In The Representation of External Threats, Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde present a collection of articles that trace the phenomenon of external threats in a multitude of settings across Asia, America, and Europe. The scope ranges from military threats against the Byzantine rulers of the 7th century to the perception of cultural and economic threats in the late 19th century Atlantic, and includes conceptual threats to the construction of national histories. Focussing on the different ways in which such threats were socially constructed, the articles offer a variety of perspectives and interdisciplinary methods to understand the development and representations of external threats, concentrating on the effect of 'threat communication' for societies and political actors. Contributors are Anna Abalian, Vladimir Belous, Eberhard Crailsheim, María Dolores Elizalde, Rodrigo Escribano Roca, Simon C. Kemper, Irena Kozmanová, David Manzano Cosano, Federico Niglia, Derek Kane O’Leary, Alexandr Osipian, Pedro Ponte e Sousa, Theresia Raum, Jean-Noël Sanchez, Marie Schreier, Stephan Steiner, Srikanth Thaliyakkattil, Ionut Untea and Qiong Yu.

Invidious distinctions on the basis of race and overt racism were central features in American colonial policy in the Philippines from 1898 to 1947, as America transported its domestic racial policy to the island colony. This collection by young Filipino scholars analyzes American colonialism and its impact on administration and attitudes in the Philippines through the prism of American racial tradition, a structural concept which refers to beliefs, attitudes, images, classifications, laws, and social customs that shape race relations and racial formation in multiracial and colonial societies. The dominance of this tradition was manifested in the wanton prerogatives of the U.S. Congress and others who helped to carry out colonial policy in the region. The Spanish flexible racial tradition had resulted in a system based on ethnicity and class as determinants of social and economic structure, while the rigid U.S. racial tradition assigned race the more dominant role. The cultural affinity between the early individual American administrators and the Filipino elite, however, meant that class-based distinctions in the islands were not broken up. Thus, the extreme elitist character of the Philippines' economy and society persisted and became impervious to the influences which in other Asian countries led to a progressive weakening of elite structures as the 20th century advanced.

"Sugar, Steam and Steel is about cane sugar and the transformation of an Indonesian island into the 'Oriental Cuba' during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, sweetener manufacture in Dutch-controlled Java - the crown jewel of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies - drew decisively away in matters of technology and sugar science from other Asian centres of production which had once equaled or, more often, surpassed it in terms of both output and know-how. Along with its larger and altogether more famous Caribbean counterpart, Java's industry came to occupy a position at the apex of the trade in what had become by this date a key global commodity. Along with the beet sugar producers of (post-1870) Imperial Germany, Cuba and Java accounted for a little over one-third of the world's recorded output of the industrially manufactured kind of sugar usually referred to as 'centrifugal'. While Cuba held the position of the world's largest supplier of cane sugar to international commodity markets, 'Dutch' Java emerged from almost nowhere to take second place. The island had begun the nineteenth century as one of a number of centres - in fact, a rather minor one - of pre-industrial sugar production located in tropical and sub-tropical Asia from the Indian sub-continent through to the southernmost islands of Japan. It ended the century not only as by far the largest of Asia's producer-exporters of sugar but also - critically - as the sole example of the sustained and successful large-scale industrialisation of sugar manufacture anywhere in 'the East'. Sugar, Steam and Steel sets out to explain how and why this happened - and what its implications were for the long-term trajectory of the Java sugar industry in the international sugar economy."--Cover description.

Southeast Asia' calls to mind a wide range of images: tropical forests and mountains, islands and seas, and a multitude of languages, cultures and religions. The area has never formed a unified political realm nor has it ever developed a cultural or civilisational unity. Many academics have defined 'Southeast Asia' over the years as what is left after subtracting Australia, the South Pacific islands and China and India. Others have pointed at diversity—the variety and fluidity of the cultures, wide ranging forms of economic activity, and openness to external influences—as the defining feature of the region. But with area studies out of fashion, is 'Southeast Asia' even relevant any longer? This volume considers 'Southeast Asia' drawn from a number of regional and disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the region from the standpoint of Thailand and the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong, Japan and the Asian mainland, the South China Sea and the seacoasts of the region. They also discuss the significance of borders, monetary networks, transnational flows of people, goods and information, and knowledge in shaping Southeast Asia both for its residents, for the scholars who study it and for the wider world.