Modern Intellectual History (2021), 1–27 doi:10.1017/S1479244321000214 ARTICLE The “Indo-Pacific”: Intellectual Origins and International Visions in Global Contexts Hansong Li* Department of Government, Harvard University *Corresponding author. E-mail:
[email protected] (Received 20 August 2020; revised 19 October 2020; accepted 16 April 2021) Abstract As the “Indo-Pacific” concept gains currency in public discourses on foreign policy, it remains poorly understood as an idea, due to inadequate surveys of its intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts. This article studies Karl Haushofer’s theory of the “Indo-Pacific” as an organic and integral space primed for political consciousness. Haushofer not only laid the oceanographic foundation of the “Indo-Pacific” with novel evidence in marine sciences, ethnography, and philology, but also legitimated it as a social and political space. Mindful of Germany’s geopolitical predicament in the interwar period and informed by sources in indology and sinology, Haushofer envisaged the political resurrection of South, East, and Southeast Asia against colonial domination, and conceived the “Indo-Pacific” vision for remak- ing the international order. Introduction This paper studies the historical “Indo-Pacific” theory in its academic and political contexts. It traces this concept of oceanic space to the innovations of the German geographer Karl Haushofer (1869–1946). At a time when modern natural and social scientists uncovered new evidence on alternative shapes of the world map, Haushofer politicized oceanography, ethnography, and philology to realign the Indian and Pacific Oceans as an integral space. The purpose of his intervention, however, was to forge an anticolonial vision in British, American, and Western European colonies in South, East, and Southeast Asia, and thus undermine the Western rivals of interwar Germany.