In Imperial Gateway, Seiji Shirane explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Challenging understandings of empire that focus on bilateral relations between metropole and colonial periphery, Shirane uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan's imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order. Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

In his Rules for Wife Behavior, Colonel Joseph Whistler summed up his expectations for his new bride: “You will remember you are not in command of anything except the cook.” Although their roles were circumscribed, the wives of army officers stationed in British India and the U.S. West commanded considerable influence, as Verity McInnis reveals in this comparative study of two female populations in two global locations. Women of Empire adds a previously unexplored dimension to our understanding of the connections between gender and imperialism in the nineteenth century. McInnis examines the intersections of class, race, and gender to reveal social spaces where female identity and power were both contested and constructed. Officers’ wives often possessed the authority to direct and maintain the social, cultural, and political ambitions of empire. By transferring and adapting white middle-class cultural values and customs to military installations, they created a new social reality—one that restructured traditional boundaries. In both the British and American territorial holdings, McInnis shows, military wives held pivotal roles, creating and controlling the processes that upheld national aims. In so doing, these women feminized formal and informal military practices in ways that strengthened their own status and identities. Despite the differences between rigid British social practices and their less formal American counterparts, military women in India and the U.S. West followed similar trajectories as they designed and maintained their imperial identity. Redefining the officer’s wife as a power holder and an active contributor to national prestige, Women of Empire opens a new, nuanced perspective on the colonial experience—and on the complex nexus of gender, race, and imperial practice.

How do colonial histories matter to the urgencies and conditions of our current world? How have those histories so often been rendered as leftovers, as "legacies" of a dead past rather than as active and violating forces in the world today? With precision and clarity, Ann Laura Stoler argues that recognizing "colonial presence" may have as much to do with how the connections between colonial histories and the present are expected to look as it does with how they are expected to be. In Duress, Stoler considers what methodological renovations might serve to write histories that yield neither to smooth continuities nor to abrupt epochal breaks. Capturing the uneven, recursive qualities of the visions and practices that imperial formations have animated, Stoler works through a set of conceptual and concrete reconsiderations that locate the political effects and practices that imperial projects produce: occluded histories, gradated sovereignties, affective security regimes, "new" racisms, bodily exposures, active debris, and carceral archipelagos of colony and camp that carve out the distribution of inequities and deep fault lines of duress today.

Desert islands are the focus of intense geopolitical tensions in East Asia today, but they are also sites of nature conservation. In this global environmental history, Paul Kreitman shows how the politics of conservation have entangled with the politics of sovereignty since the emergence of the modern Japanese state in the mid-nineteenth century. Using case studies ranging from Hawai'i to the Bonin Islands to the Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Isles to the South China Sea, he explores how bird islands on the distant margins of the Japanese archipelago and beyond transformed from sites of resource extraction to outposts of empire and from wartime battlegrounds to nature reserves. This study examines how interactions between birds, bird products, bureaucrats, speculators, sailors, soldiers, scientists and conservationists shaped ongoing claims to sovereignty over oceanic spaces. It considers what the history of desert islands shows us about imperial and post-imperial power, the web of political, economic and ecological connections between islands and oceans, and about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world.

Winner of Military History Monthly’s 2017 Book of the Year Award The Classis Britannica was the Roman regional fleet controlling and protecting the waters around the British Isles – in other words, Britain’s first-ever navy. For over 200 years it played a key role in the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire: it helped to establish the province of Britannia and assisted in Roman military campaigns, as well as controlling the continental coast through to the Rhine Delta. Outside of war, the Classis Britannica also offered vital support for the civilian infrastructure of Roman Britain, assisting in administration, carrying out major building and engineering projects, and running industry. Later, its mysterious disappearance in the mid-third century ad would contribute to Britain finally leaving the Empire 150 years later. In Sea Eagles of Empire, acclaimed historian Simon Elliott tells its story for the very first time.

The emergence of the open city during the 11th century is one of the most dramatic and important changes in Chinese urban history. While the Sui and the early Tang city was controlled and highly disciplined with restricted commercial activity, the late Northern Song city filled with pluralistic streets active round the clock became a new urban paradigm. These cities reflect the respective societies that gave rise to them - one rooted in a strong aristocratic power with a highly hierarchical social structure, and the other shaped by a pluralistic, mercantile society managed by pragmatic professional bureaucrats. This book provides an in-depth account of the process of transformation from the curfewed city of the Tang period to the open city of the Song. It analyses the multidimensional factors that gradually led to the development of an urban culture which in turn helped cement the trend towards the open city with its irregular layout and distinct urban tissue and silhouette.