Empire In Asia Research Articles

The Stauntons of Galway in China: Irish Catholic networks and the expansion of the British Empire in Asia

AbstractGeorge Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Complicating the Color Line in Asian Empires

Complicating the Color Line in Asian Empires

“Anarchy” against “Order”: French Elite Perception of the Conflict in Manchuria

Abstract The fall of the French empire in Asia is directly linked to the Second World War and France’s policy of appeasement that preceded it. The issue of France’s attitude to the invasion of Manchuria is important for understanding what French policy in East Asia was during the 1930s. For these reasons, this article intends to show the attitude of French political leaders and how, unable as they were to condemn the aggressor, Japan, it led to the policy of appeasement pursued by all French governments with regard to Japan during the rest of the decade. To do so, this article is based on the published diplomatic archives of the United States and the articles published by the newspaper Le Temps, the unofficial organ of the Third Republic.

The Decline of the Eastern Empire and the Fall of Constantinople: An Omen for Europe?

There is a theory, already outlined by Toynbee, that empires that have succeeded one another in a dominant position are seeing their centre of gravity shift from east to west. This theory has most recently been evoked in connection with the replacement of the European empire by the American empire, which now seems to be giving way to an Asian empire. If we want to analyse historically the mechanisms that lead an empire to its downfall, the best example to choose is undoubtedly that of the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire in Western terminology. It is a world that has disappeared, but one that is close enough to us to allow us to understand it, and even to learn from its evolution, which only seems inevitable in retrospect. This story with its succession of internal and external causes of decline is summarized in the present study, leading to the disappearance of the Empire at the hands of the Ottoman dynasty. A parallel is drawn with the present situation of Europe.

Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of The Japanese Empire in Asia 1868–1945 By Jonathan Clements. 351 pp. Rutland, VT, Tuttle Publishing, 2022.

Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of The Japanese Empire in Asia 1868–1945 By Jonathan Clements. 351 pp. Rutland, VT, Tuttle Publishing, 2022.

Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia: Introduction

Recent studies on the Portuguese empire in Asia during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have highlighted the role and relationships of resistance and sociability among women, children, and enslaved individuals in that context. Often tied to institutional histories, these themes are traditionally understood through the framework provided by legal restrictions and privileges. The studies gathered here aim to emphasize the stories of women, children, and enslaved individuals, incorporating perspectives that shed light on narratives of resistance, tactics, negotiations, solidarities, and disputes led by these agents in the Portuguese empire in Asia. This text serves as the introduction to the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th centuries, organized by the authors.

Spaces of Dis/Harmony in Colonial Goa. Lefebvre’s Spatial Dynamics and the Convent of Santa Mónica, 1606-1740

This paper explores the interplay of Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived spaces in the Real Convento de Santa Mónica, a nunnery located at the heart of the Portuguese Asian empire, in Goa, India. The sense of harmony produced by the conceived and perceived spaces, frameworks that produced a particular habitus among the nuns, which in turn facilitated congenial lived spaces that aligned with the nuns’ aspirations, was significantly disrupted by an external authority, the Archbishop of Goa Ignácio de Santa Teresa, in the early eighteenth century. The archbishop’s desire to curb the power of the Orders and elevate the local Goan ecclesiastical institutions had an unintended effect: it introduced a state of disharmony into the lived space of the nuns, and thus the dialectic between habitus and space led many nuns to experience the convent not as a place of calm and refuge, but rather as a prison. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Slavery, Family and Childhood in the Portuguese Diaspora in Southeast Asia, 16th-17th Centuries

The Portuguese communities in Asia were mainly concerned with maritime commerce, which required long periods on board. The families of most of these merchants resided on land, in cities such as Goa, Cochin, Malacca and Macao, and included numerous slaves of different geographical origins and ethnicities, also characterized by their young ages. This article examines the presence of enslaved children and youths in Portuguese last wills, which have been studied concerning the confraternities of Misericórdia of Porto and Macao, in a chronology that covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present approach aims to combine family history, childhood history, and history of law, in order to highlight the presence of enslaved children and youths as family members. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Kirishitan Women in Bondage Defying Persecution in Japan, 1625-1630

