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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Silver Screen Reversals Of The Domino Theory: American Cold War Movies And The Re-Imagination Of British Experiences In Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei Jun 2024

Silver Screen Reversals Of The Domino Theory: American Cold War Movies And The Re-Imagination Of British Experiences In Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines how Hollywood was affected by the successful anticommunism of Britain and its local allies in Malaya and Singapore, victories that unfolded alongside Vietnam’s mounting crisis in the early 1960s. It shows that American movies of this era which portrayed the intertwining of US and British experiences in 1950s Malaya and 1940s Singapore conveyed an uneasy yet clear optimism about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.


British Neo-Colonialism In Malaya And Singapore, And U.S. Empire In The Pacific, Wen-Qing Ngoei Dec 2022

British Neo-Colonialism In Malaya And Singapore, And U.S. Empire In The Pacific, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay places the Vietnam War upon the larger canvas of Southeast and East Asian history by studying the long shadow that Britain’s Empire cast over U.S. entanglements across the region. It shows how British officials in Malaya and Singapore directly contributed to the expansion of US involvement in post-1945 Southeast Asia, as well as the overall pro-US trajectory of the region well before the Americanization of the Vietnam conflict.


Exhibiting Transnationalism After Vietnam: The Alpha Gallery In Pursuit Of An Authentic Southeast Asian Art Form, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei Sep 2022

Exhibiting Transnationalism After Vietnam: The Alpha Gallery In Pursuit Of An Authentic Southeast Asian Art Form, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines how the Alpha Gallery, an independent artists cooperative established by Malaysians and Singaporeans, curated and staged art shows in the 1970s that advanced its project to unearth and promote an intrinsically Southeast Asian aesthetic. The cooperative pursuit a transnational vision of inter-regional connections between the Bengali Art Renaissance of the early twentieth century and Balinese folk art. It also harbored ambitions of sparking a cultural renaissance in Southeast Asia, though these were ultimately unfulfilled. Importantly, as this essay shows, the cooperative’s transnational vision mirrored the racist thinking and paternalism of Euro-American colonial discourses about civilizing the region’s …


Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince Jul 2021

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith's frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated …


The United States And The "Chinese Problem" Of Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing Ngoei Apr 2021

The United States And The "Chinese Problem" Of Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines how US Cold War policy toward all of Southeast Asia arose from American suspicions that the region's Chinese diaspora would align itself with the Chinese communists against the west. In so doing, it explores how US distrust of the Chinese diaspora fell in step with a longer imperialist tradition practised not only by the European powers for centuries, but also the Japanese Empire during its brief ascendancy during World War Two. Additionally, the essay proposes that to move beyond the bilateral studies that dominate the histories of US-Southeast Asian relations to view the region as whole, it …


Re-Thinking Region: Us-Southeast Asian Relations In The Twentieth Century, Wen-Qing Ngoei, Anne Foster Apr 2021

Re-Thinking Region: Us-Southeast Asian Relations In The Twentieth Century, Wen-Qing Ngoei, Anne Foster

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay, co-authored with historian Anne Foster, introduces a roundtable of journal articles that explore new ways to advance the study of Southeast Asia's relations with the United States in the twentieth century. It explains the importance of examining the region, how it is of world historical importance to the big powers, and merits different and innovative analyses given its significance to current affairs.


Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols Mar 2020

Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

At the time of its 2005 publication, Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire was among a handful of works in political theory probing imperialism’s constitutive influence over modern political thought.


Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince Mar 2018

Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as arobust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. Thisessay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflectionson commerce, empire, and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned thecolonial system of monopoly, war, and conquest, his strictures against empiredid not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonialslavery represented a manifestly uncivilinstitution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also adecisively commercial institutionpivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical“commercial incivility” of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the linkbetween slavery and commerce, and confined his …


Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince Dec 2017

Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses haveadopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating theforcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present.I argue that the analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation can be better performedby a pair of new concepts: “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” Irefine the conceptual core primitive accumulation (coercive capitalization of social relations ofproduction) by focusing on the role of colonial violence in the history of capitalism, which Ithen elucidate with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion …


Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince May 2017

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Adam Smith has recently been celebrated as a precocious theorist of commercialcosmopolitanism who decried the injustice of imperial conquest and extraction. This paperfocuses on Smith’s endorsement of settler colonialism in North America and argues thatSmith’s newfound cosmopolitanism is overstretched. Smith welcomed settler colonies as theembodiment of the “natural progress of opulence” and spared them from his invective againstother imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies. Smith’s embrace of settlercolonies, however, involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity ofoverseas settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans.I contend that Smith muffled this disturbing …


Not A Partnership In Pepper, Coffee, Callico, Or Tobacco: Edmund Burke And The Vicissitudes Of Colonial Capitalism, Onur Ulas Ince Jul 2012

Not A Partnership In Pepper, Coffee, Callico, Or Tobacco: Edmund Burke And The Vicissitudes Of Colonial Capitalism, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines the tensions between liberalism and capitalism through an analysis of Edmund Burke's works on eighteenth-century liberal political economy and, specifically the challenges posed by colonial capitalism. When criticizing the East India Company Burke attempted to fortify "commercial" principles, on which British self-image rested, against the "rapacious" policies of British imperialism in India, which threatened this liberal self-image. His denunciation of the Company thus can be construed as an index to broader contradictions between the liberal self-image of capitalism and the coercive processes of colonial displacement and extraction that were an integral part of capitalism's emergence. The article, …


Cracks In The Empire: Reflections Of French Journalists And Authors On The Crisis In 1930s Indochina, Henri Copin, Tobias Rettig Dec 2011

Cracks In The Empire: Reflections Of French Journalists And Authors On The Crisis In 1930s Indochina, Henri Copin, Tobias Rettig

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The events of the early 1930s in Vietnam left an important legacy to France's literature of enquiry and protest. Writers, essayists and journalists enquired on behalf of their audiences, and in the process developed France's littérature coloniale. By showing an interest in the colonial 'other' and identifying discrepancies between imperial ideology and colonial reality, they formed a new body of thought. This new colonial humanism arguably changed metropolitan sensibilities towards the French civilizing mission. Nevertheless, while they are critical of colonial abuses and in favour of reforms, the authors discussed in this paper do not really question the French colonial …