Asia in the Middle: Global Implications of the Second World War

In the three decades since Edward Said and Eric Wolf threw down the scholarly gauntlet against the all-pervasive power of Eurocentrism, the study of history has come a long way.  As exemplified in the fields of colonial studies and borderlands history in particular, self-congratulatory narrations of how Europe shaped the world have given way to increasingly sophisticated and nuanced investigations of how history—and indeed our very categories of knowledge—has been made and negotiated as an interactive and ongoing global process.  Yet the assumptions that continue to inform the study of the Second World War and the social and ideological forces associated with it—most notably fascism—highlight the degree to which Eurocentrism remains inscribed in our scholarly DNA.  This critique applies not merely to the near-universal narrative and theoretical peripheralization of Asian experience of the Second World War as such, but more importantly, to the very ontological lenses through which we continue to view and interpret the war and its global significance.  Rather than simply making a plea for Asia’s inclusion as a part of a more genuinely global Second World War history, I would go further to argue that a close examination of the multiple, diverse and contradictory interactions between Japanese imperialism and the forces it was compelled to reckon with in wartime Asia—put simply, wavering Western imperialisms, Soviet power, and rising Asian nationalisms—should locate this history at the interpretive center of the experience of the war and its profound legacies.  Thus I will argue that the view from Asia reveals the essential identity of the war as a dialectical struggle of evolving neo-imperialisms seeking to ensure continued dominance in a world-historically hostile environment characterized by rising nationalism, socio-economic crisis, shifting class balances, and ideological confrontation—a process that ultimately transformed the global order itself.