Empires at War, 1911-1923 offers a new perspective on the history of the Great War. It expands the story of the war both in time and space to include the violent conflicts that preceded and followed the First World War, from the 1911 Italian invasion of Libya to the massive violence that followed the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austrian empires until 1923. It also presents the war as a global war of empires rather than a a European war between nation-states. This volume tells the story of the millions of imperial subjects called upon to defend their imperial governments' interest, the theatres of war that lay far beyond Europe, and the wartime roles and experiences of innumerable peoples from outside the European continent. Empires at War covers the broad, global mobilizations that saw African solders and Chinese labourers in the trenches of the Western Front, Indian troops in Jerusalem, and the Japanese military occupying Chinese territory. Finally, the volume shows how the war set the stage for the collapse not only of specific empires, but of the imperial world order writ large.

Scholars have long accepted the belief that a Theravada Buddhist Mon kingdom, Rāmaññadesa, flourished in coastal Lower Burma until it was conquered in 1057 by King Aniruddha of Pagan—which then became, in essence, the new custodian and repository of Mon culture in the Upper Burmese interior. This scenario, which Aung-Thwin calls the "Mon Paradigm," has circumscribed much of the scholarship on early Burma and significantly shaped the history of Southeast Asia for more than a century. Now, in a masterful reassessment of Burmese history, Michael Aung-Thwin reexamines the original contemporary accounts and sources without finding any evidence of an early Theravada Mon polity or a conquest by Aniruddha. The paradigm, he finds, cannot be sustained. How, when, and why did the Mon Paradigm emerge? Aung-Thwin meticulously traces the paradigm's creation to the merging of two temporally, causally, and contextually unrelated Mon and Burmese narratives, which were later synthesized in English by colonial officials and scholars. Thus there was no single originating source, only a late and mistaken conflation of sources. The conceptual, methodological, and empirical ramifications of these findings are significant. The prevalent view that state-formation began in the maritime regions of Southeast Asia with trade and commerce rather than in the interior with agriculture must now be reassessed. In addition, a more rigorous look at the actual scope and impact of a romanticized Mon culture in the region is required. Other issues important to the field of early Burma and Southeast Asian studies, including the process of "Indianization," the characterization of "classical" states, and the advent and spread of Theravada Buddhism, are also directly affected by Aung-Thwin’s work. Finally, it provides a geo-political, cultural, and economic alternative to what has become an ethnic interpretation of Burma’s history. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

This book discusses British thought on race and racial differences in the latter phases of empire from the 1890s to the early 1960s. It focuses on the role of racial ideas in British society and politics and looks at the decline in Victorian ideas of white Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity. The impact of anthropology is shown to have had a major role in shifting the focus on race in British ruling class circles from a classical and humanistic imperialism towards a more objective study of ethnic and cultural groups by the 1930s and 1940s. As the empire turned into a commonwealth, liberal ideas on race relations helped shape the post-war rise of 'race relations' sociology. Drawing on extensive government documents, private papers, newspapers, magazines and interviews this book breaks new ground in the analysis of racial discourse in twentieth-century British politics and the changing conception of race amongst anthropologists, sociologists and the professional intelligentsia.

Teaching About Asia in a Time of Pandemic presents many lessons learned by educators during the COVID-19 outbreak. The volume consists of two sections, one discussing how to teach using examples and case studies emerging from the pandemic and the other focusing on pedagogical tools and methods beyond the traditional face-to-face classroom.

"Tells the stories of Chinese Muslims trying to create coherent lives at the intersection of two potentially conflicting cultures. How can people belong simultaneously to two cultures, originating in two different places and expressed in two different languages, without alienating themselves from either? Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area for 1400 years, and the intellectuals among them have long wrestled with this problem. Unlike Persian, Turkish, Urdu, or Malay, the Chinese language never adopted vocabulary from Arabic to enable a precise understanding of Islam's religious and philosophical foundations. Islam thus had to be translated into Chinese, which lacks words and arguments to justify monotheism, exclusivity, and other features of this Middle Eastern religion. Even in the 21st century, Muslims who are culturally Chinese must still justify their devotion to a single God, avoidance of pork, and their communities' distinctiveness--among other things--to sceptical non-Muslim neighbours and an increasingly intrusive state"--

I have a dog. An inconvenient dog. When I wake up, my dog is inconvenient. When I'm getting dressed, my dog is inconvenient. And when I'm making tunnels, my dog is SUPER inconvenient. But sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be big and warm and cuddly. Sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be the most comforting friend in the whole wide world.