Imperial Military Transportation In British Asia

Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia sheds light on attempts by royal engineers to introduce innovations devised in the UK to wartime India, Iraq, and Burma, as well as the initial resistance of local groups of colonial railwaymen to such metropolitan innovations. Michael W. Charney looks at the role of the railways in the First Burma Campaign to show how some kinds of military technology – as an example of imperial knowledge – faced resistance due to 1930s-era colonial insularity. The delay this caused significantly compromised the early defense of the colony when the Japanese invaded in 1942. Charney examines the efforts made by one engineer in particular to revive the railways and shows how this effort was responsible for the development of a truly imperial technology that was suitable for extra-European contexts and finally won acceptance in India. Incorporating newly accessible primary source material from the files of the military Director of Transportation during the Campaign, this book highlights a hitherto unfilled gap in the archival record and explores an ignored but crucial aspect of the 1942 Japanese invasion of Burma.

Updated by popular demand, this is the fourth edition of this important bibliography. It lists a wide selection of works on or about Myanmar published in English and in hard copy since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which marked the beginning of a new era in Myanmar’s modern history. There are now 2,727 titles listed. They have been written, edited, translated or compiled by over 2,000 people, from many different backgrounds. These works have been organized into thirty-five subject chapters containing ninety-five discrete sections. There are also four appendices, including a comprehensive reading guide for those unfamiliar with Myanmar or who may be seeking guidance on particular topics. This book is an invaluable aid to officials, scholars, journalists, armchair travellers and others with an interest in this fascinating but deeply troubled country.

This book explores the intricate and intimate relationship between military organization, imperial policy, and society in colonial South Asia. The chapters in the volume focus on technology, logistics, and state building. The present volume highlights the salient features of expansion and consolidation of imperial control over the subcontinent, and ultimate demise of the Raj. Further, it turns the spotlight on to subaltern challenges to imperialism as well as the role of non-combatants in warfare. The volume: • Deals with both conventional and guerrilla conflicts and focuses on the frontiers (both North-West and North-East, including Burma); • Looks at the army as an institution rather than present a chronological account of military operations, which highlights the complex and tortuous relationship between combat institution, colonial state, and Indian society; • Integrates top-down approaches in military and strategic studies with the bottom-up perspectives and discusses on how the conduct of war (organisation and technology) is related to the economic, societal, and cultural impact of war. A rich account of the British ‘Army in India’, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of South Asian history, military history, political history, colonialism, and the British Empire.

This book explores how the media was used by the armed forces during the India-Burma campaigns of WWII to project the most positive image to domestic and international audiences of a war that often seemed neglected or misunderstood. Discussing how soldiers were, for the first time, able to access newspapers and radio broadcasts relating stories of the campaigns they were actively fighting in, Managing the Media in the India-Burma War reveals not only the impact that the media had in maintaining troop morale, but how the military recognised that the media could be a valuable arm of warfare. Revealing how troops responded to reports of their operations, Philip Woods demonstrates the role of the media in creating the 'Forgotten Army' syndrome, which came about in the last two years of the Burma campaign. Focusing on the British Media, but with examples from the United States and India, including Indian war correspondents, it discusses India's role in the Second World War in relation to social, economic and political developments at the time. Honing in on India and Burma at a turning point in their road to independence, this book offers a fresh angle on a well-known military conflict, unpicks the various constraints and influences on the media in wartime, and links the campaign to India's crucial role in WWII.

Focusing on the transition from informal to formal empire which broadened and intensified Britain's relations with Asia and Africa, Timothy Parsons describes the establishment of extensive colonies and protectorates in Egypt, India, China, and the Ottoman Empire. Parsons explores the cultural, political, economic, and social implications of British authority in these areas and he describes the various ways in which subject peoples contested and adapted to the expansion of the British Crown. --From publisher's description.

Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.

Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology’s long fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism, itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the Global South; uncovering criminology’s colonial legacy, perhaps best exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South. Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global criminology in the twenty-first century.