Bøger af Geoffrey C. Gunn

It was the trial of a century in colonial Hong Kong when, in 1931-33, Ho Chi Minh - the future President of Vietnam - faced down deportation to French-controlled territory with a death sentence dangling over him. Thanks to his appeal to English common law, Ho Chi Minh won his reprieve. With extradition a major political issue in Hong Kong today, Geoffrey C. Gunn's examination of the legal case of Ho Chi Minh offers a timely insight into the rule of law and the issue of extradition in the former British colony. Utilizing little known archival material, Gunn sheds new light on Ho Chi Minh, communist and anti-colonial networks and Franco-British relations.

With some 20,000 or more people killed instantly in the atomic bombing of 9 August 1945, an additional 40,000 or more dying from radiation and related illnesses in the coming days and weeks, and with myriad others exposed to radiation effects, Nagasaki today is a city that remembers and reminds. But this was not always the case--in contrast with Hiroshima as the first atom bombed city, Nagasaki long stood out for the piety of its significant and historically persecuted Catholic population. New voices and new narratives would eventually emerge, however, especially among the surviving victims or hibakusha, as well as among local politicians, one who famously dared to challenge national myths surrounding war culpability. Remembrance, the struggle for recognition on the part of the victims, and the even greater struggle waged by City Hall in Nagasaki to bring to world attention the threat of nuclear weapons, comes to the heart of this book. This we term the Nagasaki peace discourse. Yet, other narratives vie with the 'idealist' view, namely that of the 'realists' and, specific to Japan, the 'nationalists'. Essentially the realists welcome the nuclear umbrella provided by the US-Japan Treaty system and have eagerly embraced civilian nuclear power under the 'atoms-for-peace' slogan. On their part, the nationalists perceive Japan's 'peace constitution' as ripe for revision, looking ahead to a legal Self Defense Force and, for some, a 'normal' and even a nuclear-armed Japan. In the light of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011, however, City Hall in Nagasaki cannot ignore the risks of civilian nuclear power or even the nation's mounting stockpile of plutonium. With Nagasaki prefecture host to the second largest US naval base in Japan, as became apparent with the 2017-18 Korean missile crisis, neither can the city insulate itself from international politics. Seventy and more years on from the atomic bombings, Hiroshima and, in subtly different ways, Nagasaki, have a sombre message to convey. This is in no better way encapsulated than in the popular civil society slogan, 'No! More! Hibakusha!'

Studies on global metageography are enjoying a revival, and in no way is this better referenced than against the geo-world system bequeathed by Claudius Ptolemy almost two thousand years ago. This is all the more important when we consider the longevity of the Ptolemaic construct through and beyond the European age of discovery allowing as well for its eventual revision or refinement. Innovations in navigational science, cartographic representations, and textual description are all called upon to illustrate this theme. With its focus upon the macro-region termed India Extra Gangem, literally the space between India and China, the book unfolds a fourfold agenda. First, it explains the Ptolemaic world system back to classical points of reference as well as to its reception in late medieval Europe from Arabic sources. Second, it tracks the erosion of the Ptolemaic template especially in the light of new empirical data entering Europe from early travel accounts as well as the first voyages of discovery. Third, through selected examples, as with India, Southeast Asia, and China, it seeks to expose textual and cartographic adjustments to the classical models flowing from the scientific revolution. Fourth, through an examination of Jesuit astronomical observations conducted at various points in Asia, it demonstrates how Eurasia was actually measured and sized with respect to its true longitudinal coordinates such had deluded Columbus and even succeeding generations. In short, this work problematizes the creation of geographical knowledge, raises awareness as to the making of region in Asia over long historical timethe Ptolemaic world-in-motionand, as a more latent agenda, sounds an alert as to the perils of overdetermination in the setting of modern boundaries whether upon land or sea.

Ranging from discussions of the natural world, livelihoods, and religious and intellectual encounters to language play, crime and punishment, and gender, this book replays the themes of enduring hybridity and "creolization" of cultures dating from the first great encounter between Europe and Asia.

East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. East Timor was among the last of colonial territories to become independent, and it actually had to be liberated twice. First, after more than four centuries of Portuguese colonial rule, it achieved independence in 1975 only to be invaded and occupied by Indonesia. After a blood-soaked occupation of 24 years and following intense international pressure, the Jakarta-regime only grudgingly allowed East Timor to form a nation of its own in 1999. Since then, the new state has faced further armed clashes and is only now able to seriously engage in nation-building. Historical Dictionary of East Timor relates the turbulent history of this country through a chronology, an introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of East Timor history from the earliest times to the present.

This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven," or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power.