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To a degree uncommon among Chinese cities, Republican Shanghai had no center. Its territory was divided among three (sometimes more) municipal governments integrated into various national states and empires. No government building or religious institution gave Shanghai a “center.” Yet amidst deep cleavages, the city functioned as a coherent whole. What held Shanghai together? The authors of this book's answer is that a group of middlemen with myriad connections across political and social boundaries created networks which held Republican Shanghai together.

This book breaks down the naturalized and eternal relationship between female infanticide and Chinese culture and reconstructs that association as a product of historical processes of the nineteenth century. It takes as its explicit focus the changing perception of female infanticide in Chinese history, rather than its practice. Without diminishing the seriousness of the problem of excess female mortality in either the Chinese present or past, this book seeks to disrupt the familiar, shopworn narrative about the continuity of female victimhood in China from the premodern era to the present, and to introduce the possibility of historical change. Historically the nature of infanticide in China has evolved from a general trend analogous to trends of infanticide and child abandonment in other parts of the world, to a distinctly gender-specific and culturally unique phenomenon. This text focuses particularly on the transformation of thought that occurred in the nineteenth-century, and how the lives and bodies of newborn Chinese infant girls came to mean something new and distinct in the early twentieth century, when compare to the nineteenth. If we wish to move beyond an undifferentiated past of Chinese gender discrimination and barbarity, then we need to frame our central question in a radical, new way. This book does not take female infanticide and Chinese culture as a given; instead it asks: just when and how did female infanticide become so Chinese?

This book provides an examination of the Muslim notability (begs) and their development of capitalistic enterprises in Eastern Turkestan under the Qing Empire. The begs, the powerful organizers of trade, agriculture, and labor in the oases, needed the empire and its military as a patron of their capitalistic reorganization of the oasis agriculture and the expansion of their access to new markets and resources. The Qing needed the begs as the foundation of imperial security and as partners in revenue extraction from local agriculture and mining development constituencies. However, the capitalistic transformation of the oasis economy created socio-economic tensions between the begs and the rural villagers. From the latter’s ranks, resistance grew in the form of bandits and refugees fleeing into the mountains that surrounded the oases, where these people would amass to form outsider communities. These communities, under the leadership of Sufi holy men (khwaja), eventually engaged in over political action in the early 1800s, which culminated in war against the Qing state. The Qing fell in Central Asia in 1864, as this new crisis deepened after Opium War (1839-42). This book offers a new perspective on Qing imperial history, and also contributes to a revised narrative on the history of global capitalism and imperialism on a truly global scale, and in an interconnected fashion.

The conventional understanding of Japanese wartime ideology has for years been summed up by just a few words: anti-modern, spiritualist, and irrational. Yet such a cut and dried picture is not at all reflective of the principles that guided national policy from 1931–1945. Challenging the status quo, Constructing East Asia examines how Japanese intellectuals, bureaucrats, and engineers used technology as a system of power and mobilization—what the author terms a "technological imaginary"—to rally people in Japan and its expanding empire. By analyzing how these different actors defined technology in public discourse, national policies, and large-scale infrastructure projects, the book reveals wartime elites as far more calculated in thought and action than previous scholarship allows. Moreover, it positions the wartime origins of technology deployment as an essential part of the country's national policy and identity, upending another predominant narrative—namely, that technology did not play a modernizing role in Japan until the "economic miracle" of the postwar years.

This book explores the unique significance that the Chinese people attach to their country's many distinct regional foods, as well as the shifting roles that Western food plays in urban life. The author focuses on Shanghai—a food lover's paradise—as a rich intersection of urban, regional, and national identities, and examines how tastes registered change and continuity at pivotal moments throughout the city's history. From the earliest accounts of Shanghai's specialty foodstuffs to the dazzling variety of regional cuisines and restaurants in the metropolis of today, the book uncovers how city residents have constructed their relationship to the city itself, to other parts of China, and to the wider world. It develops a framework for studying food culture as an intrinsic part of the way Chinese people connect to the past, live in the present, and imagine a future.

This book summarizes twenty years of the author's work in historical anthropology and documents his argument that, in China, ritual provided the social glue which law provided in the West. It offers a history of the special lineage institutions for which south China has been noted and argues that they fostered the mechanisms which enabled south China to be absorbed into the imperial Chinese state—first, by introducing rituals that were acceptable to the state, and second, by providing mechanisms which made group ownership of property feasible and hence possible to pool capital for land-reclamation projects important to the state. Just as taxation, defense, and recognition came together with the emergence of powerful lineages in the sixteenth century, their disintegration in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginnings of a new Chinese state.

