WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This panel argues that the world wars in Asia were not interruptions to global integration but zones of contact that generated new forms of cross-border connectivity. While recent scholarship in military and international history has begun to explore war-generated globalization, this work has not yet been brought into sustained conversation with world history. This panel bridges that gap, examining how conflict produced transnational exchanges of ideas, practices, and material across Asia—often between states simultaneously closing their borders to peacetime commerce.

Loughlin Sweeney traces how interactions between British, Indian, Japanese, Ottoman, and American officers during the First World War transformed military culture. Encounters in Asia forced a reckoning with competing models of professionalization, as officers learned not only from allies but from enemies, accelerating the shift from "gallantry" to "efficiency" as an organizing principle. Thomas Bottelier reexamines inter-Allied economic aid during the Second World War, arguing that alliances functioned as incubators of new international relationships rather than mere coalitions of convenience. United States aid to China, routed through British India, reveals multilateral networks of exchange operating within wartime blocs that complicate the image of the 1940s as a nadir of globalization. Chad Denton shows how Japan's metal requisition programs were modeled on German precedents from both world wars, with propaganda featuring Nazi parallels to justify the requisition of household objects, shrine bells, and bronze statues across Japan's empire.

Together, the papers demonstrate that wartime Asia was a site of intensive, if coerced, globalization, and that Asia was central—not peripheral—to these processes.

The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a complex of international norms and legal practices which could be considered, for the first time, truly global. The questions relating to sovereignty, citizenship, and rights which emerged in East Asia at this time constitute a critical and underexamined component of this transformation. Contact zones like the extraterritorial treaty ports of the China coast, and crisis points like the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer uprising, presented test cases for these norms, and jurists applied new descriptive frameworks to explain the international system that emerged as a result.
This paper argues that one reason why this phenomenon has been underexamined is due to a conceptual shortcoming in the history of international relations, which still views international law as the product of a ‘diffusion’ of civilizational values from the West, with little modification or influence from other cultures. Critiquing this approach has become increasingly important, as it has been employed in recent years by both critics and supporters of a worldview characterised by the domination of ‘great powers’.
With reference to the writing of East Asian, European, and American jurists and diplomats, and the operations of extraterritorial courts and international organisations, this paper argues that East Asia was a centre for the production of international norms, not a periphery. These examples are mobilised in support of a less ‘diffusionist’ conceptual framework for international history, illustrating the early utility of international legal concepts as not only servants of the great powers, but also as a tool for promoting the sovereignty of small states and holding powerful actors to account.