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East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, comprises the eastern half
of the island of Timor, located at the eastern end of the
Indonesian archipelago. East Timor was among the last of colonial
territories to become independent, and it actually had to be
liberated twice. First, after more than four centuries of
Portuguese colonial rule, it achieved independence in 1975 only to
be invaded and occupied by Indonesia. After a blood-soaked
occupation of 24 years and following intense international
pressure, the Jakarta-regime only grudgingly allowed East Timor to
form a nation of its own in 1999. Since then, the new state has
faced further armed clashes and is only now able to seriously
engage in nation-building. Historical Dictionary of East Timor
relates the turbulent history of this country through a chronology,
an introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 200
cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events,
places, organizations, and other aspects of East Timor history from
the earliest times to the present.
This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of
the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million
dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh
seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research
in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new
interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic
exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. He analyzes
successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and
policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections
between colonialism and agrarian unrest in the 1930s and the rise
of the Viet Minh in the 1940s. Gunn asks whether the famine
signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven,"
or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining
factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the
broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the
communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local
victimhood at the hands of outsiders-French and, in turn, Japanese-
but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to
achieve moral victory over injustice against all odds, no matter
how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author
clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and
contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just
as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development
issues persist into the present.
First Globalization presents an original and sweeping
conceptualization of the grand cultural-civilizational encounter
between Asia and Europe. Now largely taken for granted, the
exchange resonates in multiple ways even today. Offering a
"metageography" of the vast Eurasian zone, Geoffrey C. Gunn shows
how between 1500 and 1800, a lively two-way flow in ideas,
philosophies, and cultural products brought competing civilizations
into serious dialogue and mostly peaceful exchange. In Europe, the
interaction was reflected in missionary reporting, cartographic
representations, literary productions, and intellectual fashions,
alongside the business of commerce and plunder (when it reached the
Americas and peripheries). In Asia--notably China, India, and
particularly Japan--European ideas and their bearers received a
remarkably positive hearing when they did not challenge reigning
orthodoxies. Ranging from discussions of the natural world,
livelihoods, and religious and intellectual encounters to language,
play, crime and punishment, gender, and governance, this book
replays the themes of enduring hybridity and "creolization" of
cultures dating from the first great encounter between Europe and
Asia.
Studies on global metageography are enjoying a revival, and in no
way is this better referenced than against the geo-world system
bequeathed by Claudius Ptolemy almost two thousand years ago. This
is all the more important when we consider the longevity of the
Ptolemaic construct through and beyond the European age of
discovery allowing as well for its eventual revision or refinement.
Innovations in navigational science, cartographic representations,
and textual description are all called upon to illustrate this
theme. With its focus upon the macro-region termed India Extra
Gangem, literally the space between India and China, the book
unfolds a fourfold agenda. First, it explains the Ptolemaic world
system back to classical points of reference as well as to its
reception in late medieval Europe from Arabic sources. Second, it
tracks the erosion of the Ptolemaic template especially in the
light of new empirical data entering Europe from early travel
accounts as well as the first voyages of discovery. Third, through
selected examples, as with India, Southeast Asia, and China, it
seeks to expose textual and cartographic adjustments to the
classical models flowing from the scientific revolution. Fourth,
through an examination of Jesuit astronomical observations
conducted at various points in Asia, it demonstrates how Eurasia
was actually measured and sized with respect to its true
longitudinal coordinates such had deluded Columbus and even
succeeding generations. In short, this work problematizes the
creation of geographical knowledge, raises awareness as to the
making of region in Asia over long historical time-the Ptolemaic
world-in-motion-and, as a more latent agenda, sounds an alert as to
the perils of overdetermination in the setting of modern boundaries
whether upon land or sea.
It was the trial of a century in colonial Hong Kong when, in
1931-33, Ho Chi Minh - the future President of Vietnam - faced down
deportation to French-controlled territory with a death sentence
dangling over him. Thanks to his appeal to English common law, Ho
Chi Minh won his reprieve. With extradition a major political issue
in Hong Kong today, Geoffrey C. Gunn's examination of the legal
case of Ho Chi Minh offers a timely insight into the rule of law
and the issue of extradition in the former British colony.
Utilizing little known archival material, Gunn sheds new light on
Ho Chi Minh, communist and anti-colonial networks and
Franco-British relations.
Some 20,000 or more people were killed instantly in the atomic
bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945; an additional 40,000 or more
died from radiation and related illnesses in the coming days and
weeks. Many others were exposed to radiation effects. Remembrance,
the struggle for recognition on the part of the victims or
hibakusha, and the even greater struggle waged by City Hall in
Nagasaki to bring to world attention the threat of nuclear weapons,
are at the heart of this book. This we term the Nagasaki peace
discourse. Yet, other narratives vie with the `idealist' view.
