Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “Malthusian expansionism” at the center of Japanese settler colonialism around the Pacific. For Japan’s imperial apologists and the discursive architecture they disseminated, alleged overpopulation―or more precisely, a critical imbalance between surplus population and insufficient land and resources―justified expansionism. Simultaneously, both population growth and expansion were signs of national power and prestige. From the colonization of Hokkaido to the realization of a “migration state” in the 1920s and into the postwar period, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism challenges the conceptual division between settler colonialism and migration, with implications beyond Japanese history.
More content from this blog
- Syria’s Unions: Yesterday and Today, by Sulaiman Abdullah – 9 September 2024
- Project 2025. The Far-Right Playbook for American Authoritarianism, by GPAHE
- South Korea’s Predicament, by Canan Kus – 25 November 2025
- The Peace That Cannot Come, by Oleksandr Kyselov – 22 January 2026
- Against the Abuse of the Issue of Antisemitism by Right Wing Media and Politicians and Their Attacks on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech, by Ben Gidley, Daniel Mang & Daniel Randall – 20 May 2024