Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War

This talk introduces the recently published 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, Lopes 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.

About the speaker

Helena F. S. Lopes is Lecturer in Modern Asian History at Cardiff University. She held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Bristol and lectureships at the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol. Her work has appeared in Twentieth-Century China, The Historical Journal, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and other peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Chair: Dr Lars Laamann, Department of History, SOAS University of London.

Registration

This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required. 

Please note that this seminar is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.

Organiser

• SOAS China Institute

Contact

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk