Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Lives, Linkages, and Imperial Connections 1st Edition

Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Lives, Linkages, and Imperial Connections 1st Edition – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9781350238893, 1350238899

Product details:

• ISBN-10: 1350238899
• ISBN-13: 9781350238893
• Author: Robert S. G. Fletcher, Robert Hellyer

This book presents intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in Japanese and Chinese treaty ports, as well as in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, during the 19th century. It does so by examining how Westerners ‘chronicled’ their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the ‘connectivities’ between its subjects, as Westerners’ lives intersected, and as they moved between Japanese and Chinese port cities. Contributors based in the USA, Japan, the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland reveal the various commercial, maritime, and imperial connections, linked in surprising ways to Westerners in East Asia portrayed here, which shaped colonial development in Australia and New Zealand. Through a broad investigation of Westerners recording their lives, the book re-examines wider histories of the so-called ‘openings’ of China and Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as how Westerners sought to make sense of these events, and to narrate their place within them. Finally the volume considers how flows of people, capital, commerce, and communications not only cut across the histories of distinct treaty ports in Japan and China, but also shows their implications for empire and exchange beyond East Asia, including Australia, New Zealand, and the 19th-century maritime world.

Table contents:

1 Disturbed reciprocity: Rutherford Alcock’s diplomacy and merchant communities in China and Japan
2 George S. Morrison and Japan’s first British consulate at Nagasaki
3 Making safe the settlement: The British troops at Yokohama and their influence on foreign and Japanese society
4 Between trade and diplomacy: The commercial activities of the Swiss silk merchants Siber and Brennwald in late Edo and early Meiji Japan
5 Afterlife of the wealthy: The burial of mercantile communities in nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong
6 Charlotte Jane: National symbol and global reality
7 Dreams of expanding the British Empire: The life of George Windsor Earl

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