Unconquered States

H. E. Chehabi is Professor of International Relations and History Emeritus, Boston University, and Honorary Professor, School of History, University of St. Andrews. He studied geography and history at the University of Caen and international relations at Science Po before going to Yale University, where he received his PhD in political science. He has taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and Boston University. He has held a Humboldt Fellowship as well as fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A graduate of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, and the editor of a volume on Islam and the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.

• Acknowledgements Note on the Language List of Contributors H. E. Chehabi and David Motadel: Struggles for Sovereignty in the Age of Empire Part I. Military Reform 1: Erik Jan Zürcher: Army Reform in the Ottoman Empire 2: Michael W. Charney: Military Reform in Siam 3: Fantahun Ayele: Ethiopia's Military Conflicts and Reforms 4: Chika Tonooka: Meiji Military Reforms 5: Ali M. Ansari: Military Reform in Imperial Iran Part II. Capitulations and Unequal Treaties 6: Ronald C. Po: China in the Age of Unequal Treaties 7: H. E. Chehabi and Ali Gheissari: Extraterritoriality and Capitulations in Qajar Iran 8: Hailegabriel G. Feyissa: Extraterritoriality in Imperial Ethiopia Part III. Diplomatic Encounters 9: Wensheng Wang: Diplomatic Encounters between Qing China and the West 10: Andrew Cobbing: Meiji Diplomacy and the Pursuit of Sovereignty 11: H. E. Chehabi: Qajar Iran's Global Diplomacy 12: Cemil Aydin: Caliphate Diplomacy and Late Ottoman Inclusion into the Imperial World Order 13: Andreu Martínez d'Alòs-Moner: Global Diplomacy and Ethiopia's Struggle for Sovereignty 14: Sven Trakulhun: Siam's Diplomacy and Imperial Europe Part IV. Royalty and Courts 15: Edhem Eldem: Ottoman Royal Uses of Western Symbolism and Pageantry in the Imperial Age 16: Takashi Fujitani: Imperialism and Japan's Monarchy 17: Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar: European Imperialism and the Qajar Court 18: Izabela Orlowska: Abyssinia's Monarchy and European Imperial Domination 19: Patrick Jory: Siam's Monarchy and European Imperialism Part V. Defeats 20: James Roslington: Closing the Moroccan Question 21: David Keanu Sai: Hawai'i's Sovereignty and Survival in the Age of Empire 22: Kirk W. Larsen: Korea's Fall 23: Gwyn Campbell: Primary and Secondary Imperialisms in Madagascar 24: Lorenz Gonschor: Survival and State Building in the Kingdom of Tonga Glenda Sluga: Afterword Index

This is an ingenious collection, a book on international history in the 19th and 20th centuries that really does, for once, "fill a gap". By countering our simple assumption that the West's imperial and colonial drives swallowed up all of Africa and Asia in the post-1850 period, Chehabi and Motadel's fine collection of case-studies of nations that managed to stay free—from Abyssinia to Siam, Japan to Persia—gives us a more rounded and complex view of the international Great-Power scene in those decades. This is really fine revisionist history.