Given war's propensity for trampling over and demolishing borders—its literal, one might even say primordial, function as a motor of deterritorialization and reterritorializationFootnote 1 —the scant scholarly attention paid to it as a globalizing force remains surprising. An extensive body of literature has responded to the complex role of globalization in the making, as well as the supposed unmaking, of conflict. Liberal economists and political theorists, in an intellectual lineage that dates back to the writings of the European Enlightenment, have made bold claims about global economic integration and the emergence of a ‘capitalist peace’.Footnote 2 Critics of their arguments have pointed to the Western imperial violence which, from the mid-eighteenth century on, cleared the ground (and perhaps, more importantly, the seas) to make way for the so-called ‘free’ market world economy, a process which established several of those fundamental worldwide inequalities that have been perpetuated to this day.Footnote 3 The hard evidence of a more recent past makes a mockery of the presumption that global capitalist enterprises such as Starbucks and McDonalds might bring about some kind of Big Mac and Frappuccino-mediated universal fraternity.Footnote 4 Critical observers of globalization during the ‘Noughties’ (2000–2010) now recognize it as both one of the most interconnected decades in world history, and also one of the bloodiest.Footnote 5
However, the idea that wars—in particular, the twentieth century's two world wars—in themselves produced forms of intensified globalization (just as they disrupted and demolished pre-existing forms) has yet to find its place in a field largely characterized, as one scholar has put it, by its ‘pacific tendencies’.Footnote 6 Historians, especially, have remained quiet on the matter, even as more of them take up a self-consciously global perspective in their work. There is no doubt that the study of the two world wars has, in one sense, gone global. Important work has established how far the military and civilian experiences of the First World War stretched out beyond Europe and the United States; it has advanced the view that the origins of the Second World War can be found in the stresses and strains of the ‘global food economy’.Footnote 7 At the same time, the discipline of history in general has yet to grapple with what David Bell, in a critical review of a major global history writing effort, labels the ‘most direct form of “global connection” imaginable’—that is, ‘military conquest’.Footnote 8
Students coming to the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization might therefore be forgiven for imagining that it was what happened before and in between major international conflicts that is significant—in other words, that globalization was a process historically bookended by these conflicts and confined to periods of, by comparison, relative ‘capitalist peace’, until the moment when it sprang forth, rejuvenated, following the thawing of the Cold War. Alternatively, from their reading of A world connecting, the mammoth joint-authored effort of which Bell is critical, these same students might adduce, as he puts it, that ‘even the World Wars actually did surprisingly little to disrupt the long-term growth of global connections and networking’Footnote 9 —that, in effect, the onward forces of globalization carried on regardless, despite such cataclysmic disruption.Footnote 10 Emily S. Rosenberg, the editor of A world connecting, writes in her introduction that: ‘Even as World War One temporarily disrupted networks of trade, finance, and personal bonds, it highlighted the world's accelerating connectedness.’ Charles S. Maier, another eminent contributor to this volume, posits that those writing global history, while accepting the First World War as a dramatic moment which ‘structures. . .our moral narrative’, need to ‘keep a different tempo and follow long-term processes’. Dirk Hoerder, through his discussion of migration, is the only contributing author to specifically identify the two world wars as distinct motors of globalization. Yet, he spends less than a dozen pages (which include maps) examining this topic, in a book that stretches to over 1,100 pages.Footnote 11
The articles presented in this Forum eschew the argument that the world wars ‘did surprisingly little to disrupt the long-term growth of global connections and networking’.Footnote 12 Instead, they uphold the twentieth century's two major global conflicts as unprecedented points of historical rupture and critical junctures in the history of the region's social, political, and economic transformation. They also appreciate that just as one might write a history of global wartime convergences and connections, an equally valid enterprise would be to write the history of global wartime disruptions and displacements, as the historian Sandra Barkhof and literature specialist Angel K. Smith have recently done. Both these authors depict the twentieth century's world wars as having unleashed worldwide processes of disconnection and alienation, as soldiers and civilians were forcibly dispersed to places far away from home and nation.Footnote 13
What our contributors seek to provide is a more nuanced appreciation of the historical ruptures generated by global conflict, through their exploration of the distinctive forms of transnational convergence and connection which sprang from a specific wartime context. Each article, in its own way, explores the border-crossing traffic of people, information, ideologies, aid, and even political performance, for which the war in Asia of 1937–1945 was directly responsible—notwithstanding the chaos it wrought. Together, these articles expand on the arguments made by Tarak Barkawi who, in his study of the mobilization and transportation of the British Indian Army, and of the United States Army's more recent campaigns in Vietnam and Iraq, has sought to depict the way in which war ‘constituted’ new global connections.Footnote 14
But this Forum also raises the question of whether such wartime connections—which typically developed rapidly, and were more-often-than-not fragile, punctuated, and temporary—can be adequately conceptualized through the current language of globalization still in vogue. When writing histories of globalization, scholars typically resort to notions of webs, flows, circuits, and circulations which assume some degree of permanence through the longer term social, economic, and political processes which produce them. As Maier in A world connecting argues, globalization is a process which possesses a ‘different tempo’ and so demands that the historian adopt a long-term historical lens that looks beyond major points of historical rupture.
