More than three decades after the release of his seminal work An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Takashi Shiraishi finally published the long-awaited sequel, The Phantom World of Digul. Initially conceived with the self-explanatory title An Age of Normalcy, the monograph draws a sharp contrast with its prequel by investigating the interplay of the colonial regime’s political policing and the concurrent nationalist movement in the final years of the Dutch East Indies. While scholars commonly see the late 1920s and 1930s as a period of “peace and order” under the relatively stable rule of the Dutch Beambtenstaat—an “apolitical, administrative polity par excellence,” Shiraishi demonstrates that the colonial authority achieved such “normalcy” by “reducing the problem of nationalism to the question of police” (p. 16). Boven Digul, a remote penal colony established to intern recalcitrant communists and radical nationalists, stood out as a jarring antithesis to such “normalcy.” The mass internment camp served as both a metaphor and ground for the colonial regime’s policing and surveillance practices, epitomizing Dutch repressive colonial strategies that aimed to confine Indonesians’ political life within an extremely narrow space.

In 1623, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) beheaded twenty-one men on charges of conspiracy and treason in a public execution. Ten of the condemned were employees of the English East India Company (EIC) who had been trading in the Moluccas, better known as the Spice Islands, alongside their Dutch counterparts since the beginning of the century. The incident was hardly the most outrageous mass violence in the region’s tumultuous past. Nevertheless, the EIC dubbed the episode the “Amboyna Massacre,” which gained remarkable significance in various historical writings and unexpected longevity in the British culture in the following centuries. Alison Games’s monograph Inventing the English Massacre is the latest scholarly inquiry into the ambiguous conspiracy and the episode’s long afterlife, spanning British imperial history.

A panel discussion on "Empire and Regional Order", in which I discussed two related issues: 1. how to do research on the history of regional politics? 2. how to make sense of the unwritten by following what Ann Laura Stoler called “archival grains”.

荷兰殖民帝国的日常运作和印尼各种反殖民势力的活动都大大超越了“荷属东印度”这一地理范畴，而印度洋则是两者进行政治角力的重要场域。本文从海洋视角切入，对二十世纪上半叶的印尼反殖民运动进行反思。本文旨在跳出把陆地空间作为基本框架的传统叙事模式，思考反殖民运动中的去地域化因素。本文指出，高速发展的全球航运网络促进了人员、思想、商品的跨洋流动，对各地民族主义的产生及反殖民运动的发展产生了巨大的推动作用，但对这种影响的探讨却长期淹没于把殖民地或民族国家陆地疆域作为分析单位、且带有强烈的目的论倾向的历史书写之中。对跨洋网络等去地域化因素加以研究，有助于突破殖民地与民族国家的“束身衣”，重新审视二十世纪民族主义在殖民世界兴起与发展的历史进程。

China's resistance to Japanese aggression escalated into a full-scale war in 1937. The continuously deteriorating situation stimulated the rise of Chinese nationalism in the diaspora communities worldwide. The Japanese invasion of China, accompanied by the emergence of the National Salvation Movement (NSM) in Southeast Asia, provided the overseas Chinese with a rare opportunity to re-examine their ‘Chineseness’, as well as their relationships with the colonial states and the increasingly self-aware indigenous populations. This research problematises traditional approaches that tend to regard the NSM as primarily driven by Chinese patriotism. Juxtaposing Malaya and Java at the same historical moment, the article argues that the emergence of the NSM was more than just a natural result of the rising Chinese nationalism. Local politics and the shifting political orientations of overseas Chinese communities also profoundly shaped how the NSM played out in different colonial states.

Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) in China has experienced significant changes in the past twenty years. China's rising political and economic power has stimulated growing demands for better understanding of the wider world, resulting in the rapid development of area studies in recent years. Although SEAS in China predated the relatively recent notion of ‘area studies’ by at least half a century, the boom in area studies has profoundly transformed the field, most notably by attracting a large number of scholars to conduct policy-relevant research. Not only does the ‘policy turn’ reflect shifts of research paradigms in the field of SEAS, but it is also consistent with some larger trends prevailing in China's higher education sector and rapidly changing society in general. This article shows that SEAS in China has grown even more imbalanced, as indicated by the rapid growth of language programmes, absolute domination of short-term policy research, and further marginalisation of humanistic subjects. To respond, Chinese universities have adopted new approaches to SEAS depending on their distinct disciplinary foundations, language coverage, faculty interests, and local governments’ policy preferences.

The Dutch East Indies government adopted the so-called Ethical Policy in the early 20th century, resulting in complex repercussions for Chinese minorities. Education was among the most contended battleground between Dutch authorities and the Chinese community and within the Chinese community itself. While the establishment of the Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan schools galvanized the rise of Chinese nationalistic sentiment, the colonial government also founded a Dutch-language school system specifically tailored for the Chinese to counterweight the potential ideological threat. By exploring the competitions and intricacies between the two systems, this paper seeks to problematize the existing literature that predominantly focuses on only one side of the story. The paper argues that the emergence of the two systems was neither a natural result of the Dutch Ethical Policy nor merely driven by the Indies Chinese’s desperate demand for education. Instead, it vividly reflects various tensions within the heterogeneous Chinese community and its entangled relationships with the transforming colonial state and the ancestral homeland.