This book is about how Chinese views of natural resource management underwent a major change as a result of the late Qing engagement with imperialism and science and argues that modern Chinese views of strategic mineral reserves and natural resources developed in the last decades of the Qing dynasty In the West and in China coal had long been mined and used. What changed in the nineteenth century was the crafting of a global discourse of energy and industrialization, which prominently featured coal. For Qing officials and writers from the late nineteenth century coal became an essential fuel of imperialism and the foundation of a new industrial economy. Each chapter addresses a different facet of this change in worldview and as a whole demonstrate that by the end of the nineteenth century China and the West had converged in a crucial measure of modern, industrialized states: the theory and exploitation of natural resources, particularly fossil fuels.

Narrating the history of a hitherto unknown family of chungin (“middle people”) status in early modern Korea, this book engages some key debates on the rise of modern Korea. Between 1590 and 1880, the chungin, who were neither aristocrat nor commoner, invested their increasing cultural and economic capital to liberate themselves from the yangban aristocracy's monopoly on political power. From about 1880 to 1904, inspired by Western ideas and institutions, the chungin achieved increasing prominence in politics, business, and cultural circles. At a time when Korea came under the pressures of imperialism, they attacked what they deemed to be the vestiges of backward customs centered on old status hierarchies unlike commoners and slaves who continued to emulate aristocratic culture. This book argues that the chungin, as a distinct early modern status group, encompassed families of a wide range of occupations and took longer to crystallize than has been previously recognized. Earlier studies tend to highlight prominent individual chungin perceived as “collaborating” with Japanese colonial rule, but this study instead highlights the chungin who saw themselves as victims of colonialism. During the subsequent colonial era, claims to royal or aristocratic descent dominated family history narratives and the expanding discourse on ancestry and genealogy. Marginalized, if not excluded, from this discourse, a study of those of chungin descent, such as the Paks, facilitates a meaningful discussion of the meaning of identity, modernity, colonialism, memory, and historical agency, not just for Korean history but for the historian's craft in general.

Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single “foreign” policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized “frontier” policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy, but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.

This book seeks a better understanding of the politics, society, and culture of early-modern Korea by tracing and narrating the history of the descendants of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Decades after persecution that virtually exterminated the former royals, the Kaesŏng Wang, the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) sought to bolster its legitimacy as the successor of Koryŏ. Emulating Chinese historical precedents, by the mid-fifteenth century, Chosŏn had rehabilitated the surviving Wangs. Contrary to the popular assumption that the Wangs remained politically marginalized, many fared well. The most privileged among them won the patronage of the Chosŏn court for which they performed ancestral rites in honor of certain Koryŏ rulers as selected by Chosŏn, passed government service examinations, attained prestigious offices, commanded armies, and constituted elite lineages throughout Korea. As members of a revived aristocratic descent group, the Kaesŏng Wang were committed to Confucian cultural and moral norms, at the heart of which was a subject’s loyalty to the ruler—the Chosŏn monarch. At the same time, Chosŏn increasingly honored Koryŏ loyalists and legacies. An emerging body of subversive narratives, both written and oral, articulated sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the tumultuous politics of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change, although the Wangs themselves steered clear of this discourse until after Japan’s abolition of the Chosŏn monarchy in 1910. Forces of modernity such as imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration transformed the Kaesŏng Wang as the progeny of fallen royals to individuals from all walks of life.

A study of the politics of rice in Canton, this book sheds new light on the local history of the city and illuminates how China's struggles with food shortages in the early twentieth century unfolded and the ways in which they were affected by the rise of nationalism and the fluctuation of global commerce. The book profiles Canton as an exemplary site of provisioning, a critical gateway for foreign-rice importation and distribution through the Pearl River Delta, which found its prized import, and thus its food security, threatened by the rise of Chinese nationalism. The book argues that the modern Chinese state's attempts to promote domestically-produced “national rice” and to tax rice imported through the transnational trade networks were doomed to failure, as a focus on rice production ignored the influential factor of rice quality. Indeed, China's domestic rice promotion program resulted in an unprecedented famine in Canton in 1936. This book contends that the ways in which the Guomindang government dealt with the issue of food security, and rice in particular, is best understood in the context of its preoccupation with science, technology, and progressivism, a departure from the conventional explanations that cite governmental incompetence.

This book provides an answer to the mystery of why no peace treaty has yet been signed between Japan and Russia after the more than sixty years since the end of World War Two. The author, an authority on Japanese–Russian diplomatic history, was trained at the Russian Institute of Columbia University. This volume contributes to the understanding of not only the intricacies of bilateral relations between Moscow and Tokyo, but, more generally, of Russia's and Japan's modes of foreign policy formation. The author also discusses the U.S. factor, which helped make Russia and Japan distant neighbors, and the threat from China, which might help these countries come closer in the near future.

This book explores the transformation of Huizhou salt merchants’ social and political status in eighteenth-century China. These merchants left their homes in the remote countryside of Huizhou, conducting business and sojourning in the most prosperous part of the Qing empire (1644-1911), the Lower Yangzi valley. Benefiting from the new salt monopoly policies instituted by Manchu emperors, they became one of the wealthiest merchant groups of the High Qing period (1683-1839).

