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Date(s)： 2024/08/07
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host： Prof. Wu Jen-shu ( Research fellow and Deputy Director, IMH, AS)
Speaker：Prof. Helena F. S. Lopes （Cardiff University）
Organizer： Urban History Research Group
Abstract: This talk introduces the book Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. Exploring the intersections of local, regional and global dynamics, the book analyses the layers of collaboration that developed from neutrality in Macau during the Second World War. Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archival material from Asia, Europe, Australasia and America, the book explores connections between a variety of multinational actors with competing and collaborative interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, Portuguese colonial authorities and British and Japanese representatives. Following refugees, diplomats, colonial officials, intermediaries, philanthropists, and spies, this book rethinks Asia-Europe connections in the 1930s and 1940s, the uses and abuses of neutrality in East Asia, and the interplay of imperialism and anti-imperialism in a global Second World War. Speaker: Dr Helena Lopes is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern Asian History at Cardiff University in Wales, United Kingdom. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in History from the University of Oxford and was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol and a Lecturer at the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol. Her articles have appeared in edited books and journals such as The Historical Journal, Twentieth-Century China, and Cold War History. Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War is her first book.