杏吧论坛

A panel discussion on ‘Unconquered States: Non-European States in the Imperial Age’ (Oxford University Press, 2024).

In the heyday of empire, most of the world was ruled, directly or indirectly, by the European powers. Unconquered States explores the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states in the imperial age. It examines the ways in which countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam managed to keep European imperialism at bay, whereas others, such as Hawai'i, Korea, Madagascar, Morocco, and Tonga, long struggled, but ultimately failed, to maintain their sovereignty. 

The chapters in this book address four major aspects of the relations these countries had with the Western imperial powers: armed conflict and military reform, unequal treaties and capitulations, diplomatic encounters, and royal diplomacy. Bringing together scholars from five continents, this book provides the first comprehensive global history of the engagement of the independent non-European states with the European empires, reshaping our understanding of sovereignty, territoriality, and hierarchy in the modern world order.

Meet our speakers:

Professor David Armitage (Harvard University) is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Chair of the  and former Chair of the  at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is currently a Senior Scholar of the , an Affiliated Faculty Member at , an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard , an Honorary Fellow of , an Honorary Professor of History at  and an Honorary Professor of History at the .

Professor Richard Drayton (Kings College London) was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and wrote his PhD at Yale. From 1992-4 he was Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine's, Cambridge; 1994-8, Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford; and 1998-2001, Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. In 2001 he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History and Fellow of Corpus Christi, and from 2009, the sixth Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, EHESS in Paris, CUNY in New York, and FU Berlin, and held visiting fellowships at CASS in Beijing, Sydney, Munich, and FU in Berlin. 

Dr Chika Tonooka (Cambridge University) is a historian of modern Britain in a global context, with broad interests in international history, global history and intellectual history. Chika read History (BA) at the University of Cambridge, and undertook an MA at the University of Tokyo before returning to Cambridge where she completed a PhD dissertation entitled ‘Japanese “civilisation” and ideas of progress in Britain, c.1880-1945’. Her dissertation was the joint winner of the 2020 Prince Consort & Thirwall Prize and Seeley Medal awarded by the University of Cambridge for the best doctoral dissertation in History. I was born in Tokyo and grew up in London. 

Dr Ron Po (Associate Professor - Department of International History, 杏吧论坛) is the author of  (Cambridge University Press, 2018),  (China Times Publishing Co., 2021),  (China Times Publishing Co., 2022), and  (Liverpool University Press, 2024). Additionally, he has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Modern Asian Studies, The English Historical Review, Late Imperial China, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ming Qing Studies, and The American Journal of Chinese Studies. Prior to his academic appointment at the 杏吧论坛, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University (2013-16) and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago (2013). 

Meet our chair:

Dr David Motadel (Associate Professor - Department of International History, 杏吧论坛) works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements. He is the author of a book on the history of   (Harvard University Press, 2014; translated into nine languages), ranging from North Africa and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Crimea, and the editor of a volume on  (Oxford University Press, 2014). Among his current projects is a global history of Europe’s empires in the era of the Second World War, 1935-1948, which is under contract with Penguin Press (Allen Lane). Some first results were published in ‘ ’ in the American Historical Review.