`Realists' welcome the nuclear umbrella provided by the US-Japan
Treaty system and have eagerly embraced civilian nuclear power
under the `atoms-forpeace' slogan. On their part, Japanese
nationalists perceive Japan's `peace constitution' as ripe for
revision, looking ahead to a legal Self Defense Force and, for
some, a `normal' and even a nuclear-armed Japan. In the light of
the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011, however, City Hall
in Nagasaki cannot ignore the risks of civilian nuclear power or
the nation's mounting stockpile of plutonium. With Nagasaki
prefecture host to the second largest US naval base in Japan, as
became apparent with the 2017-18 Korean missile crisis, neither can
the city insulate itself from international politics. Seventy and
more years on from the atomic bombings, Hiroshima and, in subtly
different ways, Nagasaki, have a sombre message to convey. This is
encapsulated in no better way than in the popular civil society
slogan, `No! More! Hibakusha!'
It was the trial of a century in colonial Hong Kong when, in
1931-33, Ho Chi Minh - the future President of Vietnam - faced down
deportation to French-controlled territory with a death sentence
dangling over him. Thanks to his appeal to English common law, Ho
Chi Minh won his reprieve. With extradition a major political issue
in Hong Kong today, Geoffrey C. Gunn's examination of the legal
case of Ho Chi Minh offers a timely insight into the rule of law
and the issue of extradition in the former British colony.
Utilizing little known archival material, Gunn sheds new light on
Ho Chi Minh, communist and anti-colonial networks and
Franco-British relations.
One figure strides across modern Cambodian history - Norodom
Sihanouk. From his accession to the throne of Cambodia in 1941
until his extravagant funeral ceremony in 2013, the prince turned
`king father' in later life never dodged controversy. But this is
not a biography of Sihanouk; the focus is upon the final decades of
the French protectorate, the rise of a counter-elite and winning of
Cambodia's independence. Manipulation of the 1,000-year-old
monarchy comes to the heart of this book, as does indigenous
resistance, Buddhist activism, French cultural creationism, the
rise of radical republicanism, Thai recidivism and wartime Japanese
machinations. Carried through into the postwar period, the seeds of
Cambodia's own destruction were being sown in the jungle
perimeters, rubber plantations, schools and monkhood, and even in
the classrooms of prestigious French institutions. Deeply embedded
Khmer cultural conventions and the interplay of charismatic power
and patronage are not irrelevant to this discussion, indeed inform
us as to the future and even present-day patterns of political
behaviour. The skill of the young Sihanouk in navigating between
Vichy France, Japanese militarists, republican opportunists, armed
rural insurgency and French proconsuls is brought to life by a
range of new archival documentation. A book is also a work of
premonition as much inquiry, exploring how did a country of such
grace and natural bounty come to be associated with the worst
excesses of mass murder and genocide experienced in the twentieth
century. The long political prelude as exposed in this book makes
the now cliched `tragedy of Cambodian history' much more
comprehensible.
One figure strides across modern Cambodian history - Norodom
Sihanouk. From his accession to the throne of Cambodia in 1941
until his extravagant funeral ceremony in 2013, the prince turned
`king father' in later life never dodged controversy. But this is
not a biography of Sihanouk; the focus is upon the final decades of
the French protectorate, the rise of a counter-elite and winning of
Cambodia's independence. Manipulation of the 1,000-year-old
monarchy comes to the heart of this book, as does indigenous
resistance, Buddhist activism, French cultural creationism, the
rise of radical republicanism, Thai recidivism and wartime Japanese
machinations. Carried through into the postwar period, the seeds of
Cambodia's own destruction were being sown in the jungle
perimeters, rubber plantations, schools and monkhood, and even in
the classrooms of prestigious French institutions. Deeply embedded
Khmer cultural conventions and the interplay of charismatic power
and patronage are not irrelevant to this discussion, indeed inform
us as to the future and even present-day patterns of political
behaviour. The skill of the young Sihanouk in navigating between
Vichy France, Japanese militarists, republican opportunists, armed
rural insurgency and French proconsuls is brought to life by a
range of new archival documentation. A book is also a work of
premonition as much inquiry, exploring how did a country of such
grace and natural bounty come to be associated with the worst
excesses of mass murder and genocide experienced in the twentieth
century. The long political prelude as exposed in this book makes
the now cliched `tragedy of Cambodian history' much more
comprehensible.
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