Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism: The Performativity of Western Music Endeavours in Interwar Shanghai

This article examines the meaning of Western music performances in interwar Shanghai through the theoretical framework of performativity that originated in John Austin's speech act and Judith Butler's notion of identity as performed. The early concerts of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra (SMO), I suggest, were an assertion of settler sovereignty in a treaty port such as Shanghai. Therefore, Chinese musicians performing Western music – propagated through the establishment of the National Conservatory of Music by Chinese elites in Shanghai's French Settlement in 1927 – was the embodiment of three contradictory ideals: colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Zooming in on four SMO concerts that featured Chinese musicians in 1929, I argue that they were sites of identity and power negotiation, the SMO and the Chinese musicians asserting quite distinct performative utterances. On the one hand, the performing Chinese body enacted the cosmopolitan outlook that the Municipal Council was eager to project, not only for the sake of ideology but also to increase SMO's concert revenue by appealing to the increasing number of Chinese concert attendees. On the other hand, it meant national glory to Chinese residents in Shanghai, marking Chinese musicians participating in a global musical network. Lastly, this study draws attention to the diverse geographies of Western music in the twentieth century and its coeval development beyond the West, testifying to the timely need for a global music history in which the musicking of Western music in so many Asian cities should be interwoven into its narrative.

‘International Shanghai’ (1863–1931): Imperialism and private authority in the Global City

At the intersection of imperial rule and private power, Shanghai rose to international prominence in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It did so by taking advantage of the extraterritorial status and the dynamic, cosmopolitan population of the International Settlement. In evaluating the fate of the Shanghai Municipal Council, we seek to ascertain how private authority could have been constituted on a transnational basis within the framework of a treaty port. The rise of Shanghai was linked to some of the ambiguities of overlapping imperial rule and the possibilities it created for legal and governance experimentation. This is particularly clear in realms most associated with sovereign power, namely the International Settlement’s attempts to claim some taxation power and maintain law and order. That power, however, was interstitial at best and the product of fragile balances, as shown by the Council’s ultimate failure to secure a full international legal status for Shanghai. Nonetheless, the rise and fall of the International Settlement at Shanghai are worth reflecting upon, not only in relation to the history of China, imperialism and international law, but also as a way of thinking how the authority of large metropolitan centres might be constituted.

殖民的規訓營造──廈門租界的個案（1840s~1940s）

<p>本文旨在重新檢視19世紀中葉後，廈門租界在通商口岸的建構下，如何以殖民工程科學論述的移植，進行租界的空間營造。文中將指出這樣的殖民行動目的在於確保殖民者在殖民地的衛生與安全，以確保殖民行動的遂行，方式上是經由科學觀察、調查、測量和統計的殖民現代性營造，一種帶有非正式帝國（informal empire）領土延伸的具體空間部署。這種非正式的殖民營造，是一種主體被遮蔽的建構過程。作者認為，19世紀萌芽的科學且正當的社會進化理論，提供了像英國這樣的殖民帝國在晚清中國租界擴張的一個自然化邏輯的依據；同時，藉由知識掌控，進而利用殖民地資源，以增進各種帝國殖民行動的經濟利益。這種來自於殖民主義擴張所確立的空間部署，使得想像中的地理願望在這一部署行動中被化為確立的政治連結、經濟依賴與地景改造的物質空間性。諸如廈門租界也在這種全景敞視論（panopticism）的機制下，而被予以殖民規訓營造。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p> This article would like to rediscover the spatial planning and management of the treaty area in Xiamen（廈門）during the 1840s~1930s. It argues that the Xiamen concession shaped the treaty port by transplanting the modern engineering-science. The author thought that British Empire used the neutralization logic for science and legitimated the social evolution to encroach concessions of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century, and enhanced various interests of colonial acts by controlling knowledge simultaneously. This spatial disposition made geographical desire of colonial imagination be a physical space of political connection and economical dependency and remodeled. The informal colonization was a constructional process of a hidden subject. The Xiamen concession built the colonial discipline based on the method of panopticism. This article will point out the purpose of colonial act aimed on ensuring the hygiene and health of Colonizers in Xiamen concession. In practice, it concerned building colonial modernity by observing, surveying, measuring the statistics of science that was a spatial disposition referring to extended territory of informal empire.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Trade in the Japanese Empire

