It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? Slavery and the Dutch State shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More tha...

This book provides a critical assessment of the broadly held view that states ‘own’ war. The central theme of the book is that the persistence of non-state actors in historical as well as contemporary conflicts challenges this narrative. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to address a host of questions concerning the role of non-state actors, both armed and unarmed, in conflict and their relationship with states. Recurring themes are issues of loyalty, accountability and effectiveness....

‘China Under Xi Jinping: A New Assessment’ is one of the first scholarly books on Xi’s China during the Pandemic, which contains several features that are unmatched by existing scholarship. First, all the authors have studied and taught Chinese and American history or politics in both China and the United States for decades. They accordingly are quite familiar with and possess deep understandings of the history, politics, ideology, and society in both countries and therefore their resea...

This volume traces how colonial powers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century built, adapted, and expanded systems of slave trading and coerced labour across different regions of the globe. Bringing together diverse geographical perspectives and source materials, the contributors investigate how European practices of enslavement—shaped above all by experiences in the Atlantic world—were transferred to, or reshaped by, societies in the Indian Ocean and Asia. In examining the manageme...

Increased existential threats demand that Western Democracies and their armed forces can swiftly scale up, rapidly expanding their capabilities to deter potential adversaries and defend borders effectively. The principle of scaling also applies to crisis response systems in general; the larger the disaster scope, the more crucial scalability becomes to alleviate suffering. From a multidisciplinary viewpoint, this book introduces fresh insights into the concept of scaling by examining scalabil...

'Rethinking Environmental Governance' brings to light the pluralistic views, diverse forces, and multiple realities (re)shaping formal and informal decision-making structures, processes, and power interplay in environmental governance. Linking socio-economic drivers with the evolution of cultural norms, the (re)shaping of institutional arrangements, and ever-changing power relations, the book looks at processes of institutional emergence across spatio-temporal scales. Through case study illus...

Spanning Malaysia’s post-independence period, and using the repression-mobilization nexus as a key theoretical framework, this study outlines how its Christian community delicately and simultaneously defends its religious rights without being construed as anti-Islam in the face of state-led “Islamization”. By primarily focusing on the 1980s to the contemporary period, while considering subnational differences between East and West Malaysia, this study charts the changes in the community...

Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan (now the Center for Military History of the National Institute for Defense Studies) published the 102-volume "Senshi Sosho" (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. Volume 3 of the series, "The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies", describes in depth the campaign to gain control over ...

By the closing decades of the 19th century, photography and postcard-production arrived in British Malaya. The colonial-era postcards that were produced up to the 1940s captured virtually all aspects of life in the British colony and remain as visual testimonies of how the colonial subjects at the time lived and worked, as well as their relationship to the land. And yet, despite the developments in photography and postcard-production, the images that were produced also reiterated and reproduc...

This book provides a fresh reinterpretation of the global spread of modern leisure travel in the middle of the nineteenth century through a critical comparative reading of twenty-two works of popular travel writing from maritime Southeast Asia and Ceylon. The examination of these books reveals a coherent genre that was seemingly frivolous yet in fact intensely political, with shared rules and tropes that served to legitimise colonial rule and codify aspects of colonial culture in the popular ...