Transimperial History – Connectivity, Cooperation and Competition This Forum article argues that a turn in empire history is needed, one which we label «transimperial». Whereas national history has been transnationalized in recent decades, the history of empires has, by and large, remained nationalized. Since transnational history, global history, postcolonial studies and new imperial history all offer an abundance of tools to tear down imperial borders and deconstruct nationalized narratives, the moment seems to have come for a shift, namely for what we call a transimperial approach to imperial history. We seek to show how such an approach makes it possible to dynamize and decentralize the history of empires both on the level of empirical research and historiographical narratives. By including marginalized empires we offer a way to overcome British centrism of empire studies. On the methodological level, this contribution seeks to discuss imperial competition, cooperation and connectivity not as separate phenomena but as entangled processes. The point is not to analytically isolate cooperation or competition but to shed light on how they reinforced each other and how connectivity plays into this. The article shows that a key to establishing a transimperial approach is to consider time and space together by focusing on the transformative aspect of competition, cooperation and connectivity in spaces in-between empires. In this article, we highlight transimperial histories avant la lettre, on which such an approach can rely. Finally, we discuss how this approach helps challenge essentializing master narratives in empire studies, be it the one in which the British Empire serves as a model for other empires or the one where the Japanese empire is seen as a mimicry of European imperialism.

In the spring of 1938 a mission of the Italian Fascist Party journeyed to the Japanese empire, visiting China, Korea, Manchukuo, and Japan itself. Those were happy days for the Axis and, as such, characterized by a flood of shuttle visits and requests for cooperation between Italy, Japan, and Germany. As we explore the choreography of the visit and accompany the Italian Blackshirts on their two-month-long trip, two processes become clear. On the one hand, the presence of the Blackshirts in Japan helped place the nation's regional war with China in the broader context of worldwide conflicts. On the other hand, this trip assisted in firmly placing the new Axis alliance in the context of a pan-Asianist empire under Japanese control. This article suggests that both processes were linked and mutually enhancing of one another. At the same time they were part of a much more far-reaching phenomenon, namely the globalization of the Axis alliance. This, I will argue, was acted out on the stages provided by what is best described as the ‘spectacle of global fascism’. Of course, this spectacle proved to have its tensions and oddities. But as the focus on the performative aspects of the Italian-Japanese encounters shows, this novel form of fascist diplomacy was a way of handling contradictions within the alliance. At the same time, the spectacle served to strengthen it. In other words, seen through the lens of the Blackshirts’ mission, the Axis appears significantly stronger, diverse, and also more global than conventional diplomatic history has perceived it to be.

In the early 1930s, fascism emerged as a global phenomenon. In Europe, Mussolini’s Italy was the driving force behind this development, whereas in Asia the center of gravity lay in the Japanese Empire. But the relationship between Japan and the mother country of fascism, Italy, in the interwar period has been hardly examined. The following article thus focuses on the process of interaction and exchange between these two countries. Moreover, the question of Japanese fascism has previously been discussed from a comparative perspective and thereby generally with a Eurocentric bias. In contrast, this article adopts a transnational approach. Thus, the question under consideration is not whether Japan ‘correctly’ adopted Italian Fascism, so to speak, but rather the extent to which Japan was involved in the process of fascism’s globalization. I will show that the pattern of influence in the early 1930s was certainly not limited to a single West-East direction and that fascism cannot be understood as a merely European phenomenon. This article begins by describing the rise and fall of universal fascism in the period from 1932 to 1934 from a global perspective. It secondly explores the legacies of fascism’s global moment and its consequences for the subsequent formation of the Tokyo-Rome-Berlin Axis when, following the end of an utopian phase, a more ‘realistic’ phase of global fascist politics began, with all its fatal consequences.

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