Unconquered States: Non-European Powers in the Imperial Age

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 Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is currently a Senior Scholar of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

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, LSE) is the author of The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), The Placid Ocean: Qing China and the Asian Seas (China Times Publishing Co., 2021), Turning the Tide: Historical Actors and Social Memory in Late Qing China (China Times Publishing Co., 2022), and Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (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 LSE, 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, LSE) works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (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 Islam in the European Empires (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 ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt Against Empire’ in the American Historical Review.