This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables us to go beyond Hannah Arendt’s classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism.

To her, statelessness was the product of a failed European nation-state system. We find a very different story when we examine the history of stateless people, many of them Jews, fleeing to Asia from Europe. In Asia, we see that being stateless was not a uniform experience, but a variety of possibilities reflecting the political structure of the states and cities in which refugees found shelter. We find too that stateless people managed to enter the political realm long before they reached the threshold of citizenship.