Yet in the violent and haphazard context of global war, when population movements were sudden, frequently one way, and coerced, when the ‘flow’ of knowledge might have been censored, and vital networks of information abruptly cut, is such a perspective either useful or appropriate? Do we instead need to identify the emergence of a more intense, frenetic, and unstructured globalization during wartime, as the points at either end of the lines of communication shifted from location to location, in frantic manoeuvres designed to re-establish essential routes of supply? The articles in this Forum, it is hoped, make some case for answering this question in the affirmative.
A global history of the war in Asia: framing the regional
Why focus specifically on Asia during the Second World War? The three articles in this Forum examine a region and a period where it might fairly be observed that much has already been done to highlight border-crossing connections, without this research having explicitly defined itself as part of a wider history of globalization effort. Chris Bayly and Tim Harper's pivotal two-volume history of the war in British Asia and its aftermath purports, from its opening chapter, to trace the connections that ran along what they term the ‘great crescent’ linking India with Burma, Malaya, and Singapore. Especially in their first instalment, which chronicles the ‘forgotten armies’ that moved across this arena, they provide the first attempt at a coherent transnational account of the interconnected experience of the Second World War across these territories.Footnote 15 Our understanding of the massive regional movements of Asian civilians during this conflict owes much to the research of historians such as Sunil Amrith, who has addressed Indian migration between Southeast and South Asia, and Paul Kratoska, who has edited an important volume on labour migration within Japan's wartime empire.Footnote 16 Tracing another form of wartime mobility, Ernest Koh has recovered the engagement of overseas Chinese of Singapore with China during the 1937–1945 conflict, which culminated in their contributions—of funds, machinery, and personnel—to the ‘Burma Road’ from Lashio to Kunming, a new supply line intended to relieve China's nationalist forces.Footnote 17
Nonetheless, in their willingness to surmount the boundaries by which other works abide, these works remain striking exceptions. Undoubtedly, major studies of the Second World War in Asia have now begun at last to ‘globalize’ the study of a subject long defined by its pervasive Eurocentricism.Footnote 18 In the process, these works have raised historiographical questions about the conflict's origins and its temporal identity. For the most part, however, they still take the nation-state as their principal framework of analysis, or, if they venture beyond it, adopt a lens circumscribed by the boundaries of modern area studies.Footnote 19 The effect has been to drive a conceptual wedge through the northern, southern, and eastern parts of war-torn Asia, which the conflict itself did not necessarily generate, and which ignores the historical experience of wartime globalization which spilled across these imaginary divides.
