A Study on Discources on Statecraft of East Asia before the Mid-nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 7-42
Author(s):  
Tae Heui Kim
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

The Concept of Asia: From Geography to Ideology

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Mitani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Asian People

In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.

scholarly journals ‘Black Mail’: Networks of opium and postal exchange in nineteenth-century India

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Devyani Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Western India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Offices ◽  
Asian Context

This article discusses the overlap between British Indian networks of postal communication and trade, and smuggling of opium within a nineteenth-century inter-Asian context. These circulatory networks received support from the expansion of global shipping lines. The colonial state subsidised opium steamers of private shipping companies and converted them into mail packets, using them to transport illicit opium to parts of Southeast and East Asia. Domestically, inland postal routes came to be appropriated by local traders, cultivators and itinerants to smuggle excess opium, growing outside the purview of the colonial state, to various ports in western India, thereby cutting into the profits and prestige of the colonial state. Simultaneously, official complicity in opium smuggling also came to the fore, evident in the case of post offices situated in the eastern parts of the subcontinent, highlighting the inherent weaknesses within the colonial system of administration.

Politics, Trade and Communications in East Asia: Thoughts on Anglo-Russian Relations, 1861–1907

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-678
Author(s):  
Ian Nish
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Total Trade ◽  
North East ◽  
Intelligence Operations ◽  
Political Stance ◽  
The One ◽  
Image Position

As Britain saw it, trade was not the prime motivating force for Russian expansion in east Asia or, put another way, the Russian frontiersmen were not driven by the actual amount of their trade there or its future potentialities. While Russia was primarily concerned with the tea trade over land frontiers, Britain was concerned with the seaborne commerce of China. The customs revenue paid to China in the year 1894 worked out as follows:Judging from the returns of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Organization, British ships carried 83.5% of China's total trade. But Britain's commercial dominance affected her political stance because she wanted to preserve China's stability for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. This was at the root of the political tensions between Britain and Russia which emerged in China after 1860 and especially those which derived from the spate of railway building which took place from 1890 onwards. It would be foolish to deny that intense rivalry did exist in the area from time to time or that detailed observations of the actions of the one were regularly conducted by the other—what we should now call ‘intelligence operations’. But what I shall suggest in this paper is that, despite all the admitted antagonism and suspicion between Britain and Russia in east Asia, Britain regularly made efforts to reach accommodations with Russia in north-east Asia.

The Concept of Rights in Modern Japan

2019 ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Ōkubo Takeharu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Normative Issues ◽  
Imminent Threat

This chapter aims to investigate the acceptance of “rights” in nineteenth-century Japan by examining divergent interpretations of political concepts between the West, especially Europe, and East Asia. After the arrival of US warships in 1853, facing the imminent threat of Western power, Japanese scholars and statesmen raised fundamental normative issues concerning the legal and moral concepts shaping the Western world—essentially posing the question, “What is Western civilization?” They grappled both theoretically and practically with Western political thought, employing the vocabulary and concepts provided by their own East Asian legal, moral, and political traditions, such as Confucianism, in a variety of ways. Given the differences between Western and Asian legal traditions, especially, the idea of “rights” was one of the hardest to accept. This chapter examines how some key Japanese intellectuals and politicians, including Nishi Amane, Nakae Chomin, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, confronted the complex plurality of rights in jurisprudence and discourse of European thinkers such as Simon Vissering, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill and how they used it to reconsider specifically the legal culture of East Asia. In the course of this intellectual struggle with an alien culture, these Japanese thinkers sought to liberate European political theory from a closed historical identity and imbue it with new meaning in a new context. This is a history of comparative political theory concerned with the cross-cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth-century encounter of non-Western intellectuals with the ideal and the reality of “the West.”

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