End of Empire: 100 Days in 1945 that Changed Asia and the World

Edited by David P. Chandler, Robert Cribb, and Li Narangoa

Aiming to balance the focus on European events in global public discussions and reminiscences of World War II, End of Empire focuses on a brief, 100-day period at the end of the war across a broad sweep of eastern Asia – a time when the Indonesian and Vietnamese revolutions were born, the fragile wartime truce between Communists and Nationalists in China began to fray, and the first steps were made in Japan towards a new democratic order. Following a chronological order, the volume combines daily events with commentary, photographs, maps and personal accounts. More importantly, it is part of a radical, multi-faceted project to commemorate the period not just in print but also on screen and in ‘real-time broadcasts’ published day by day. Here, perhaps, is the form of scholarly publishing and learning of the future but without abandoning traditional standards.

The book comes with a companion website (Endofempire.asia) and a Facebook page (Facebook/endofempire.com) in which you can join the discussion on the events depicted!

Highlights

• Charts 100 days of dreams, drama and turmoil across eastern Asia at the end of World War II.
• Combines daily events with commentary, photographs, maps and personal accounts.
• Part of a radical new multi-layered, 'real time' publication commenmorating events 70 years after they happened and 'broadcast' day by day.

About the Editors

ROBERT CRIBB grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and spent much time as a child wandering the bush and the Barrier Reef with his botanist parents. A keen appreciation of the environmental and geographical dimensions of history still informs much of his research and writings.

After completing his undergraduate studies in Asian History at the University of Queensland, he took his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a thesis on Jakarta during the Indonesian revolution, 1945–1949. This was the basis of his subsequent, and highly praised, book on gangsters and revolutionaries in the Indonesian independence struggle.

After graduating, Robert Cribb taught at Griffith University and the University of Queensland (both in Brisbane) and as guest lecturer at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. He held research positions at the Australian National University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, where he was also director for two years. He rejoined the Australian National University at the beginning of 2003 and he is currently Professor of Indonesian History in the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific. He is also the immediate past president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Professor Cribb’s research interests focus mainly on Indonesia, though he has some interest in other parts of Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia and Burma/Myanmar) and in Inner Asia. The themes of his research are mass violence and crime, national identity, environmental politics, and historical geography.

DAVID CHANDLER is Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he taught between 1972 and 1997. He has held visiting appointments at Cornell University, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan and in 1992 he was a visiting professor at the University of Paris. 

He served as an American diplomat in Phnom Penh in 1960-1962 and since 1990 he has visited Cambodia over twenty times. In 2009 and in 2012 he testified as an expert witness at the so-called Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh. 

His books include A History of Cambodia (4th edition, 2007), The Tragedy of Cambodian History (1991), Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (2nd edition, 1999) and Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (1999). 

Professor Chandler lives in Melbourne.