The story of the British acquisition of Hong Kong is intricately related to that of the Portuguese enclave of Macao. The British acquired Hong Kong in 1841, following 200 years of European endeavours to induce China to engage in foreign trade. As a residential base of European trade, Portuguese Macao enabled the West to maintain continuous relations with China from 1557 onwards. Opening with a vivid description of the first English voyage to China in 1637. Macao and the British traces the ensuing course of Anglo-Chinese relations, during which time Macao skillfully—and without fortifications—escaped domination by the British and Chinese. The account covers the opening of regular trade by the East India Company in 1770, including the ‘country’ trade between India and China and Britain’s first embassies to Peking, and relates the bedeviling effect of the opium trade. The story culminates in the resulting war from which Britain won, as part of its concessions, the obscure island of Hong Kong. Among those who feature in this lucid and lively account are the merchant princes Jardine and Matheson, the missionary Robert Morrison, the artist George Chinnery, and Captain Charles Elliot, Hong Kong’s maligned founder.

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

The Eisenhower administration’s intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of “counterrevolution” to trace the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite.

Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington’s efforts to roll back “communism” in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War represented in reality a short-term strategy to protect core American interests from the rising tide of Third World nationalism.

Could it be that the familiar and beloved figure of Confucius was invented by Jesuit priests? In Manufacturing Confucianism, Lionel M. Jensen reveals this very fact, demonstrating how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient ru tradition to invent the presumably historical figure who has since been globally celebrated as philosopher, prophet, statesman, wise man, and saint.
Tracing the history of the Jesuits’ invention of Confucius and of themselves as native defenders of Confucius’s teaching, Jensen reconstructs the cultural consequences of the encounter between the West and China. For the West, a principal outcome of this encounter was the reconciliation of empirical investigation and theology on the eve of the scientific revolution. Jensen also explains how Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century fashioned a new cosmopolitan Chinese culture through reliance on the Jesuits’ Confucius and Confucianism. Challenging both previous scholarship and widespread belief, Jensen uses European letters and memoirs, Christian histories and catechisms written in Chinese, translations and commentaries on the Sishu, and a Latin summary of Chinese culture known as the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus to argue that the national self-consciousness of Europe and China was bred from a cultural ecumenism wherein both were equal contributors.

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book.

Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices. 

 Although historians have written extensively on propaganda during Napoleon III’s regime and Vichy, they have virtually ignored the Third Republic. Focusing on Third Republic policies, Marketing Marianne suggests that Americans’ long-lasting love affair with French culture is no accident. Robert J. Young argues that the French used subtle but effective means to influence U.S. policy in Europe. He examines French propaganda efforts and the methods of the French Foreign Ministry, always highlighting the wider cultural and social context of Franco-American relations. French propagandists believed that the steady promotion of their nation as the cultural capital of the world was the best way to foster goodwill among Americans. They slowly recognized the important role the United States played in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Young argues that the French deliberately exploited America’s sense of cultural inferiority when faced with Europe’s rich heritage, and the rise of new technologies and modern forms of government in France encouraged the development of more sophisticated forms of propaganda.

In 1989 news broadcasts all over the world were dominated for weeks by images of East Germans crossing the Berlin Wall to West Germany. But what did the East Germans expect to find when they excitedly broke through the Wall? And what did they actually find when they made it over to the other side? This study draws on fifteen months of research into both the lives of East Germans before the fall of communism and their fast-changing world after they embraced capitalism. Grounded in powerful anthropological insights, Milena Veenis argues persuasively that national identifications and the bond between state and citizenry in both East and West Germany over the past twenty years has been shaped by the far-fetched, socialist and capitalist promises of consumption as the road to ultimate well-being. These promises also functioned as a way to cover up the more shameful and dirty aspects of both countries’ history and social life.

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.

Ramon Eduardo Ruiz would be the first to admit that he is not your typical Mexican American. But he has always known who he is.

Historian, author, and intellectual, Ruiz has established himself through such books as Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People and Cuba: The Making of a Revolution, and in 1998 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton. Now he turns his pen on his own life to offer a personal look at what it really means to be American by birth but Mexican by culture.

Little has been written by or about persons of Mexican origin who have achieved the academic stature of Ruiz, and his memoir provides insights not found in the more common biographies of labor leaders and civil rights activists. His early life straddled the social worlds of his parent's Mexico and semi-rural America, where his father's success as an entrepreneur and property owner set his family's experiences apart from those of most other Mexican Americans at the time. His parents reinforced in their children an identity as mexicanos, and that connection with his ancestral roots was for Ruiz a lifejacket in the days of acute bigotry in America.

