It started as a British experiment in 1933: Could the Malays form an effective modern fighting force? From an experimental company of 25 raw recruits, within 10 years the regiment created legendary heroes in their gallant last stand against the Japanese in Singapore, February 1942.
Had the eminent physicist Ernest Rutherford actually once said that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”, he might have botany in mind, a discipline the very basis of which is collecting and labelling plants according to strict taxonomies. In her (perhaps aptly entitled) new book, Unmaking Botany, Kathleen C Gutierrez sets about describing not just the history of botany in the Philippines but how the practice of it intersected with the imperial projects of Spain and the United States.
In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in the Second World War. The trial sparked outrage across the country, among ordinary people, members of the pro-independence movement and, worryingly for the British Raj, members of the Indian army. The end-result? Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian army, commuted the INA officers’ sentences. Just over a year later, India and Pakistan were independent countries.
What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to keep the peace, much to the chagrin of officials back in London.
Between 5 November and 31 December 1945, three officers of the Indian National Army (INA) were tried by a British military court on charges of murder and waging war against the British king. Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon were found guilty of committing treason against the Crown, Khan was found guilty of murder, and Sahgal and Dhillon were acquitted of murder charges. But instead of imposing the required sentences of life or death, all three defendants were cashiered from the British Army and had their pay and allowances forfeited. As longtime journalist Ashis Ray explains in The Trial That Shook Britain, British authorities made a decision to effectively grant clemency to the officers due to the political and civil turmoil that surrounded the trial. Although the officers were physically in the dock, it was Indian independence that was on trial.
In the early 19th century, Reverend Andrew Fuller, a leading evangelical, dismissed the possibility of any anti-colonial unity in India, claiming that “Hindoos resemble an immense number of particles of sand, which are incapable of forming a solid mass. There is no bond of union among them, nor any principle capable of effecting it.” Yet, over the next century, Fuller’s glib remark would be upended by the very forces he had underestimated. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rising wave of Hindu nationalism had begun to consolidate those so-called “particles of sand” into a powerful, collective identity.
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and unofficial histories celebrate this struggle. Meanwhile, interest in decolonization has grown exponentially, but Indonesia has figured much less in international discussions than cases such as Algeria or India.
Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu.
How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?
There’s a popular folk hero in Puebla, Mexico—Catarina de San Juan, who Mexicans hailed as a devoted religious figure after her death in 1688. She’s credited with creating the china poblana dress, a connection of dubious historical veracity made several centuries after her death. But Catarina is one of Mexico’s most famous “chinos”—despite the fact that she was likely from India, not China. In fact, any Asian that disembarked in Mexico, whether from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, or even further away, was called “chino”. It was not a particularly beneficial classification: “chinos”, under Spanish law, could be enslaved; “indios”, or indigenous populations, could not.
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