[May 2] Transimperial Trajectories: Colonialism and Anticolonialism across the British and Japanese Empires

Date: May 2, 2025 (Friday)

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F., Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Speaker: Prof. Satoshi Mizutan | Faculty of Global and Regional Studies, Doshisha University (Japan)

Moderator: Prof. Michael Roellinghoff | Department of Japanese Studies, the University of Hong Kong 

Abstract:

This presentation draws on one of the chapters of Transimperial Trajectories: Colonialism and Anticolonialism across the British and Japanese Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Transimperial Trajectories is a monograph which presents Transimperial History (TIH) as a novel field of study by using as an extended case study various interactions which unfolded in-between and across the British and Japanese Empires. The chapter in question deals with the question of colonial collaboration, demonstrating how it can be rethought by adopting a transimperial approach. Based on a multi-archival and multi-lingual examination of historical sources, the paper focuses on the thoughts and activities of Rash Behari Bose, an Indian revolutionary in exile who engaged in anti-British activities in Japan where he lived for three decades from the mid-1910s.

It is well-known that Rash Behari Bose collaborated with Japanese Pan-Asianists, strenuously working to have Japan extend its sphere of influence in ways that drove Britain out of Asia in general and India in particular. Far less known is how Bose and his Japanese colleagues got involved in the imperial politics of colonial collaboration in Korea under Japanese rule. This paper discusses why and how not just Bose but also a circle of Korean collaborators he met in 1934, including Yun Chi-ho, Choe Rin, and Choi Nam-seon, advocated Pan-Asianism as a theory justifying the imperial mobilization of Korean masses into Japan’s ‘sacred’ war against the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’. Through exploring these Indo-Korean trajectories of collaboration with Imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s, the paper proposes ‘transimperialist collaboration’ and ‘mobilisational integration’ as key analytic concepts of TIH which can be applied to many other instances of colonial collaboration which evolved in-between and across two or more different empires under competition.

Speaker’s bio:

Satoshi Mizutani is a professor in the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies at Doshisha University, specializing in British imperial history and colonial studies. He is also the director of the Center for Transimperial History (CTH) at Doshisha. His first monograph, The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India 1858-1930, was released by Oxford University Press in 2011.

All are welcome. No registration is needed.

For enquiries, please contact Prof. Michael Roellinghoff at roellimr@hku.hk