This book examines the rise of anti-Catholic hostility in early nineteenth-century Vietnam under the Nguyễn dynasty. French missionaries have long been blamed for the destabilization of dynastic Vietnam and the anti-Catholic violence that preceded the French invasion in 1858, but the focus on the political conflict leading to the Nguyễn court's antipathy to the church overlooks the significance of Catholicism as a popular religion. Focusing on, but not limited to, the Cochinchina region, this study explores grassroots experiences of the religion and the conflict between the Nguyễn court and missionaries of the Missions Étrangères de Paris. To do so, it draws on the correspondence of French missionaries and Vietnamese priests from the MEP archive, and on vernacular Vietnamese translations of the Nguyễn dynastic record, to provide a new perspective on Nguyễn Vietnam from the 1820s to the 1860s.

Chambers of commerce developed in China as a key part of its sociopolitical changes. In 1902, the first Chinese chamber of commerce appeared in Shanghai. By the time the Qing dynasty ended, over 1,000 general chambers, affiliated chambers, and branch chambers had been established throughout China. In this new work, the author examines Chinese chambers of commerce and their network development across Lower Yangzi cities and towns, as well as the nationwide arena. He details how they achieved increasing integration, and how their collective actions deeply influenced nationalistic, reformist, and revolutionary movements. His use of network analysis reveals how these chambers promoted social integration beyond the bourgeoisie and other elites, and helped bring society and the state into broader and more complicated interactions than existing theories of civil society and public sphere suggest. With both historical narrative and theoretical analysis of the long neglected local chamber networks, this study offers a keen historical understanding of the interaction of Chinese society, business, and politics in the early twentieth century. It also provides new knowledge produced from network theory within the humanities and social sciences.

Before WWII, China mattered little in international relations. Afterwards, it was recognized as one of the victorious allies, it secured a permanent seat in the UN’s Securty Council, and it had become a central player in East Asian Affairs. Negotiating China’s Destiny examines this transformation in China’s international position, which occurred despite its military weakness. The book examines the end of Western imperialism in China, the efforts of the Nationalists to engage with its wartime Allies, the UK, the USSR, and the USA, its dealings with surrounding states and peripheral areas, including India, Tibet, Vietnam, and Korea, and its approach to Japan in defeat. Written by scholars from China, Japan, Europe, and the USA, it adopts a genuinely global perspective on a key shift in international relations whose repercussions have become truly into focus only now with China’s rise as a world power.

The year was 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Allied troops poured into war-torn Japan and spread throughout the country, altering both the built environment and the country's psychological landscape. The effect of this influx on the local population did not lessen in the years following the war's end. In fact, the presence of foreign servicemen also heightened the visibility of certain others, particularly panpan—streetwalkers—who were objects of their desire. This book shows how intimate histories and international relations are interconnected in ways scholars have only begun to explore. Although sex workers became symbols of Japan's diminished status, by earning scarce dollars they helped jump-start economic recovery. But sex workers who catered to servicemen were nonetheless a frequent target. They were blamed for increases in venereal disease. They were charged with diluting the Japanese race by producing mixed-race offspring. In 1956, Japan passed its first national law against prostitution. Though empowered female legislators had joined with conservatives in this effort to reform and rehabilitate, the law produced an unanticipated effect. By ending a centuries-old tradition of sex work regulation, it made sex workers less visible and more vulnerable. This probing history reveals an important but underexplored aspect of the Japanese occupation and its effect on gender and society. It seeks to shift the terms of debate on a number of controversies, including Japan's history of forced sexual slavery, rape accusations against U.S. servicemen, opposition to U.S. overseas bases, and sexual trafficking.

In late imperial China, opera was an integral part of life and culture, shared across the social hierarchy. Opera transmitted ideas about the self, family, society, and politics over time and space. The Qing capital of Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values via performance. It is in this context that the author harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance refracted ethnic tensions and discontent among literati, blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage—literally and figuratively—on which to act out gender and class transgressions. By examining opera in Qing Beijing, this work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies partook of opera and manipulated it to their own ends. Given Beijing's political influence, this analysis of opera and its tensions in the capital also sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.

This book puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth-century transposition of “the real” in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify “photography” in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. They pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering, through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study. The book is an exploration of the process by which the Shōhyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten.

It is by now clear that the rhetoric and practice of democracy in the modern nonwest has irreversibly transformed the European meanings of the concept. Crucial to this transformation has been the persistence of religion in nineteenth and twentieth century anticolonial struggles. But what does “religion” in the singular stand for in these diverse and divisive contexts? B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and practices have decisively shaped the relationship between religion and politics in India, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, morality, and freedom. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their commitment to unconditional equality, which for them remained inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. Ambedkar and Gandhi inherited the concept of equality from modern humanism, but their ideas marked a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. Kumar recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their theories of justice and ethics of resistance, he probes the nature of risk that radical democracy’s desire for inclusion opens within modern (nationalist) thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi’s intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality and violence thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a new universalism of citizenship and dissidence.