cultural tradition with complex elements, consistent among them reading and writing multiple languages and literatures, horse training and hunting pastimes, and shamanic religious and political practices. Because these elements are associated in modern discourse with distinct language and cultural traditions, this aristocratic culture tends to be seen as variegated and ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than as coherent and continuous.

This article tells the story of 36 Chinese peasants and their audacious campaign to defend their private rights on two tiny islands in Manchuria from the Japanese empire and a Chinese warlord regime. A borderland in Northeast Asia, Manchuria was a site of intense inter-imperial rivalry in the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly discovered local Chinese archival documents as well as sources produced by Japanese, Korean, and American actors, I discuss how the peasants leveraged their knowledge of multiple property regimes in the borderland to delay and deflect the demands of two states. This microhistory of a transnational dispute illustrates the workings of a form of convergent legal pluralism in the Northeast Asian borderland. While historians agree that state capacity grew substantially in the East Asian borderlands in the early twentieth century, the case shows how that growth also complicated the nature of the state and created new possibilities of bottom-up socio-legal action. It exemplifies the kind of legal cosmopolitanism grassroots actors practised in a world of justice dominated by not-so-cosmopolitan nation-states.

Dominant historiography in Singapore celebrates Sinnathamby Rajaratnam as one of the city-state’s founding national fathers, and the intellectual superintendent of state-sponsored multiculturalism in what has been characterized as an ‘illiberal democracy’. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extensive periods of Rajaratnam’s life in which he was not in governance with the People’s Action Party, and thus had considerable intellectual autonomy. This article examines the first of these periods—his sojourn in London from 1935 to 1947—marked by connections with overlapping communities of anti-colonial intellectuals drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and East and South Asia. Close reading of Rajaratnam’s London lifeworld, his published fiction and journalism, and the many annotations he made in the books he read reveals a very different intellectual history than the one that we think we know, and allows us to better understand his lifelong uneasiness with capitalism and racial governmentality. Re-reading Rajaratnam as an autonomous intellectual disembeds his early intellectual life from the story of the developmental state, enabling a focus on the role of affect and form in his writing. The process also offers new insights into Singapore today, where the legacies of state-sponsored multiculturalism are increasingly challenged, and where citizens, residents, and migrants seek new forms of solidarity in and across difference.

This article examines, for the first time, a significant aspect of Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971: the fate of ‘stranded Bengalis’ in West Pakistan during and after the war. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. The government of Pakistan responded by holding hostage roughly the same number of Bengali military personnel, civil servants, and their dependants in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, both official and personal, this article traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengali officials and officers—hitherto serving the Pakistani state—found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘enemy’ status after December 1971. Their wartime experiences, more than half a century after the war, warrant recognition in widening the understanding of 1971, not only in the history of regional and global politics but also at what was arguably the home front—a thousand miles away from the ‘war zone’ in East Pakistan.