Modern World History

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 education and land reform - against the aftermath of the Second World War and within a global framework, relating them to the global transformation in political geography from empire to nation.

A revealing reassessment of the American government's position towards Indonesia's struggle for independence

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers' conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a rich account of several U.S.-allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos' rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto's Indonesia.

With original case studies of more than a dozen countries, it offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonization. As colonies became independent states (and European countries and other colonial powers lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonization, republicanism, and radicalism. These studies place dynasties—both European and 'native'—at the center of debate about decolonization and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands, and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies, and the 'white rajahs' of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonization and of the history of modern monarchy.