British Burma in the New Century draws upon neglected but talented colonial authors to portray Burma between 1895 and 1918, which was the apogee of British governance. These writers, most of them 'Burmaphiles' wrote against widespread misperceptions about Burma.

This multidisciplinary volume highlights the transformed nature of the relationship between higher education and society in the 21st century. In particular, it argues that the development of the global university, especially in the non-western world, has transformed the traditional understanding of the relationship between higher education and society. This has important implications for the relations of state, as education has not only become an object of national development policy but f...

“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in par...

A "compassionate and penetrating" landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War ( New York Times Book Review)."Fitzgerald's Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning study of the Vietnam War remains essential reading thirty years after its initial publication." — Library JournalThis magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam—the tradition...

Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of the World's Largest ArchipelagoIndonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and has the fourth largest population in the world after the United States. Indonesian history and culture are especially relevant today as the Island nation is an emerging power in the region with a dynamic new leader. It is a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes that has a long and rich history stretching ba...

Myanmar, since its independence from the British in 1948, has witnessed decades of military dictatorship, a plethora of ethnic and political problems, and an arduous struggle to political normalcy and democracy. Reinventing its place in international trade, diplomacy, and geo-strategy, Myanmar today presents a complex picture—and how it engages with its own history plays an important part in this process of transformation. Myanmar: A Political History examines the politico-historical antec...

The Political Economy of Imperial Relations offers a much needed historical and theoretical intervention into the relationship between Britain and Malaya after the Second World War. It challenges existing accounts and details a strong continuity in this relationship from 1945 until 1960.

Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles ...

Using previously unexplored archives from colonial institutions and individuals, and primary materials produced by the Burmese Chinese, this comprehensive study investigates over a century of history of the Burmese Chinese under British colonial rule. Due to the peculiar position of Burma in the British imperial world and the Southeast Asian Chinese network, the Chinese community had a unique experience in a Southeast Asian colony governed by Europeans with an India-based system. This book...

Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisati...

In Liberal Barbarism, Erik Ringmar sets out to explain the 1860 destruction of Yuanmingyuan - the Chinese imperial palace north-west of Beijing - at the hands of British and French armies. Yuanmingyuan was the emperor's own theme-park, a perfect world, a vision of paradise, which housed one of the greatest collections of works of art ever assembled. The intellectual puzzle which the book addresses concerns why the Europeans, bent on "civilizing" the Chinese, engaged in this act of barbaris...

By exploring themes of fragility, mobility and turmoil, anxieties and agency, and pedagogy, this book shows how colonialism shaped postcolonial projects in South and Southeast Asia including India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia. Its chapters unearth the contingency and contention that accompanied the establishment of nation-states and their claim to be decolonized heirs.The book places key postcolonial moments - a struggle for citizenship, anxious constitution making, mass educati...