This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan's own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan's colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.

On April 25, 2015, central Nepal was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed over 9,000 people and displaced 2.8 million. The image of the Dharahara, a nineteenth-century minaret that collapsed during the quake, quickly became for many Nepalis an iconic representation not only of the disaster but also of a national determination to recover and rebuild. Drawing upon media and literary discourse in the Nepali language, this article asks why the Dharahara tower, rather than the country's severely damaged World Heritage sites, loomed so large in the Nepali imagination in the immediate aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake, and why it became a rallying point for a resurgence of Nepali hill nationalism.

The history of British rule in the Indian Himalaya exemplifies the mutual enforcement of social identities and political cultures in modern South Asia. For the Khas ethnic majority of the Himachal Pradesh–Uttarakhand borderland, the colonial power's differentiation between “secular” and “religious” authorities engendered the division of substantially commensurable groups into “caste Hindu” and “tribal” societies. In demarcating borders along the “natural barrier” between the states, the British had severed a politically potent grassroots theocracy from its underlings, consolidated the fragmentation of the Shimla Hill States, and ultimately encouraged the development of a composite political cultures that complemented Khas traditions with Brahmanical creeds from the plains.

Since its publication, Yi Yŏngil's Complete history of Korean cinema (1969) has remained a seminal work of film historiography. A critical rereading of the work is required, however, to capture the paradoxes of postcolonial historiography that are created by the spatial-temporal orders of modernity in a decolonizing, non-Western society. By examining Yi's creative use of historical documentation, such as oral testimonies of filmmakers, this article considers how he offers a counter-narrative against colonialist historiography that denies Korea's agency to transform itself into a modern nation-state without Japanese annexation. However, despite his decolonizing endeavor, his work cannot fully eradicate the colonial effects that inevitably shape postcolonial subjectivity in the globalizing world. In reassessing the possibilities and predicaments of his work, this article reveals Yi's fundamental conundrum as a postcolonial writer living with the effects of colonialism, ultimately challenging the imagination of the postcolonial experience as an uninterrupted struggle to establish an autonomous nation.

This article examines why the “history issue” continues to hinder Japanese-Korean relations after nominally successful negotiations such as the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea and the 2015 comfort women agreement. It contends that leaders put off and quite possibly sacrificed reconciliation in order to achieve treaties and agreements that addressed more immediate security, economic, and political needs. However, because agreements were not transparently negotiated, partly due to the lack of a neutral third-party mediator, Koreans believe the treaties were not fair nor final settlements. Additionally, the reconciliation process has been flawed because it haphazardly tackles disagreements and does not consider time. A third-party such as the United States should mediate a settlement between Japan and South Korea to ensure adequate confidence building measures. Such measures will lower the costs of giving and accepting an apology, increasing the chances of an enduring and legitimate treaty.