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Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian Studies, despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Burma is often studied either in isolation or alongside Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, despite its equally important historical and cultural connections to communities, states, and networks across what is now India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal. In this Roundtable, four scholars of South Asia discuss Burma's erasure within the discipline, the origins and limitations of traditional area studies frameworks, and the possibilities afforded by Burma's inclusion within a more expansive conception of South Asia.

Eighty years after both the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of a new war on European soil, we are facing a situation of both accelerated information and of reductionism in the stories about the past, often for very ‘presentist’ motivations. In such a context, it is even more difficult than usual to anticipate the place that the Spanish conflict will occupy in academic study and social debate in the next two decades, the period remaining until the conflict's 100-year anniversary. But historians seeking to re-evaluate or ‘re-size’ the Spanish war face two primary tasks: to place Spain back at the heart of our understanding of the interwar European crisis and to develop a robust interpretation of the war, one which can challenge presentist distortions of its history and help Spain build a healthier society around a fairly shared understanding of the past.

Besides these cooperations, the new authoritarian regimes also worked within existing international organisations. Even anti-colonial leaders joined this international, whether as part of Japan’s pan-Asian alliance, centred on the project for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, or in Berlin’s anti-colonial international, which brought together anti-colonial nationalists from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Prominent international meetings included a camp organised in 1961 by the British National Party, with delegations from the United States, Austria, France, Germany and Sweden, and the World Nationalist Congress, convened by American neo-fascists in the mid-1970s, with guests from the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and other countries, issuing declarations in support of South Africa and Rhodesia, requests for the release of Nazi war criminals and announcements of solidarity with ‘all White Nationalists throughout the world’. [...]at the national congresses of right-wing organisations, such as the Order of Flemish Militants, the French and European Nationalist Party (and also the Front National), the Golden Dawn and Germany’s National Democratic Party, foreign delegations were regular participants. Le Pen’s Front National, Orban’s Fidesz, Kaczyński’ Law and Justice Party, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, Salvini’s Lega Nord, Strache’s Freedom Party of Austria and Modi’s Indian People’s Party, as diverse as they might be, are united in their anti-liberal nationalism, hatred of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, weakness for authoritarianism and scorn for multiculturalism and pluralism.

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

[...]active participation has helped promote policies that the United Kingdom favoured – notably the establishment of the Single Market and successive rounds of Community/EU enlargement –, has enabled many British officials in Brussels to gain strong and largely positive reputations and has made the UK viewpoint an important factor in explaining what has and hasn’t happened in the Community/Union ever since 1973. Margaret Thatcher’s strident disagreements with Jacques Delors or Helmut Kohl, or David Cameron’s attempt to veto the Eurozone’s first institutional response to the Euro crisis, have always loomed much larger in journalistic coverage of the European integration process than the constructive day-to-day contributions of less senior ministers or officials. [...]this is where the longer-term history of relations between the UK and its geographical neighbours comes in. Because in explaining why so many in the UK seem to have instinctively interpreted their country’s relationship with its ostensible partners through an adversarial viewpoint, historical tropes about the country’s splendid isolation, brave resistance to continental tyranny and preference for empire or the United States rather than its continental neighbours would appear to have played an important role. Nor is there any sign that the outcome of the 2016 referendum has killed the trope: it is now reported that hard-line Brexiteers, disillusioned with the current Prime Minister’s proposed concessions to the EU, have taken to referring to their party leader as ‘Theresa the appeaser’. [...]more insidiously, the placement of the UK’s European experience in a continuum of conflict all but drowned out the widespread continental European narrative about integration being a process which promoted peace and helped overcome the enmities that had led to European war.

Any civil war leaves a legacy of partisanship. Divisions persist over time and may be particularly bitter when, as in Spain, a culture of victory survives long after the end of hostilities. Any attempt at reconciliation was postponed, leading to an unusually bifurcated historiography, framed by a perennial interest into who, at base, was responsible for the outbreak of the civil war. The parameters of this debate were set in the 1970s, most notably in works by Stanley Payne and Paul Preston. It has continued in various guises since then, most recently revived by a generation of Spanish scholars, such as Fernando del Rey Reguillo, who have added case studies and new levels of detail, while leaving the terms of the debate more or less unchanged. Of course the historiographical panorama can change, often in tandem with the historical context, as several contributions to this roundtable make clear, notably those of Vjeran Pavlaković, Helen Graham and Giuliana Chamedes. However, the framing of the Spanish Civil War is still essentially moral: who bore responsibility for the outbreak of war, who was to blame for the defeat of the republic and, as a consequence, the conduct of the repression. One result has been to assimilate the history of the civil war with that of the Second Republic; another is a historiography that is largely political in tone and focus.

While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

Recent research into the Moroccan troops who fought in the Spanish Civil War has both drawn from and contributed to insights gained from new historiographical developments in the field of the Spanish conflict as well as other European twentieth-century conflicts. Studies examining the experiences and choices of low-level participants of the war, whether soldiers or civilians – on both the Francoist and republican sides – have increasingly shown that they were players in possession of a certain degree of agency, however limited. That agency allowed these low-level players, whether Spanish or Moroccan, to influence war events to a higher degree than previously thought possible, and has shown that mobilisation for and maintenance of the war effort depended on a certain mixture of coercion and negotiation, even within the more authoritarian Francoist camp. In the European context, the Moroccan participation in the 1936–9 war has its special characteristics, one of which is that its military significance weighed heavier than other colonial contributions to European battlefields between 1914 and 1945, and therefore the agency of Moroccans was more consequential. Nevertheless, it has much in common with other European experiences. A recent collaborative volume on British, French, Spanish and Dutch colonial armies in the first half of the twentieth century, Colonial Soldiers in Europe (2016), edited by Eric Storm and myself, has helped put the Moroccan–Spanish experience in European perspective. Similarities abound, not only in colonial soldiers’ experiences of fighting in foreign lands, but also between the various Western European attempts at controlling, i.e. limiting, the cultural and human consequences of this massive irruption of male warriors into the continent.

In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.