scholarly journals Land of the Morning Calm, Land of the Rising Sun: The East Asia Travel Writings of Isabella Bird and George Curzon

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jihang Park
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Fierce Competition

The developments in East Asia in the late nineteenth century became a matter of great interest to Britain. The rise of Japan and the wrangles among the great powers over China and Korea were some of the issues that put East Asia in the spotlight. In China, Western powers had been contending fiercely for economic and political hegemony since the Opium War. Japan, after abandoning its national policy of seclusion in 1854, carried out the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and was driving towards rapid Westernization. Here modernization took place in a relatively smooth manner and there was no need to fear external threats, but domestic tensions were inevitable. Finally Korea, after being forced to open its doors in 1876, suffered from acute dissensions between conservatives and progressives, and fierce competition between China, Japan and Russia over hegemony in Korea complicated the situation further.

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.

Sport in China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Brownell
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
World History ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Ping Pong ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Far Eastern

Due to the Orientalist bias in sport history in the West, starting in the late nineteenth century, “Far Eastern civilization” was defined in terms of its lack relative to “Western civilization,” which (it was said) valued sports and created the Olympic Games. This chapter begins by outlining some of the similarities between classical Greece and China and proceeds to trace the course of China’s encounter with the West through sports up to the present. Western sports were introduced into East Asia by the YMCA, but China turned them to its own goals during Ping Pong Diplomacy. The pursuit of Olympic medals made the position of wushu (traditional martial arts) ambiguous. Inside China, hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing was called the fulfillment of a “one hundred-year dream,” symbolizing that China had finally been written into world history and was no longer defined by its sporting deficiency relative to the West.

The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Chang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Western China ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Broad Audience ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chinese Gardens

This chapter argues that a comparative lack of British interest in traditional Chinese gardens during the period 1880-1914, often interpreted as evidence of Japan’s more ready appeal, obscures the complexity of organic exchange going on between Britain and East Asia at this time. Celebrated plant hunters were launching daring expeditions into unexplored Western China; those plants, upon importation, were so successfully and quickly naturalized that they became evidence of the landscape conformity that Japanese designs were held to resist. What’s more, even as these plant hunters were publishing their travel narratives for a broad audience, select British readers were absorbing a very different view of Chinese gardens through the outré works of French and British writers. Spurred by the retranslation of Thomas De Quincey’s works into French, late nineteenth-century French decadents found inspiration in the same provocative elements of Chinese behavior and landscape that British Romantics had found a century before. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden was read and appreciated by Oscar Wilde, among others, and formed a part of a larger fin-de-siècle European reconsideration of the East. It is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden that provide a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism.

State structure, technological leadership and the maintenance of hegemony

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 003-025 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL DREZNER
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Technological Leadership ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Precise Role

The importance of technological innovation to economic growth and state power is generally acknowledged in international relations. Less attention has been paid to the state's precise role in fostering innovation. This article argues that, contrary to realism, a centralized state is ill-suited to fostering innovation, particularly for technological leaders. Centralized states are more likely to make errors in crafting policy, and those errors cannot be reversed at the regional or local level. Decentralized states are better suited for the required tasks in fostering innovation. These hypotheses are tested against the Anglo–German rivalry for technological leadership in the late nineteenth century, and the US–Japanese rivalry of the last twenty years. In both cases the more centralized regime—Great Britain and Japan—faltered after initial successes. This suggests a tension within great powers. Policymakers prefer a strong, centralized state to facilitate policymaking. However, the evidence suggests that a decentralized state structure is a necessary condition for states to sustain themselves at the technological frontier.

scholarly journals International Law and its Influence on Diplomacy in the Late Nineteenth Century Japan

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Takeharu Ōkubo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
East Asia ◽  
International Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Western Nations ◽  
Philosophical Questions

In 1853 United States warships led by Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) came to Japan to negotiate a commercial treaty. This event had suddenly thrust late-nineteenth-century Japan into a web of relations with the Western nations, and as a result, European international law was a topic of particularly urgent concern including some normative philosophical questions: What is Civilization? What are the rules in international relations? What are the differences with the existing order in East Asia?

scholarly journals J. R. SEELEY AND JAPAN'S PACIFIC EXPANSION

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
MARTIN DUSINBERRE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Japanese Student ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, as Japanese scholars, traders, and labourers began to cross the Pacific Ocean in ever greater numbers, Tokyo-based intellectuals started to think about the significance of the ocean for the upcoming century. One prominent articulation of this ‘Pacific age’ was the result of an intellectual dialogue between a young Japanese student, Inagaki Manjirō (1861–1908), and his Cambridge professor, John Robert Seeley (1834–95). Traditionally framed as a relationship of ‘influence’ from teacher to pupil, and thus from West to East, the emergence of the ‘Pacific age’ was in fact the result of a sophisticated modulation of ideas from Seeley's The expansion of England (1883) into the rapidly changing politics of early 1890s Japan. This article traces that modulation in Inagaki's published works between 1890, when he graduated from Cambridge, and 1895, when Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Seeley's analyses, in Inagaki's hands, gave a significant impetus to existing expansionist visions in Japan, and thus constitute one example of late nineteenth-century history being written in the discursive space between Europe and East Asia.

An Aspiring Buffer State: Anglo-Persian Relations in the Third Coalition, 1804–1807

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Near East ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Weak States ◽  
The Third ◽  
British Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.

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