This article inspects cases of three Kirishitan (Christian) women servants in the Jesuit accounts of Shimabara, Japan, between 1625 and 1630, arguing that global and national changes resulted in the worsened enslaving conditions for servant-class women in Japan. The arrival of Portuguese traders and the Jesuit mission in the mid-sixteenth century, the Jesuits’ initial engagement in the slave trade, the ongoing civil wars, Japan’s invasion of Korea, the shogunate’s total ban of Christianity and Iberian commerce, and its consolidation of patriarchal structures by the 1640s accelerated the decline of women’s status. The sources, read in this context, show that under severe religious persecution, these women’s Kirishitan identity was crucial in their resistance to the multiple systems of oppression. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

State of forgiveness: Cooperation, conciliation, and state formation in Mughal South Asia (1556–1707)

AbstractThis paper contributes to a growing literature on state capacity with reference to the early modern Asian empires. The historiography of these states, and especially the Mughal empire of South Asia, has moved away from an image of unrestrained despotism towards that of a constrained state, but has yet to explore fully what these constraints were and what the state did to overcome them. Using a new dataset on conflicts in Mughal South Asia, and an analytical model, the paper shows how forgiving rebel leaders was used as a strategic tool to secure stability, in a setting where high information costs made intermediaries indispensable to the state. The paper also offers some comparison between Asian empires on the role of intermediaries in shaping state constraint and fiscal policies.

David Veevers. The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750.

David Veevers has written an original and stimulating work on the history of the English East India Company in South and Southeast Asia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book’s main arguments address the evergreen questions of when and how the East India Company established an empire in Asia. Veevers’s unequivocal answers are that the roots of empire are to be found long before the East India Company conquered significant territory in India during the 1750s and 1760s, which traditionally has been seen as the beginning of the company’s empire, and that the actions of the company’s agents, or servants, in Asia were much more significant in laying the groundwork for empire than political maneuverings, decisions, and events in London. Veevers divides his book into four parts of unequal length. The first part, “Weakness and Adaptation,” sets the stage for his arguments by examining the company’s early failures to establish successful trade settlements, or factories, on the island of Java and at Masulipatam and Armagon on the east coast of India. He notes the lack of corporate investment, the strength of the Dutch East India Company, and the inability of English servants in Asia to ingratiate themselves with local powers. Veevers then details how the Company’s servants adjusted their posture to local elites through intermarriage and the pursuit of private trade, with the result that more profitable business avenues were opened to the company. Veevers focuses on the founding of Madras to reinforce his point that real initiative and power shifted from London to the company’s servants in Madras who sustained the company’s trade through the cultivation of personal relationships with indigenous elites.

Presidential Succession in Russia: Political Cycles and Intra-Elite Conflicts

Abstract This article examines the issue of Putin’s presidential successor from a historical perspective of long-term political cycles. Contemporary Russia still shows considerable similarities to the polities, characteristic of old agrarian empires in Asia. Based on the thesis on the origins of the monocentric political system in Russia, our article analyses how the transition of presidential power takes place in Russia, who might be the next president of Russia and whether we will see a new ‘time of troubles’, or smuta, after Putin’s departure. A generational change in Putin’s elite cohort will require a specific candidate to ensure a successful transition as a long-term solution. This will involve balancing clashing interests between key informal power networks. In all likelihood, a repeat of a political cycle of empires will happen in Russia again, resulting in a continued consolidation of its monocentric political system.

Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters by Junko Thérèse Takeda

Reviewed by: Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters by Junko Thérèse Takeda Susan Mokhberi Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters. By junko thérèse takeda. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Recently scholars have turned their attention to the impact Asia, and especially Persia and the Ottoman Empire, made in France prior to Montesquieu's Persian Letters.1 Junko Takeda's timely book takes off from this point in the early eighteenth century arguing that Persia continued to make a strong impact in France, shaping economics, military technology, and politics from the pre-Revolutionary era to Napoleon. Takeda unearths a truly global Enlightenment era in which Frenchmen watched events in Persia and responded, revealing the commercial and intellectual intertwining of Asian and European Empires. Takeda's method advances the field of global history by taking a microhistorical approach. She relates accounts of unexpected characters including merchant-diplomats, former gambling-house Madams, Armenian envoys, and Enlightenment figures. The book uncovers how Persian and French relations advanced through the contributions of these various marginalized people from across the Mediterranean world, far from the halls of Versailles and revolutionary chambers. The diverse cast of figures negotiated treaties, dealt in arms and commercial exchange, and spread Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideas from Asia to France. Chapter one draws on Takeda's extensive knowledge of the commercial politics of Marseille, the subject of her first book. Here, she explores the rise of the Fabre family, a powerful merchant family in Marseille who had ties to Versailles. She explains how the French monarchy selected one of the Fabre family members, despite inadequate experience and more qualified candidates, to become the official envoy to the Safavid Shah in 1705. The French court "rewarded [End Page 149] loyalty over ingenuity, talent or even wealth," thereby leading to chaotic results. Chapter two traces the 1705 embassy of Jean-Baptiste Fabre to Persia and the woman who accompanied him, Marie Petit, a former Madam and woman of questionable repute. Her role in French-Persian relations was most famously laid out in the 1950s by historian Laurence Lockhart.2 The French sources, written by Petit's male opponents discredited her as a hindrance to politics and marked her as a symbol of disorder. Takeda teases out Marie Petit's voice and salvages her side of the story thereby raising Petit from a marginal, tarnished figure to a role of importance in international politics. Chapter three traces continued attempts to forge a treaty between France and Persia in the early eighteenth century. Individuals, including a rich Armenian merchant, spearheaded efforts to supply Persia with arms against the opponents that encircled the Safavid empire. Takeda highlights the personal tragedy and struggles such individuals underwent to shape international relations. For instance, the Armenian merchant was one of the wealthiest merchants in Yerevan when he embarked on his commercial and diplomatic quest to Europe. He became Persia's first consul to France but after surviving the plague in Marseille and thirteen years of difficulties, he died in Marseille in ruins. Chapter four connects Enlightenment ideas of Revolution to events in Asia. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others wrote about the turbulent transformations in government across Asia. Takeda carefully unpacks this vast Enlightenment literature on the political convulsions that shook Persia. In tune with the recent translation of Jürgen Osterhammel's essay on the impact of Nadir Shah, the Persian eighteenth-century conqueror who took over the weakened Safavid dynasty and established a vast but short-lived Asian empire, Takeda shows how discussions of Nadir Shah's rise and fall shaped the French conversation about revolution and notions of violence and human rights.3 Taking into account the vast literature on Persian revolutions, [End Page 150] Takeda convincingly shows that the causes of the French Revolution included discussions stretching from Persia and beyond, and therefore more global than previously imagined. Chapter five spotlights the oft-forgotten personality, dubbed the "other" Rousseau, Jean-François Rousseau, the cousin of Jean Baptiste. Raised in Persia, Jean-François was an advocate of the French Revolution and one of...

The Wu Region as Locality and as Empire

Abstract This essay uses the history of the Wu region in the first millennium ce to explore the relationship between locality and empire. Many major East Asian empires are considered to be “Chinese” and to have essentially similar characteristics which are largely independent of their local base. Recent work on the Jiankang Empire (third to sixth centuries ce, also known as the “southern dynasties”) has shown that it had an imperial culture which was quite different from Central Plains-based empires, and which is in part attributable to the distinctive culture of the local Wu region. The relationship can be further illustrated by linking those developments to evidence from the tenth century, when the Wu region again served as the core of a political regime with imperial pretentions.

Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870 by Albert Schrauwers

Reviewed by: Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870 by Albert Schrauwers G. Roger Knight Albert Schrauwers. Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870. New York: Berghahn, 2021. Merchant Kings is focused on an elite cadre of technocrats and their associates in government and business, something that Albert Schrauwers envisages as fusing colony and metropole into a single—in this instance Dutch—"corporate governmentality." It's an impressive and intriguing hypothesis, valuable not least for the way in which it draws attention, if not to the singularities of the Dutch empire, then at least to the dangers of conflating "empires" into an homogenous whole: clearly, the Heeren in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam set out to run their vast Asian empire on lines considerably at variance from that of the Gentleman of London, Manchester, and Glasgow. The spotlight it plays on its subject in this respect illuminates what are arguably some substantial contrasts—as well as comparable features. All in all, it is a thought-provoking essay in trying to make sense of the interwoven history—a single, unified history—of what it has become increasingly threadbare to term merely as "core" and "periphery." The Dutch empire in Asia, transformed in the middle of the last century into the Republic of Indonesia, has long attracted the attention of historians and others, above all on account of developments there during the middle decades of the nineteenth century on its centerpiece island of Java, far the most populous of the sprawling archipelagic territories that came to constitute what their colonial hegemon invariably referred to as "the Indies." It was there, in the shape of the Cultivation System (Dutch: Cultuurstelsel), that the colonial regime set about commandeering the land and labor of the island's peasantry for what became the highly profitable production of a "tropical" commodities for the world market, notably coffee, sugar, the dye-stuff indigo, and tobacco. In respect to the forging and intermeshing of commodity chains linking metropole and colony, however, a crucial development was the fact that Java's extensive population (there were already perhaps as many as nine million Indonesians living on the island c. 1850) provided a potentially lucrative market for the manufactures of the metropolitan country. It was here that—as Schrauwers's account emphasizes—the heavily state-backed Netherlands Trading Society or NHM, one of the key entities in the evolution of the corporate regime that he identifies as coming into existence c. 1830 onward, played a key role. For not only did it transport and sell in Amsterdam the agricultural staples produced under the aegis of the system and act as banker to the colonial government, while subsequently playing a role (somewhat exaggerated in this account) in the industrialization of Java's sugar manufacture: the NHM also acted to bring into existence a "complimentary" cotton goods manufacturing industry in the Netherlands itself, especially in the "cheap labor" northeastern parts of the country. The potential for an integrative analysis of the Dutch empire overseas with that of the empire at home, of course, was not lost on an earlier generation of scholars: Leiden professor Cees Fasseur, albeit from a potentially very different historical perspective from that of the book currently under review, might well have done so—building on series of publications beginning in the mid-1970s—had he not been deflected into the writing [End Page 233] of a warmly received two-volume biography of the twentieth century Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. More recently, Exploring the Dutch Empire (ed. Antunes and Gommans, 2015) held out further early promise in that direction, but important work by historians writing in Dutch (as largely dictated by their funding bodies) on the imperial agents central to the Cultivation System, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch (Sens 2019) and the state-backed Netherlands Trading Society of NHM (De Graaf 2012), has remained untranslated and hence unavailable to the academic community in general. In short, Schrauwers is filling an important gap for Anglophone readers, but he is doing much more than that. The organic connection that he sets out to demonstrate—one between metropole and colony—begins with Van den Bosch...

Een Indië van papier

This article traces the career of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East Indies, 1724-1726) by François Valentyn during the nineteenth century. Valentyn’s multivolume work on the Dutch East India Company’s trading area continued to be used until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Dutch colonial empire in Asia was reduced to the Indonesian archipelago. During this period, it served as an important frame of reference for the development of the colonial policy in the East Indies and as a source of inspiration for new publications on colonial Indonesia in the Netherlands. It only lost its value when more up-to-date works were published and reservations about the way the work was written increased, such as the unsatisfactory manner in which the information it contained was accounted for.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Dealing in Debt: The Role of Credit in Early Sino–U.S. Trade

