Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (Studies in Asian Security)

Although India and China have very different experiences of colonialism, they respond to that history in a similar way—by treating it as a collective trauma. As a result they have a strong sense of victimization that affects their foreign policy decisions even today. __Wronged by Empire__ breaks new ground by blending this historical phenomenon, colonialism, with mixed methods—including archival research, newspaper data mining, and a new statistical method of content analysis—to explain the foreign policy choices of India and China: two countries that are continuously discussed but very rarely rigorously compared. By reference to their colonial past, Manjari Chatterjee Miller explains their puzzling behavior today. More broadly, she argues that the transformative historical experience of a large category of actors—ex-colonies, who have previously been neglected in the study of international relations—can be used as a method to categorize states in the international system. In the process Miller offers a more inclusive way to analyze states than do traditional theories of international relations. Although India and China have very different experiences of colonialism, they respond to that history in a similar way - by treating it as a collective trauma. As a result they have a strong sense of victimization that affects their foreign policy decisions even today. Wronged by Empire breaks new ground by blending this historical phenomenon, colonialism, with mixed methods - including archival research, newspaper data mining, and a new statistical method of content analysis - to explain the foreign policy choices of India and China: two countries that are continuously discussed but very rarely rigorously compared. By reference to their colonial past, Manjari Chatterjee Miller explains their puzzling behavior today. More broadly, she argues that the transformative historical experience of a large category of actors - ex-colonies, who have previously been neglected in the study of international relations - can be used as a method to categorize states in the international system. In the process Miller offers a more inclusive way to analyze states than do traditional theories of international relations -- Provided by Publisher Miller uses colonialism as a lens to understand the foreign policy of countries that have undergone it, focusing specifically on the cases of India and China. Colonialism, although a hugely influential phenomenon, has not been treated systematically by IR theorists, or used to understand foreign policy decisions. This book argues that colonialism should be viewed through the lens of trauma to understand why it continues to matter to many countries today. It specifically focuses on two countries with very different colonial experiences but with a similar emphasis on their colonial past Contents 10 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction 18 1. Trauma, Colonialism and Post-Imperial Ideology 24 2. PII: Discord and Discourse in the UN 52 3. PII and the Sino-Indian Border Negotiations of 1960 72 4. PII, Victimhood and "Nuclear Apartheid" 99 5. PII, Victimhood and Sino-Japanese Hostility 123 Conclusion 147 Notes 160 Index 180