This limitation is especially evident in the body of literature devoted to Japan's wartime empire. For some decades, historians have regarded Japan's Southeast and Northeast Asian colonial territories as discrete and distinct spheres, in an apparent reinforcement of the earlier administrative logic of Tokyo's imperial officials. Duus, Myers, and Peattie's The Japanese wartime empire, 1931–45 has at least moved things forward from the original volume in the series, which ‘set aside’ Southeast Asia as a separate imperial arena that was deserving of study in its own right. Yet this latest offering still conforms to an area studies structure even as it strives to provide broader historical coverage. Japan's Nanyo annexations are examined in a separate section, which follows one devoted to Japan's Northeast Asian empire, with the result that the possibility for new understandings about the integrated and interrelated history of these administrative units is nullified.Footnote 20 Other studies likewise underline a degree of Southeast Asian exceptionalism in the history of the Japanese empire, at the expense of a discussion of the connections which embedded it within a common imperial edifice.Footnote 21 One notable exception is Kratoska's aforementioned edited volume on wartime labour. Another is Michael Baskett's study of transnational film culture in an imperial Japan that had become mobilized for war. This latter work paves the way for future efforts by arguing for the creation of a ‘mass audience linked together by filmic discourses’ in which film representations and their circulation became official tools of Japan's ‘pan-Asianism’ project.Footnote 22
Of course, writing a history of wartime globalization in Asia is no simple task. Basic challenges of scale, expertise, and language proficiency readily explain the geographical frames that have been applied in existing historical enquiries. Moving beyond these frames demands a familiarity with an often overwhelming collection of distinctive political, social, and economic contexts. It frequently requires the integration of a degree of interdisciplinary and specialist area knowledge that is only achievable through scholarly collaboration. By the same token, it is hardly a given that every form of border-crossing wartime connection necessitates us dispensing with existing geographical units of historical enquiry. Kenneth J. Ruoff's enlightening examination of Japanese wartime tourism to Manchukuo and China during the 1937–1945 conflict is a case in point. It reveals that war heritage tourism did not wait for peace to become a powerful source of inter-regional exchange; rather, the Japanese state consciously promoted such tourism to foster a popular and physical engagement of its subjects with their imperial patrimony. Although similar tours to Southeast Asian parts of the empire may well have also developed had the war in the Pacific not turned against the Japanese from late 1942, the scope of Ruoff's study is determined by the reality that the passage of the conflict did not take this turn.Footnote 23
The historiographical problems arise when these frames of reference become confining conceptual compartments, which limit our understanding of wartime forces and mechanisms. If any event in the history of Asia brought home the reality that life (and death) in one part of the region had become linked to places elsewhere and far away, then the war of 1937–1945 was undoubtedly it. For historians to avoid the study of the global interconnections which this conflict produced, because they lure the nation-state or the area studies specialists among them over the border into alien territory, means losing sight of those key transnational actors, those (often newly formed) supranational contexts, and those intense border-crossing movements and interdependencies which arose from the war and determined the way it unfolded. A narrower historical lens might ensure that the story remains clear and focused. It will still only hint at the myriad ways in which the same story's protagonists fought, imagined, experienced, and determined the outcome of this conflict beyond the geographical boundaries that it so readily altered or obliterated.
Having said this, this Forum does not intend to make a sacrificial offering of the local, the national or ‘the area’ at the altar of the pan-Asian and the global. It is hardly our intention to inspire historians to ditch their conceptual baggage and their robes of specialist expertise, so that they can run headlong and unencumbered after wartime connections which take them ever further away from the place where they started. The global frame employed here is not one that aspires to provide global coverage. Rather, we take as our starting point the study of globalization as involving the investigation of transnational phenomena that manifest themselves in ‘the movement of people, goods, and knowledge beyond the boundaries of collectives, as defined by their political or ethnic affiliation’.Footnote 24 We furthermore seek to make the (one might say obvious) case that wartime processes that had an impact in Asia were ‘constructed in [this very] movement between places, sites, and regions’.Footnote 25
Most importantly, this Forum attempts to provide a rooted understanding of border-crossing wartime connections in which a global perspective is drawn upon to better inform our understanding of place, whether that place be the ‘area’ of area studies approaches, or the nation, or the smaller locality. Cities, too, although our contributors do not discuss them directly, provide fine examples of the impact of frenetic wartime globalization, as indicated by the rapid transformation of China's nationalist capitals of Wuhan and then Chongqing. The British writer Christopher Isherwood, who in the company of the poet W. H. Auden visited Wuhan in 1938, remarked that the city was ‘the real capital of wartime China’, a place the two men would rather be ‘than anywhere else on earth’. In his diary, Isherwood wrote of the ‘consulates, warehouses, offices, and banks; British and American drug stores, cinemas, churches, clubs’. He also noted that:
