Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Dusinberre
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Global History ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
In Transit

AbstractThis article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

scholarly journals “Peruvian balsam”: an example of transoceanic transfer of medicinal knowledge

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Schottenhammer
Keyword(s):  
Modern China ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medicinal Uses ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Spanish Colonies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Archaeological Analysis ◽  
Medicinal Drugs

Abstract Background Connections between China and the new Spanish colonies in America are known for an exchange of silver for silks and porcelains. That also medicinal drugs and medicinal knowledge crossed the Pacific Ocean is hardly known or discussed. Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms (“New World“ or “Peruvian balsam“) is a botanical balsam that has a long history of medicinal use, particularly as antiseptic and for wound healing. Except for a Chinese article discussing the reception of balsam in China and Japan, no scientific studies on its impact in China and Japan and the channels of transfer from the Americas to Asia exist. Methods Description: (1) This section provides a general introduction into Commiphora gileadensis (“Old World” balsam) as a medicinal category and discusses the specific medicinal properties of Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms. The section “Historical research and uses” provides a brief survey on some historical analyses of balsam. Aim, design, setting: (2) Applying a comparative textual and archaeological analysis the article critically examines Chinese and Japanese sources (texts, maps) to show (i) what Chinese and Japanese scholars knew about balsam, (ii) where and how it was used, and (iii) to identify reasons why the “digestion” of knowledge on balsam as a medicinal developed so differently in China and Japan. Results and discussion This chapter discusses the introduction of “Peruvian balsam” into, its uses as a medicinal as well as its scholarly reception in early modern China and Japan and introduces the channels of transmission from Spanish America to Asia. It is shown that Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms was partly a highly valued substance imported from the Americas into China and Japan. But the history of the reception of medicinal knowledge on Peruvian balsam was significantly different in China and Japan. Conclusions In Japan, the knowledge on Myroxylon balsamum was continuously updated, especially through mediation of Dutch physicians; Japanese scholars, doctors and pharmacists possessed a solid knowledge on this balsam, its origin and its medicinal uses. In China, on the contrary, there was no further “digestion” or development of the knowledge on either Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms or Commiphora gileadensis. By the late nineteenth century, related medicinal and even geographic knowledge had mostly been lost. The interest in “balsam” in late Qing scholarship was pure encyclopaedic and philosophic.

Guestworkers of the World, Unite!

No Man's Land ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy Hahamovitch
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
To Come

This chapter explores the first phase of the global history of guestworker programs, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before that time, there were no guestworker programs because there were no immigration restrictions. Immigration restrictions led to guestworker programs as states sought to guarantee employers access to the immigrant workers that restrictionists were trying to deny them. Temporary immigration schemes—guestworker programs—were state-brokered compromises designed to placate employers' demands for labor and nativists' demands for restriction. Guestworker programs offered clear-cut distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, natives and aliens, insiders and outsiders, whites and nonwhites. This first phase in the history of guestworker programs thus reveals the essential features of the guestworker programs to come.

Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Orgasm ◽  
Male Homosexuality ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

Fellow Worker

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Barry Pateman
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fellow Worker

Review of Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, Wobblies of the World. A new edited collection on the global history of the Industrial Workers of the World.  

THE TECTONIC HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN BASIN SINCE CHRON 34Y (83 MA)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky M. Wright ◽  
◽  
Maria Seton ◽  
Simon E. Williams ◽  
R. Dietmar Müller
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Ocean Basin ◽  
Tectonic History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

MONARCHS, TRAVELLERS AND EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC'S AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Site

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.

Re-imagining International Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Amitav Acharya
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
Global History ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Multiple Origins ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Buzan and Acharya challenge the discipline of International Relations to reimagine itself in the light of the thinking about, and practice of, international relations and world order from premodern India, China and the Islamic world. This prequel to their 2019 book, The Making of Global International Relations, takes the story back from the two-century tale of modern IR, to reveal the deep global history of the discipline. It shows the multiple origins and meanings of many concepts thought of as only modern and Western. It opens pathways for the rest of the world into this most Eurocentric of disciplines, encouraging them to bring their own histories, concepts and theories with them. The authors have written this book with the hope of inspiring others to extend these pathways by bringing in a wider array of cultures, and exploring how they thought about and acted in worlds composed of multiple, independent, collective actors.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document