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Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as \"cattle to the slaughter.\" But, in fact, the Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary. In Curse on This Country , Danny Orbach explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of Japanese government control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s-a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. Orbach argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history. Curse on This Country follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the \"accidental\" invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador's plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military-political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister \"changed colors.\" Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war. Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as \"cattle to the slaughter.\" But, in fact, the Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary.In Curse on This Country , Danny Orbach explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of Japanese government control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s-a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. Orbach argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history. Curse on This Country follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the \"accidental\" invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador's plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military-political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister \"changed colors.\" Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war.

Violent mutiny was common in seafaring enterprises during the Age of Discovery-so common, in fact, that dealing with mutineers was an essential skill for captains and other leaders of the time. Mutinies in today's organizations are much quieter, more social and intellectual, and far less violent, yet the coordinated defiance of authority springs from dissatisfactions very similar to those of long-ago shipboard crews. This highly original book mines seafaring logs and other archives of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ship captains and discovers instructive lessons for today's leaders facing challenges to their authority as well as for other members of organizations in which mutinous events occur.The book begins by examining mutinies against great explorer captains of the Age of Discovery: Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Sebastian Cabot, and Henry Hudson. The authors then identify lessons that entrepreneurs, leaders, and other members may apply to organizational insurrections today. They find, surprisingly, that mutiny may be a force for good in an organization, paving the way to more collaborative leadership and stronger commitment to shared goals and values.

This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies that struck the French infantry and navy in 1919. Based on official records and the testimony of dozens of participants, it is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers. Examining their words for the traces of sensory perceptions, emotions and thought processes, it reveals that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as the result of simple war-weariness and low morale is inadequate. In fact, an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. Taking this into account, the book considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.

There has been debate about the extent to which the English old poor law could operate as a system of social discipline. This article looks closely at an almost completely neglected set of sources, petitions by local communities asking to stop (or cut) a pauper’s relief, to assess how far poor relief was used as a disciplinary tool. Taking 182 appeals by Lancashire townships from the Civil War to the appearance of workhouses in the county, it suggests that poor relief operated robustly as a system of labour discipline, but only weakly as a wider tool of behavioural control. There is some evidence that townships wanted to end doles to those engaged in ‘bad’ behaviour, such as excessive drinking, gambling, or insubordination, but such cases were infrequent. Far more important were attempts to stop relief where paupers could work or could support themselves through their own productive assets. In turn, townships’ focus on the ability to work suggests that ‘deserving’ poverty was understood in terms of bodily impotence, whilst the need to restrict poor relief to those who were ‘necessitous’ required officers to engage in close surveillance of the poor and their bodies.

The role played by the East India Company in European expansion in early modern Asia is of such importance that it has generated a large body of scholarly literature. However, the logbooks of the East Indiamen, compiled by their captains, are largely overlooked as a primary source for the history of navigation, despite the wealth of information such firsthand, “from below” documents could provide about those voyages. As part of the Global Sea Routes (GSR) project, this essay analyses the voyage of the Nassau (1781–85) along four main themes: the peculiarities of navigation during the Age of Sail, when the duration of a voyage was difficult to predict and subject to a range of possible accidents; the concrete reality of life on board, oscillating between the various activities of the crew and the episodes of desertion and insubordination that broke its daily routine; her military deployment, as the Nassau was directly involved in operations related to the Second Anglo-Mysore War; and, finally, her commercial activities, from the port cities of India to the seas of China.

This article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom’s long-standing cult of the ‘Father-King’, the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people’s democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today’s youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of ‘equal friendship’ and ‘hierarchical siblinghood’ substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of ‘filial insubordination’ to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, ‘friendship-based’ polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand’s Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter’s ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances.

The majority of literature on civil–military relations has focused on coups d'état. Yet, studying lesser forms of military insubordination can offer valuable insight into the true condition of states' civil–military relations. This paper introduces a data collection effort on mutinies across Africa from 1950 to 2018, revealing several interesting trends. First, most African countries have experienced mutinies, with these events increasing in frequency in the post-Cold War period. Second, while mutinies rarely escalate into coups, they are associated with an increased likelihood of coups in the future. This dataset provides a useful tool to explore the complexity of states' civil–military relations.