Traditionally, the tumultuous period 1930-50 in South East Asia has been viewed as a dichotomy, of European vs Asian or imperialist vs nationalist. This highly acclaimed volume presents another (triangular) perspective and challenges established wisdom about the period.

Traditionally, the tumultuous period 1930-50 in South East Asia has been viewed as a dichotomy, of European vs Asian or imperialist vs nationalist. This highly acclaimed volume presents another (triangular) perspective and challenges established wisdom about the period.

This volume is a festschrift for Damodar Ramaji SarDesai (b. 1931), Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where all of the contributors received their Ph.D as did SarDesai himself. His work for over fifty years at UCLA has been an inspiration to generations of students, and he has made major contributions to the world of learning, and in his chosen areas of specialization of India, especially its foreign policy with regard to Southeast Asia, imperialism and the history of the modern European empires; and Southeast Asia. He has served as Chair of the History Department at UCLA as well as Bombay University and President of the Asiatic Society of Bombay. The volume includes a biographical introduction and a bibliographic essay on SarDesai’s major writings and contains new and cutting-edge essays on the design of imperial Vijayanagara; famine policy in colonial India and how European imperialist policies created, or exacerbated the impact of, famines; the relatively unknown chapter of ‘Chinese Gordon’s’ brief Indian career; reflections on the Tamil humanist A. Madhaviah, a man ahead of his time; nationalism and the career of industrialist G.D. Birla, Gandhi’s friend; the ‘Chindia Problematic’—India and China relations; the state of Philippine historiography and its nationalist impulses; the role of Vietnamese highlanders in the Vietnamese nationalist struggle and their recent plight; early Malayan nationalism; and the efforts of American administrators to protect Philippine highland natives from being forced to participate in international exhibitions as curiosities from the American colony.

Using Southeast Asia as an example, this book tests theory about the relation between modernity, nationalism, and ethnic identity. The author develops his own typology to better fit the formation of political identities such as the Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Acehnese, Batak and Kadazan.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.

Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based on decades of colonial rule, as well as the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.