In an oft-quoted article, Joanna Bourke noted in 2006 that, from its beginning in the 1960s, the success of the new military history was due to the fact that it has always managed to incorporate new approaches: first social history and then cultural history. She concluded: ‘The vibrancy of new military history resides precisely in the energizing uncertainty about where it may go next.’[1] It has now become apparent that approaches from global history and new imperial history lend themselves to enriching the new military history. In spite of the fact that both paradigms have been around for a couple of decades, it is still relatively seldom that they are made serviceable to the field of military history. The benefits of applying methods and perspectives borrowed from these fields are significant: For one, they allow us to interrogate conventional spatial frameworks and guide our attention to regions that would otherwise remain under the radar. Thus, the much wider definition of imperialism and colonialism triggered by the ‘new imperial turn’ of the early 2000s have made us perceptive to the fact that formally non-colonising countries were massively involved in colonial expansion, including its military dimension. This phenomenon is illustrated in our panel through the example of Swiss colonial mercenaries in the service of the Dutch Empire. Furthermore, methodologies of global history raise awareness of transnationally operating civilian organisations and actors. That movements associated with Christian internationalism such as the Young Mens’ Christian Association were also important players in violent global conflicts has been ignored for a long time. Supplementing the tasks of non-combatant troops, they took on the role of caregivers, go-betweens and ‘intercultural brokers’ in various theatres of war during WW I and WW II. Finally, the study of discursive forms of representation of the colonized ‘Other’ represents an additional field in which a fusion of new imperial and new military history proves to be yielding. While such an analysis has usually involved the study of ‘human zoos’, travelogues by scholars, memoirs of imperial administrators, newspaper articles or scientific expeditions, new military history allows to extend the object of investigation to both the perception and memorization of rank and file soldiers in colonial contact zones. In our panel this is demonstrated by a thorough analysis of the visual and narrative representations of Bengal produced by American GIs in stationed in India during the Second World War. In sum, then, this panel takes a selection of recent studies on theatres of war in South and Southeast Asia as its starting point to elaborate and discuss how approaches of new military history, global history and new imperial history can be productively merged.

[1] Joanna Bourke: New Military History, in: Matthew HughesWilliam J. Philpott: Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History pp. 258-280, p.275.