This chapter assesses the 1926-1927 Uprising in Indonesia across several interconnected geographic and institutional scales: In the Comintern, where exiled leaders of the Partai Komunis Indonesia conferred with Comintern representatives about the situation at home; in the highest levels of the Politburo, where disagreements over revolutionary tactics in China exacerbated the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky; and in Indonesia itself, where colonial repression inspired the abortive uprising. In so doing, this chapter shows how the Uprising demonstrated the limits of internationalism. As PKI leaders were unable to maintain effective contact with the movement in Indonesia, gaps in information undermined decision-making and led to conflict over the applicability of Russian models to the Indonesian context. Debates over Moscow’s China policy diverted attention from other territories and drew PKI members into the Stalin-Trotsky feud. Comintern support for the Uprising, therefore, did not materialize, further undermining the communist movement in Indonesia.

《海岛东南亚近现代史》为面向全校相关院系硕博研究生的英文讨论课。阅读材料以英文历史文献为主，并辅以中文及东南亚语言文本作为补充阅读。课程旨在全面提升研究生的学术能力和创新能力，夯实硕博研究生的史学及区域研究基础，为学生构建必要的区域知识体系，培养其学术研究的问题意识。  

本尼迪克特·安德森著作等身,其代表作《想象的共同体》更是过去数十年间全球人文与社科领域最重要的学术成果之一。此外,安德森的作品涉及文学、政治学、社会学、历史学,以及区域与国别研究等领域,其本人是一个无法被单一学科标签定义的学者。本文以其回忆录《椰壳碗外的人生》为线索,探讨安德森在其学术生涯中试图跳出的六大"椰壳碗",即身份束缚、西方中心主义、书本迷信、狭隘地方主义、学科边界、学术象牙塔,并结合对西方东南亚研究的反思指出打破上述壁垒的必要性。 

1937年中国与日本的军事冲突升级为全面战争。随着中国国内战局的发展,海外华人的民族主义情绪空前高涨,抗日救亡运动在东南亚各地迅速兴起。在此背景下,许多华人重新审视自己的"中国性"与"华人性",思考自身与当地殖民政府及当地社群间的关系。传统观点认为,东南亚的抗日救亡运动主要受海外华人的爱国情怀驱动,其成效取决于华人领袖及社团对整个移民群体的动员能力。本研究将英属马来亚和荷属东印度的抗日救亡运动进行对比,指出这种观点存在一定的片面性。本文认为,虽然海外华人的爱国情绪引发了抗日救亡运动,但东南亚各殖民地不同的社会政治环境却影响了救亡运动的效果,华人群体内部的分歧也对救亡运动的发展产生了重要的形塑作用。 

Kris Alexanderson’s Subversive Sea is the newest addition to the growing scholarship on the twentieth-century Dutch empire. Adopting a fresh approach, this groundbreaking work examines the transoceanic aspects of Indonesian anticolonialism by examining the shipping networks stretching beyond the geographic boundaries of the metropole and colony. Based on her solid archival work, careful reading of existing literature, and well-structured analysis, Alexanderson demonstrates how the “oceans’ permeable boundaries created a simultaneous liberating and threatening maritime spatiality” and that “the maritime world is not a liminal space but an active political arena” (p. 27). Specifically, she points out Dutch shipping companies “connected disparate bodies of water into intertwined transoceanic networks” and played a “unique role in navigating interwar power struggles between imperial hegemony and anticolonialism” (p. 25). By “repositioning colonial Indonesia to a sub-imperial center,” Subversive Sea reveals that the interconnected maritime networks were not only critical in defining colonial structure within the colonial state but also reflected “fundamental differences between terrestrial and oceanic characteristics particular to the interwar Dutch empire” (p. 2).

The past few years have seen a growing number of scholarly works on British operations in Southeast Asia and their relationships with local resistance in World War II. Particularly intriguing is the mysterious last-minute deal struck between the British in Malaya and the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party, or MCP, before the Japanese takeover...

People often see the origins of communist movements in Southeast Asia and the region’s overseas Chinese community as closely intertwined. This perception is evident in the cases of densely Chinesepopulated areas such as Malaya and Siam (Thailand), as well as places like Vietnam and Cambodia, where China’s influence has been historically strong in both political and cultural domains. Admittedly, it is very convenient to connect many Chinese-involved communist activities in Southeast Asia to the emergence of the communist party in China, but the simplistic argument – that Southeast Asia imports communism from China – is severely problematic. While overseas Chinese...