Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia explores occupation as spatial processes, structures, and experiences in which administrative power and people's resistance are contested. Spanning the Andaman Islands to the Philippines to Japan, the introduction and following nine chapters of case studies illuminate multilayered crossroads of economic, environmental, and military controls and contestations from the nineteenth century to the present day. The volume collectively challenges a prevalent dichotomy between occupation and colonialism, showing their intersections.
Scholars often separately study occupied territories and colonies. In the introduction, the editors trace this occupation/colonialism dichotomy back to the international law that legitimatized the European colonial expansions; the law predicated itself on Eurocentric ideas of denying non-Western and colonized regions access to sovereignty. To understand occupation beyond the legal and Eurocentric framework, the volume engages insights into space, place, and scale by human and cultural geographers. In each chapter, interdisciplinary...