In making an early, self-conscious commitment to a life of the mind, Ruiz became aware of his unique nature, and while not immune to prejudice he was able to make a name for himself in several endeavors. As a student, he attended college when few Mexican Americans were given that opportunity, and he was one of the first of his generation to earn a Ph.D. As an Army Air Force officer during World War II, he served as a pilot in the Pacific theatre. And as an intellectual, he navigated the currents of the historical profession and charted new directions in Latin American research through his prolific writing.

Ruiz's career teaching took him to Mexico, Massachusetts, Texas, Oregon—often as the lone "Mexican professor," and ultimately back to his native California. While teaching at Smith, he exulted in being "free to interpret Spanish American life and culture to my heart's content," and at the University of California, San Diego, he saw the era of campus racial barrier give way to the birth of affirmative action. While at UCSD, he taught hundreds of Chicanos and trained one of the largest groups of Chicano Ph.D's.

Memories of a Hyphenated Man is the story of a unique individual who, while shaped by his upbringing and drawing on deep cultural roots, steadfastly followed his own compass in life. It tells of a singular man who beat the odds as it poignantly addresses the ambiguities associated with race, class, citizenship, and nationality for Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.

Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.

By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

A Mission for Development tells the remarkable story of faculty from three Utah universities who lived and worked in Iran as part of the Point Four Program. Using the experience of these advisors, the book reexamines the rise and fall of the US-Iranian alliance and explores the roles that American universities played in international development during the Cold War.
 
The Point Four Program sponsored American technical assistance for developing countries during the 1950s—an American Cold War strategy to cultivate friendly governments and economic development in countries purportedly susceptible to Communist influence. Between 1951 and 1964, advisors from Brigham Young University sought to modernize Iranian public education, experts from Utah State University worked to improve agricultural production, and doctors and nurses from the University of Utah helped with the Iranian government’s rural health initiatives. In A Mission for Development, author Richard Garlitz offers a critical and clear-eyed assessment of the challenges the Utahns faced and the contributions they made to Iranian development.
 
The book also reexamines the Iranian political crisis of the early 1950s and the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh through the eyes of the Utah advisors. A Mission for Development provides rare insight into the university role in international development and will be of interest to historians and policy makers.
 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, soon after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the United States was an imperialistic nation, maintaining (often with the assistance of military force) a far-flung and growing empire. After a long period of collective national amnesia regarding American colonialism, in the Philippines and elsewhere, scholars have resurrected the power of “empire” as a way of revealing American history and culture. Focusing on the terms of Asian American assimilation and the rise of the model-minority myth, Victor Bascara examines the resurgence of empire as a tool for acknowledging—and understanding—the legacy of American imperialism. Model-Minority Imperialism links geopolitical dramas of twentieth-century empire building with domestic controversies of U.S. racial order by examining the cultural politics of Asian Americans as they are revealed in fiction, film, and theatrical productions. Tracing U.S. economic and political hegemony back to the beginning of the twentieth century through works by Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, and Sui Sin Far; discourses of race, economics, and empire found in the speeches of William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan; as well as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and other texts, Bascara’s innovative readings uncover the repressed story of U.S. imperialism and unearth the demand that the present empire reckon with its past. Bascara deploys the analytical approaches of both postcolonial studies and Asian American studies, two fields that developed in parallel but have only begun to converge, to reveal how the vocabulary of empire reasserted itself through some of the very people who inspired the U.S imperialist mission.Victor Bascara is assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is best known in the English-speaking world for his Jerusalem (1783), the first attempt to present Judaism as a religion compatible with the ideas of the Enlightenment. While incorporating much of Jerusalem, Michah Gottlieb’s volume seeks to expand knowledge of Mendelssohn’s thought by presenting translations of many of his other seminal writings from the German or Hebrew originals. These writings include essays, commentaries, unpublished reflections, and personal letters. Part One includes selections from the three major controversies of Mendelssohn’s life, all of which involved polemical encounters with Christian thinkers. Part Two presents selections from Mendelssohn’s writings on the Bible. Part Three offers texts that illuminate Mendelssohn’s thoughts on a diverse range of religious topics, including God’s existence, the immortality of the soul, and miracles. Designed for class adoption, the volume contains annotations and an introduction by the editor.

Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project. In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.