there is a good lending library, a Y.M.C.A [Young Men's Christian Association], a red-light street of cafes—Mary's, the Navy Bar, the Last Chance . . . All kinds of people live in this town—Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley, Chou Enlai; generals, ambassadors, journalists, foreign naval officers, soldiers of fortune, airmen, missionaries, spies. Hidden here are all the clues which would enable an expert, if he could only find them, to predict the events of the next fifty years.Footnote 26
Wuhan, as a cosmopolitan metropolis that had developed quickly (so Isherwood comprehended it) into a centre of global history, inevitably also became the focus of international media attention. Foreign correspondents and documentary film-makers flocked to the city to record its defence. Robert Capa, ‘Mr Life magazine’ himself, arrived in Wuhan to visually document its resistance efforts, having just covered the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 27 The sudden internationalization of wartime Wuhan in turn impacted on the patriotic activism of those who congregated there. On 8 March 1938, International Women's Day, female Chinese activists in Wuhan twinned the sacrificial role played by Spanish women in their patriotic defence of the besieged city of Madrid with their own brave efforts. The activist Shi Liang, for example, passionately called upon her female compatriots to match the actions of their political sisters thousands of miles away in Europe.Footnote 28
Especially following Wuhan's fall, Chongqing, the capital of Chiang Kai-shek's retreating government, likewise became a suddenly globalized metropolis, transforming, as Li Danke has observed, ‘from a regional centre to an internationally known wartime capital’.Footnote 29 Connected with the outside world through newly added airlines and international telephone services, as well as through the strategically pivotal Dianmian Road—the overland route through Yunnan to Burma which enabled the Allies to continue supplying Chiang's Guomindang forces—the city emerged as the communications hub of Free China.Footnote 30
The contributions
To capture wartime globalization in Asia, the three articles collected here adopt what might be considered a decidedly non-macro approach. Each is grounded in the study of a single incident, a single life story or group of connected life stories: the Indian war correspondent who travelled along the ‘great crescent’ from India down to Java; the Indian medical mission to war-torn China; the Italian fascist propaganda mission to Japan and its newly acquired East Asian territories. In each of these studies, a global frame means taking the wartime history of the modern-day Asian nation-state out of itself—whether that nation be (in our case) India, China or Japan—in order to then return it to itself, with what is thereby hoped for is an enhanced understanding of the way wartime convergences and connections affected it.
In ‘The transnational mission of an Indian war correspondent: P. R. S. Mani in Southeast Asia, 1944–1946’, Heather Goodall (with additional material from Mark R. Frost) provides an insider's view of the border-crossing experiences of Indian troops in British service as they were mobilized and then deployed in Manipur, Burma, and Indonesia. By juxtaposing the official dispatches, private diary entries, and later recollections produced by Captain P. R. S. Mani, a British Indian Army Public Relations officer, this article reveals how the production of wartime propaganda and the establishment of transnational wartime communications became open to nationalist subversion and appropriation. Mani embarked on his transnational journey with a mission to move Indian servicemen from the margins of the British public relations machine to the centre. He also used his position as a producer of official military information to further his own patriotic agenda, secretly establishing contact with fellow Indian nationalists in the diaspora, not to mention (eventually) with fellow anti-colonial Asian freedom fighters. After the war, Mani recorded the striking dilemmas with which he and his fellow Indian soldiers were faced as they became the military enforcers of British interests overseas, while they simultaneously received news of the anti-colonial movement in their homeland. Goodall chooses the costly Battle of Surabaya in late 1945 to poignantly illustrate this. Her analysis shows how the under-researched movement of information through Asian wartime journalism impacted on the political landscape of the region, shaping the way its non-European participants viewed their involvement in the conflict in increasingly pan-Asian terms.
That transnational associations and connections were not merely severed with the outbreak of all-out war in China, but strengthened and realigned in manifold ways, is illustrated by Maria Framke's article ‘“We must send a gift worthy of India and the Congress!” War and political humanitarianism in late colonial South Asia’. It examines the Indian medical mission sent by the Indian National Congress (INC) to China in 1938 in support of the Nationalist government. Framke delineates how the organization of this mission gave expression to a new climate of national protest and growing internationalism in India. By dispatching it, the INC joined in a global effort that protested against Japanese aggressions. The Congress also drew upon certain pan-Asian ideas that had long circulated in India and had developed in exchanges with pan-Asian thinkers situated throughout the region. Furthermore, Framke stresses that the mission also enabled the INC to appear as if it was performing on an international stage as an independent government of India, unbound by British rule. She therefore argues that the INC used this transnational humanitarian mission as a political tool in its arsenal of instruments for anti-colonial emancipation. Like Goodall, Framke ultimately shows how the forces of wartime globalization—which brought Indian doctors to China—meant that India's freedom struggle played out on an international stage.
