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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Sidney Xu Lu, "The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Description: Sidney Luâs The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of âMalthusian expansionismâ at the center of Japanese settler colonialism around the Pacific. For Japanâs imperial apologists and the discursive architecture they disseminated, alleged overpopulationâor more precisely, a critical imbalance between surplus population and insufficient land and resourcesâjustified expansionism. Simultaneously, both population growth and expansion were signs of national power and prestige. From the colonization of Hokkaido to the realization of a âmigration stateâ in the 1920s and into the postwar period, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism challenges the conce...