In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia
Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis
Abstract
The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destructio ... More
The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.
Keywords:
Empire,
Modern imperial ideologies,
Japanese wartime empire,
East Asia,
Global History,
Decolonization,
Deimperialization,
Cold War,
Transwar history
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9789888528288 |
Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2021 |
DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528288.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Barak Kushner, editor
Cambridge University
Andrew Levidis, editor
University of Central Lancashire
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