Insecurity and inequality (both real and perceived) have defined the Japanese Empire as an entity of trade. If one the primary goals of Japan’s leaders during the Meiji period (1868–1912) was to revise the so-called unequal treaties, then having an empire was seen as a necessary means towards achieving this end. From the very beginning, strategic concerns proved inseperable from economic considerations. Imperial expansion into neighboring territories occurred simutaneously and worked hand in hand with forging an industrial nation-state. The empire began with the so-called internal colonization of Hokkaidō and then the Ryūkyū Islands (Okinawa), followed by Taiwan and Korea, spoils of victory after the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, respectively. Taiwan and Korea represented Japan’s formal empire, and Japan developed these territories primarily as agricultural appendages—unequal and exclusive trading partners to provide foodstuffs for a growing, industrializing population in the home islands. As Japan developed its formal colonies toward a goal of agricultural self-sufficiency, it also pursued informal empire in China, which took shape as a competitive yet cooperative effort with other Western imperial powers under the treaty port system. World War I represented a turning point for imperial trade: At this time, Japan took advantage of a Europe preoccupied with internecine battles to ramp up the scope and scale of industrial production, which made Japan increasingly reliant on China—and particularly Manchuria—for raw materials necessary for heavy industry such as coal and iron. Japanese efforts to tighten its grip on China brought it into conflict with the Western imperialist powers and with a strengthening Chinese nation. Another major turning point was Japan’s 1931 takeover of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo; these actions ended the treaty port system and sparked conflicts between China and Japan that broke out into full-out war by 1937. Although Japan was largely able to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency by the 1930s, it was unable to be fully self-reliant in essential resources for industry (and war) such as oil, tin, and iron. Resource self-sufficiency was a major goal for the construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the early 1940s. The Japanese Empire officially ended with defeat in 1945.

Western Merchants and Intra-Asian Trade: John Henry Duus at Treaty port Hakodate (Part One 1861-68)

This article examines the business activities of John Henry Duus, a long-standing foreign resident of the treaty port of Hakodate. In the first of this two-part article, I trace Duus’ background and focus in on his efforts to conduct business at Hakodate in the 1860s. Though Duus’ efforts to foster trade between Japan and western countries proved largely fruitless, he played an important role as a local agent for Chinese and China-based western firms and thus was active in fostering intra-Asian trade. As an Asia-born Anglo-Dane who first came to Hakodate as a British merchant but later switched allegiances to Denmark and served as Danish consul, Duus’ career also points to the cosmopolitan background of western treaty porters at the more peripheral treaty ports such as Hakodate.

Shaping a New Profession

Not until the nineteenth century were the Japanese forced to confront and engage with the European conception of international law. In East Asia a Sinocentric regional order had governed their worldview for over a thousand years, and during the early modern period the Tokugawa dynasty then modified this outlook to place Japan in the centre of its own framework of international relations. Under the Tokugawa judicial system, moreover, the concept of a lawyer, international or otherwise, was practically unknown. It was the reluctant opening of treaty ports in 1859 that paved the way for Japan’s reception of international law. This chapter charts the shift from the early Japanese exploration of the outside world after centuries of self-imposed isolation, to the training of Japan’s first generation of international lawyers as the Meiji state embarked on reclaiming sovereign rights lost through the imposition of the treaty port regime.

Colonialism and Compromise: The Shanghai Municipal Police and the Arrest of Communists, 1927–37

The Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which was mainly controlled by British residents in the treaty port of Shanghai, and protected by the British Foreign Office, came under serious challenge from the Guomindang (GMD) (the rising Nationalist Party of China) from 1927 onwards. The Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)—an imperial police force with powers to arrest, prosecute and detain—was forced to collaborate with the GMD, and practice unlawful arrest, extradition and re-indoctrination of Communist suspects and convicts. This resulted in the erosion of state powers and the management of prisons. This article argues that the dismantling of British colonialism began to take place in Shanghai during the inter-war period at the expense of some English legal conventions, as demonstrated by SMP violations of existing legal practices and humanitarian commitments. Second, it also suggests that English judicial conventions had an unintended impact on some Chinese civilians, who were keen to safeguard their rights during their detention and trial in and beyond the Shanghai Legation. This article, therefore, offers a new periodisation of British decolonisation and a re-examination of colonial legacy in East Asia.

Treaty Port Tort

This chapter considers the kinds of legal and medicolegal disputes that arose when foreign residents sustained injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company. It looks at the kinds of expertise and institutions responsible for adjudicating claims for compensation and considers the rights of the Bangkok Tramway Company, its employees, managers, and shareholders. In answering these questions, the chapter analyzes “jurisdictional politics,” “conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities,” in the plural legal arena of treaty port Bangkok. It deconstructs historical metanarratives about the “Westernization” or “modernization” of Thai law by revealing the fractious nature of Western law, including evidence of internecine squabbles between the representatives of legal and medical expertise—barristers and physicians—but also among the laypeople who advocated for particular brands of European legal tradition. It therefore complicates celebratory narratives of legal liberalism by demonstrating how nationalist sentiments and professional self-interest were the true impetus for legal change, not any grand imperial ambitions for bestowing law as a civilizing force.