history

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Climate Variability and Steppe Empires

Please join us for a lecture:

Climate Variability and Steppe Empires: New Findings and Future Directions

Nicola Di Cosmo, Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian History, Institute for Advanced Study; Associate Member at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Moderated by: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Three decades of climatological research in Mongolia and neighboring regions have transformed our knowledge about the environmental history of Inner Asian empires. The processes that gave rise to these political formations, many of which have played a distinct and crucial role in Chinese history, are still very poorly understood. High-resolution climatic reconstructions, when placed in historical contexts, provide clues about the nomads’ responses to climatic variability, and thus illuminate critical nexuses between economic production, social structures, and political change. By illustrating a range of representative historical cases studies, this lecture will explore both the nature of the data and the methods that historians and climatologists have adopted to gauge the impact of climate upon pre-modern nomadic peoples.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

This event is cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Modern Tibetan Studies Program, the Department of History, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

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Dai-Ōji: The Ōji Paper Company and the Politics of Pulp in Asia

Please join us for a lecture:

Dai-Ōji: The Ōji Paper Company and the Politics of Pulp in Asia

David Fedman, Assistant Professor modern Japanese history at the University of California, Irvine

Moderated by: Paul Kreitman, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

David Fedman’s recent monograph, Seed of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) explores how Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into supply chains that grew in tandem with Japan’s imperial sphere. These mechanisms of resource control were only fortified after 1937, when the peninsula and its forests were mobilized for total war.

Sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Online via Zoom. Registration information will be provided soon.

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Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies in World War II

Please join us for a lecture:

Supporting the Faith, Building the Empire: Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies in World War II

Kelly A. Hammond, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, and an associate editor at The Journal of Asian Studies

Moderated by: Paul Kreitman, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

This talk will examine some of the ways that the Japanese Empire curried favors to Muslims in China, and later throughout East Asia, in the lead up to and throughout World War II. Drawing on examples from my recent book, China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II, the talk will present viewers with concrete policies and explore some of the ways that the Japanese Government envisioned themselves as the benevolent protectors of Islam while at the same time advancing their imperial, expansionist visions. For their part, Muslims from around the colonial world found the anti-western and anti-Soviet rhetoric expounded by the Japanese Empire appealing to a certain extent. By placing Muslims at the center of Japan’s imperial ambitions, it becomes clear that their visions for empire went far beyond what we would now consider to be the geographic boundaries of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere into predominantly Islamic spaces like Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

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