An ocean of print: the communications revolution in late-colonial South and Southeast Asia

This paper examines the nineteenth century revolution in maritime communications as it affected British territories in the Indian Ocean. It argues that the massive increase in the number of letters, books, postcards, pamphlets and periodicals circulated across the region during the period 1870-1920 constituted an information explosion. In particular, the heighted interconnection afforded new, multilingual Asian literati led to the creation of transnational publics which transformed the way some people thought about knowledge, community, modernity and the future of the British Empire. Can we argue that this era witnessed the birth of a bourgeois colonial public sphere and an Asian enlightenment?postprintThe Commodities in Motion Workshop, London, U.K., 5-7 July 2010

An unsettled majority: immigration and the racial ‘balance’ in multicultural Singapore

This article examines the official idea of racial ‘balance’ in Singapore and its relationship to modern multiculturalism or (as the island’s government refers to it) ‘multiracialism’. The article explores the colonial origins of Singapore’s contemporary ethnic population breakdown and the emergence of ethnic Chinese as the island’s majority community. It examines how the Singapore government has come to officially depict the island’s multicultural ‘success story’ since independence, and the official emphasis on the necessity of maintaining fixed ethnic ratios which ensure that Chinese remain roughly three-quarters of the island’s settled population. At the same time, this article interrogates the official rationale behind such a policy, illuminating the colonial-era discursive assumptions that underpin it, and highlighting the way such assumptions have been contested. The article especially focuses on the role that immigration has played in the state’s effort to ensure Singapore’s racial ‘balance’, and argues that such an ethnically-determined immigration policy has frequently unsettled the Chinese majority it has been intended to bolster, while calling into question the multicultural idealism on which the Republic of Singapore was ostensibly founded

Introduction: The “comfort women” as public history - scholarship, advocacy and the commemorative impulse

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women

Introduction: Locating Asia's War Memory Boom: national, regional and global perspectives

This introductory chapter locates recent shifts in war memory across the Asia region within the wider historical literature that seeks to explain the phenomenon of “memory booms”. While recognizing those global changes which have influenced the timing and shape of war remembrance across Asia as well as Europe, the authors take aim at a Western diffusionist model of the history of war memory. They argue that approaches informed by European experience need to better take account of historical difference and be, in effect, provincialized. They also contend that the ruptures in Asian war memory directly occasioned by the end of the Cold War have been overplayed. Rather, the major recent rupture in war remembrance has been the increasingly interconnected nature of war memory-making in the region, across national boundaries and involving growing numbers of non-state actors. This has influenced a shift from portraying the wars of 1931–45 as a series of local national wars, each with its own political significance and temporality, towards presenting them as a common pan-Asian experience

Debating Shusenjo - the main battlefield of the comfort women issue: director Miki Dezaki in conversation with Mark R. Frost and Edward Vickers

This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki’s film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty-and importance-of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past

Isotropic Oscillator Under a Magnetic and Spatially Varying Electric Field

We investigate the energy levels of a particle confined in the isotropic oscillator potential with a magnetic and spatially varying electric field. Here we are able to exactly solve the Schrodinger equation, using matrix methods, for the first excited states. To this end we find that the spatial gradient of the electric field acts as a magnetic field in certain circumstances. Here we present the changes in the energy levels as functions of the electric field, and other parameters

Pandora's post box: Empire and information in British India, 1854-1914

This essay examines the historical relationship between empire and information in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Asia through a new examination of the imperial post. It argues that the creation of an Indian penny post in 1854 set in motion an information revolution which impacted regionally on literate and illiterate Indian subjects of the British Empire, on Indian publishers, and on colonial administrators. What historians have so far written about Britain?s imperial post has largely presented it as an instrument of modern colonial state-building. When it has merited attention as an engine of social communication it has been mistakenly judged an outright failure. But, as this essay argues, a study of the imperial post reveals Britain?s colonial state, within the wider context of a very illiberal British imperialism in Asia, trying to behave like a liberal one. While its desire for control and surveillance pulled it in one direction, Victorian notions of free trade, which in turn demanded an unrestricted circulation of information, pulled it in another. These contradictory impulses have largely been ignored in a literature more often focused on the authoritarian aspects of British rule after 1850; yet, as this study suggests, they are fundamental to comprehending both the history of the imperial post and the everyday foundations of Britain's imperial authority in India

Regulation of transposable elements by DNA modifications

Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (101225/Z/13/Z)People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement number 608765