Transwar Asia

Reviews / Votes

Pursuing a transwar perspective, both as analytic method and alternative history, these essays cross the alleged rupture of 1945 to show the connections across time from the 1920s to the 1960s and across space in the entangled nations and empires in Asia and beyond. Their fascinating topics and compelling arguments bring new depth to the term "transwar". * Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University, USA * This volume injects us with an effective dose of reformulation, recalibration and resetting in our understanding of twentieth-century global Asia. The spaciotemporality of 'transwar Asia' as method provides a long duree perspective on knowledge-, practice- and institution-formation within competing imperialisms. It is a welcome and timely volume that all students of modern global history would benefit from reading. * Sho Konishi, Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies; Associate Professor in Modern Japanese History, University of Oxford, UK * Rather than thinking in terms of legacies, the editors highlight the postwar afterlives in a refreshing way that takes into consideration the connections across time... [T]he book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in alternative and postcolonial conceptions of 'Trans-Asia', as a way to rescue research on the continent from area studies. * International Affairs * Transwar Asia is highly recommended to scholars of Asian history and Asian studies more broadly, but equally so to historians who deal with methodological questions of historiography and the conceptualization of history in general. Hofmann and Ward's volume offers new critical insights into four decades of Asian history, during which the experiences of the Second World War were not a temporal interruption but rather must be understood as links of continuity between the region's pre- and post-war periods. -- Frank Jacob * H-Soz-Kult *