ABSTRACT
The 1930s began with a mixture of anti-colonial disturbances, renewed pushes for political rights or independence, and spasms of violence against restive colonized populations. Although there remained a marked discrepancy between literacy levels in urban and rural areas, by the 1930s, an ever-growing array of print materials reached more readers across Asia than ever before, especially in cities whose size and number had swelled. Historians have often associated the turn away from pro-western, liberal internationalism and toward pan-Asianism in Japan with the efforts of anti-liberal, expansionist-minded conservative intellectuals, politicians, and military officials. During the 1930s, feminism in western Europe, the Americas, and antipodes lost a great deal of the momentum it had gathered in the years prior to the Great War. The invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the League of Nations' anemic response to the violation of all that it stood for in the way of collective security gave pan-Africanism a powerful jolt.
