A study of an enigmatic travel writer and his work in colonial Asia during the fin de siècle. In 1898, a man calling himself Alfred Raquez appeared in Indochina claiming to be a writer travelling the world to escape unfathomable sorrows back home in France. He published thousands of pages of highly detailed travel accounts that open a unique window onto the European presence in the Far East. He travelled far into the Zomia of upland Southeast Asia, a peripheral zone populated by people who lived beyond official state power. Raquez explored the nightlife of Shanghai and operated a popular cabaret in Hanoi. An amateur anthropologist, he helped mount expositions of colonial material in Hanoi and Marseille. Raquez met people in the highest circles of Belle Époque Indochina, as well as the kings of Annam, Cambodia, Laos and Siam. And yet, despite the charm and the ebullience and the erudition, through all his travels and rising fame, the man kept a secret that was so mortifying that even his closest companions would not learn of it until after his death in 1907. In truth, Alfred Raquez did not exist. A fascinating read for students and scholars of colonial Southeast Asia, and European colonialism more broadly.

A Study of an Enigmatic Travel Writer and His Work in Colonial Asia during the fin de siècle. In 1898, a man calling himself Alfred Raquez appeared in Indochina claiming to be a writer travelling the world to escape unfathomable sorrows back home in France. He published thousands of pages of highly detailed travel accounts that open a unique window onto the European presence in the Far East. He travelled far into the Zomia of upland Southeast Asia, a peripheral zone populated by people who lived beyond official state power. Raquez explored the nightlife of Shanghai and operated a popular cabaret in Hanoi. An amateur anthropologist, he helped mount expositions of colonial material in Hanoi and Marseille. Raquez met people in the highest circles of belle époque Indochina, as well as the kings of Annam, Cambodia, Laos and Siam. And yet, despite the charm and the ebullience and the erudition, through all his travels and rising fame, the man kept a secret that was so mortifying that even his closest companions would not learn of it until after his death in 1907. In truth, Alfred Raquez did not exist. A fascinating read for students and scholars of colonial Southeast Asia, and European colonialism more broadly.

This text argues that Nietzsche’s idea of invalid policy that is believed to be valid and Heidegger’s concept of doubt as the reason for a representation are essentially the same idea. Using this insight, the text investigates vignettes from colonial occupation in Southeast Asia and its protest occupations to contend that untruth, covered in camouflages of constancy and morality, has been a powerful force in Asian history. The Nietzschean inflections applied here include Superhumanity, the eternal return of trauma, the critiques of morality, and the moralisation of guilt. Many ideas from the Heideggerian canon are used, including the struggle for individual validity amidst the debasement and imbalance of Being. Concepts such as thrownness, finitude and the remnant cultural power of Christianity, are also deployed in an exposé of colonial practices. The book gives detailed treatment to post-colonial Malaya (1963), Japanese occupied Hong Kong (1941–1945), and the tussle with communism in Cold War Singapore and Malaya, as well as the question of Kuomintang KMT validity in Hong Kong (1945–1949) and British Malaya (1950– 1953). The book explains the struggles for identity in the Hong Kong protest movement (2014–2020) by showing how economic distortion caused by landlordism has been covered by aspirations for freedom.

Unlike most books on the Atlantic that associate its history with European colonialism and thus end in 1800, this volume demonstrates that the Atlantic connections not only outlasted colonialism, they also reached unprecedented levels in postcolonial times, when the Atlantic truly became the world’s major crossroads and dominant economy. Twice as many Europeans entered New York, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo in 3 years on the eve of WWI as had arrived in all the New World during 300 years of colonial rule. Transatlantic ties surged again with mass movements from the West Indies, Latin America, and Africa to North America and Western Europe from the 1960s to the present. As befits a transnational subject, the 24 contributors in this volume come from 14 different countries. Over half of the chapters are co-authored, an exceptional level of scholarly collaboration, and all but two are explicitly comparative. Comparisons include Congo and Yoruba slaves in Brazil, Irish and Italian mercenaries and adventurers in the New World, German Lutherans in Canada and Argentina, Spanish laborers in Algeria and Cuba, the diasporic nationalism of ethnic groups without nation states, and the transatlantic politics of fascism and anti-fascism in the interwar. Overall, the volume shows the Atlantic World’s distinctiveness rested not on the level or persistence of colonial control but on the density and longevity of human migrations and the resulting high levels of social and cultural contact, circulation, connection, and mixing. This title will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of Atantic and global history, migration, diaspora, slavery, ethnicity, nationalism, citizenship, politics, anthropology, and area studies.

The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the ‘Hispanic-Anglosphere’ – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) a crucial hub for the global Hispanic world, a launching-pad and a bridge between Spanish Europe, Africa, America and Asia in the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Perhaps not unlike today, that was a time marked by social uncertainty, pandemics, the dislocation of global polities and the rise of radicalisms. The volume offers insights on many themes including trade, the arts, education, language, politics, the press, religion, biodiversity, philanthropy, anti-slavery and imperialism. Established academics and rising stars from different continents and disciplines combined original, primary research with a wide range of secondary sources to produce a rich collection of ten case-studies, 25 biographies and seven samples of interpreted material culture, all presented in an accessible style appealing to scholars, students and the general reader alike. Chapters Introduction; Chapter 1 (Section 1); Chapter 5 (Section 1); Section II; Afterword) of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Keramat, holy graves and shrines, represent physical markers of Singapore’s history as a multi‐ethnic maritime trading center. They offered sanctified spaces not only for Muslims but also for the entire community in which they emerged. Maintained by self‐appointed caretakers, the stories of keramat often interweave fact with folklore that mirror the history and sensibilities of the community. While once an abundant part of the social landscape of Singapore, many keramat were destroyed during the post‐independence rush to develop. These keramat now face a second vanishing with memories of them fading as caretakers and community members age and pass away. In parallel, many modern Muslims consider keramat as a form of shirk, or polytheism, and tacitly consent to their destruction. This book concludes by critically examining the often‐tense relationship between keramat and authority, both secular and religious, from colonial to modern times. The dilemmas of grappling with puritanical norms and grassroots elaborations in varying modes of preservation are investigated using case studies from Singapore and the wider region. A vital resource for scholars, this work contributes to a people’s history of Singapore, one that both deepens and problematizes official historical accounts.

This book explores imperial power and the transnational encounters of shipowners and merchants in the South China Sea from 1840 to 1930. With British Hong Kong and French Indochina on its northern and western shores, the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ was for almost a century a crucible of power and an axis of economic struggle for coastal shipping companies from various nations. Merchant steamers shipped cargoes and passengers between ports of the region. Hong Kong, the global port city, and the colonial ports of Saigon and Haiphong developed into major hubs for the flow of goods and people, while Guangzhouwan survived as an almost forgotten outpost of Indochina. While previous research in this field has largely remained within the confines of colonial history, this book uses the examples of French and German companies operating in the South China Sea to demonstrate the extent to which transnational actors and business networks interacted with imperial power and the process of globalisation.