The third and final article in this Forum, Daniel Hedinger's ‘The spectacle of global fascism: The Italian Blackshirt mission to Japan's Asian empire’ bridges the Asian and European theatres of war. Hedinger draws on the Japanese wartime media that followed and reported on the Italian ‘Missione del Partito Nazionale Fascista’, which, in the spring of 1938, journeyed through the Japanese empire, visiting China, Korea, Manchukuo, and Japan itself. Not only, in Japanese hands, did the Mission's voyage become a pan-Asian propaganda trip which emphasized Japan's alleged success in uniting Asia, it contributed to a reassessment of Japan in Italy as a ‘modern’ and powerful international player and the reversal of a racialized discourse that had previously denounced Japan's East Asian expansionism. Importantly, Hedinger shows that this new way of conducting diplomacy through cultural means generated a much stronger popular consciousness of the Axis alliance in Japan than is often postulated. On the one hand, the Italian Missione enabled Japanese publicists to globalize the public's conception of the war in China. Simultaneously, this visit allowed the Japanese media to localize the Tokyo-Rome-Berlin alliance as something tangible and visceral at a domestic level, giving it a recognizably pan-Asian face. Hedinger concludes that late-1930s Axis diplomacy and ideology can be viewed neither in isolation nor understood by simply scrutinizing local-level fascist activities. It is only through a global lens that the powerful transnational forces that were at play during the war in Asia reveal themselves.
The legacies of wartime globalization?
Collectively, the contributions in this Forum show that the 1937–1945 war in Asia drove up the fever curve of a type of globalization which brought into play new border-crossing connections, just as it destroyed and disrupted others. These articles, although they focus on different locales across Asia, help us better understand the critical role of war in the intensified transnational movement of information, of ideologies, and of people. Yet, we may still ask what exactly were the long-term historical impacts of these sudden, often febrile, and frequently impermanent, global wartime movements?
As the articles in this Forum begin to show, the answer to this question is complex and far from uniform. In the case of India, the wartime convergences and connections that connected Indian patriots with other Asian freedom fighters in Malaya and especially Indonesia generated a sense of pan-Asian solidarity that reached its climax with India's independence in 1947, an event celebrated by anti-colonial nationalists across the region. The Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, which Prime Minister Nehru attended, might be cited as evidence that such solidarity survived decolonization. However, the partition of India and the emergence of Pakistan impacted on India's relationship with Indonesia, diluting the sense of transnational sympathy and solidarity that the Second World War had made possible.
Meanwhile, Sino-Indian exchanges, which had experienced a new lease of life through wartime humanitarian links, cooled with the increasing ideological rifts that began to divide the region as the Cold War progressed, and eventually hit freezing point with the Chinese-Indian border war of 1962. Nevertheless, some lingering Sino-Indian legacies of wartime globalization were still evident after this. Today, the participants in the Indian medical mission of 1938 continue to be evoked by China's communist leaders as the epitome of exemplary Sino-Indian ties.Footnote 31
In other cases, the transnational mobility which the war generated came to a swift and grinding halt soon after hostilities formally ceased. China's suddenly globalized cities of Wuhan and Chongqing became, along with the rest of the country, effectively sealed off from most of the world by the Revolution of 1949, which followed the recommencement in 1946 of the country's civil war. Post-war Japan, under official American occupation until 1952, also experienced a period of what we might term rapid ‘de-globalization’. Japanese expatriates were expelled from its former East Asian empire and flocked back to the homeland in their millions. Movements into and out of the country were closely controlled until as late as 1964, when the Tokyo Olympics of that year signalled (for many contemporaries) Japan's return to the international community.
Finally, if we take a step back, and at last adopt a macro-perspective, we find that the ways in which the war in Asia enabled and stimulated rapid forms of globalization was contingent on the direction in which other far-off parts of the world were simultaneously moving. The way in which the Second World War unfolded in the region, and the global connections it generated, were heavily determined by the arrival, the retreat, the return, and then the final departure of extra-Asian armed forces. When London and Washington decided that these foreign armies should decamp and depart, whole systems of global transportation and communication, along with entire networks of supply went with them. So too, typically, did the newspapers, radio stations, and war correspondents that had sustained the information flows binding this region of the world to others.
This reality—that the end of global conflict could generate its own post-global moment—reminds us once more of the temporal limits of the globalizing processes that originated within it, or were accelerated by it. Indeed, by rooting certain transnational convergences and connections in conflicted times, we become as much aware of their erratic and short-lived peculiarities as of their lasting legacies. However, these comparatively short lifespans do not make wartime globalization a less important subject for historical study. Rather, it is hoped that the articles in this Forum show the long-overdue recognition that this phenomenon demands within the broader study of global and transnational history, not only for Asia but also beyond it.
