Eastward Ho! Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido and the Making of Japanese Migration to the American West, 1869–1888

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (03) ◽  
pp. 521-547
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu

This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan's own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan's colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.

Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the “Anglo-world” into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness its purported world-historical potential as an agent of order and justice. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century. The first two sections of the chapter explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. The third section traces the echoes of debates over the future relationship between the empire and the United States through the twentieth century, discussing the interlacing articulation of imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. The final section discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy.


Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Ashley (Woody) Doane

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States.


1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 865-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Knick Harley

The expansion of staple agriculture into the American West after the Civil War was an important event in the economic history of both the United States and the world. This migration of commercial farmers transformed the world's commodity markets. We would expect to find that these farmers were responding to price signals in a commercial fashion. Curiously, the existing literature has failed to detect a price responsiveness in western expansion. This failure appears to stem from a lack of appreciation of the importance of the spatial distribution of prices in the late nineteenth century. This study shows that when this factor is considered, the expansion of western cultivation clearly is connected to the prevailing local price of wheat.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-380
Author(s):  
Charnan Williams

Abstract The Bridg(e)water Family Papers is a substantial archive that details the history of an African American family who left the American South in the late nineteenth century for freedom in the American West. In the early twentieth century, the family eventually arrived in Montana, where they experienced both degrees of freedom and unfortunate forms of racial discrimination. Both the family matriarch and her daughter—Mamie and Octavia Bridgwater, respectively—were the main architects of the family archive. These two Black women constructed a collection that provides insight into the history of the Black West. Utilizing their archive, this article shows how the Bridgwaters departed from the South in search of social and economic advancement through participation in the military, membership in Black organizations, and landownership. Although they were out of the South, the Bridgwaters still encountered racially discriminatory practices that are indicative of the African American experience throughout the United States. The struggle of the Bridgwater family and their descendants to navigate this ambivalent terrain in the West is the consistent theme of their archive.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Judith B. Cohen

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's, An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States, confronts the reality of settler-colonialism and genocide as foundational to the United States. It reconstructs and reframes the consensual narrative from the Native Indian perspective while exposing indoctrinated myths and stereotypes. This masterful and riveting journey provides truth and paths towards the future progress for all peoples. It is a must read and belongs in every classroom, home, library, and canon of genocide studies.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Judith Allen

Abstract Histories of feminism since the 1970s have generally observed national and regional boundaries. In view of the international character of women's movements in western countries since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the neglect of comparative approaches has been unfortunate. The outcome is parochialism and inwardness, as feminist historians evaluate feminists of the past according to current preoccupations, in a cycle of identification and repudiation. An Anglo-American hegemony in the field is identified as is the consequent and pervasive “Northern Hemispherism” it ordains (notwithstanding an almost invariable omission of Canadian feminist experience). Advantages of comparative, international approaches to the history of feminism are not confined to the virtues of representativeness and comprehensiveness. Rather, major causal and chronological schema generalised from Anglo-American experience stand to beproblematised and revised in more useful directions. Most significantly, comparative studies of feminism permit due recognition of the fact that feminism emerged relatively contiguously across western countries in response to relatively common international characteristics of transformations in sexual patternings and sexual cultures.


2018 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Michael Robertson

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Fehring ◽  
Terry S. Reynolds

The engineering involved in transportation provided one of the points from which the modern mechanical engineering profession in the United States emerged. The shops that produced the steam engines for river boats and the locomotives for railroads had, by the 1840s, become a leading training ground for the first generation of professional mechanical engineers. As railroads became the primary means of long-distance transport for goods in the late nineteenth century, they also became a leading employer of mechanical engineers. Not surprisingly, the Rail Transportation Division was one of the original eight divisions created when ASME in 1920 adopted a divisional organization; it remains among that organization’s most active divisions. Unfortunately, despite the rail industry’s importance to American history and to the history of mechanical engineering, few articles dealing with the history of this form of land transportation have appeared in Mechanical Engineering magazine over the past fifty years. None were selected for this volume.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 599-622
Author(s):  
Tanya Agathocleous ◽  
Janet Neary

Abstract This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century.


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