This essay explores the development of Sino–U.S. commercial and arbitration practices that grew out of credit transactions and operated in relation to, but distinct from, the greater Canton system that primarily served Beijing and London. Without dismissing the importance of silver and Pacific trade goods to early Sino–U.S. trade, this essay traces the financializing trade practices and emerging regulatory strategies that rose alongside the traffic in specie and commodities. Chinese merchants who traded with foreigners at Canton became increasingly eager for U.S. specie payments as China’s imperial policies as well as Britain- and India-based traders siphoned silver away from Canton. The eagerness for American specie remittances coupled with the relationships cultivated by resident American agents like John Perkins Cushing led Chinese merchants to increasingly trade with Americans on credit. Credit transactions facilitated the expansion of Sino–U.S. trade, the movement of opium, and the entry of Chinese merchants into Atlantic commodity and capital markets. Credit transactions also presented the problem of how to enforce payment and collect bad debts. Whenever the informal personal networks they had forged to secure credit relationships proved insufficient, merchants on both sides of the globe looked to U.S. legal institutions to mediate commercial disputes. Thus, even as the silver U.S. traders supplied in Canton worked to integrate Americans more firmly into Britain’s commercial empire in Asia, credit transactions and formal and informal dispute resolutions arising therefrom carved out separate avenues of direct Sino–U.S. exchange that were of mutual interest.

David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2020

Article David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2020 was published on February 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 314, issue 1).

Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams Mark Sabine Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). xxiv + 386 pages. Print and ebook. The responsibility shouldered by contributors to Liverpool University Press's Transnational Modern Languages series should not be underestimated. By gathering a multi-perspectival corpus of scholarship on cultural traffic that focuses on the permeability of borders, and acknowledges the multi-layered and intersectional nature of purportedly unitary ethnic identities, the series hastens the overdue embedding of the 'transnational turn' in a discipline founded—like it or not—in the epistemology of cultural nationalisms and colonialism. As Hilary Owen and Claire Williams assert in their cogent introduction to this volume, the challenge that transnational research methodologies present to the 'conflation of language, territory and identity' upon which the study of Modern Languages was originally predicated offers 'a transformative means of re-thinking' the pedagogic, social and political agency of the modern linguist (p. 5). It offers this, one might add, at a time when the value of a multilingual practice of scholarship, and of cultural analysis more generally, is increasingly scorned or contested. The current 'boom' in transnational enquiry responds to and informs both contestation of the hegemony of Eurocentric and often racist models of research and cultural value, and the demands of an increasingly multipolar world order. The studies Owen and Williams have gathered justify their contention that research subsumed under the rubric of Portuguese or Lusophone Studies offers especially 'powerful and engaging possibilities' for 'Modern Languages as transnational cultural enquiry' (p. 6). Portuguese Studies' status as a discipline has been determined by the language's global diffusion—centuries before the age of nationalism—and by its historical and geographical proximity to Spanish. Consequently, it has long presented as 'always already requiring a multiply-hyphenated "transcultural" and "transnational" methodology' (p. 7), even as its practitioners have, paradoxically, claimed a discrete 'national-looking' language base, so as to resist conflation with Spanish, or 'Hispanic', Studies. [End Page 99] Moreover, for some decades, historians examining Portugal's colonial expansion have foregrounded how that project's fragility—in the face first of established African and Asian empires, and later of ascendant European rivals—often engendered intricate repartitions of economic and political power that, in turn, brought forth new or hybridized cultural practices and identities. If Portuguese Studies' longstanding examination, and frequent celebration, of hybridities and transculturation qualifies it to offer leadership to sibling Modern Language disciplines, however, its practitioners also need to confront the legacy, in Portugal and elsewhere, of a 'dynamics of ignorance' about all things extra-national promoted by isolationist authoritarian regimes, as Ellen W. Sapega notes (p. 223) in a timely and meticulous study of Portuguese memorialization of the Second World War. They need also acknowledge—as Anna Klobucka's reading of Gilberto Freyre's quasi-anthropological travelogue Aventura e Rotina reminds us (pp. 50–56)—how imperialist, racist and (European) male-supremacist preconceptions and metanarratives often linger within the purview of linguistic and cultural scholarship, even when scholars identify Lusophone communities as inherently transculturated, and their task as inherently translational. Of the volume's four themed sections—'Spatiality', 'Language', 'Temporality' and 'Subjectivity'—the first two present transnational approaches to their titular concepts that are particularly effective for countering imperialist or exceptionalist narratives of a 'Portuguese-speaking world'. Zoltán Biedermann's 'Global Navigations and the Challenge of World-Making' opens up the ideological loading of 'unquestioned […] spatial notions' (p. 24)—'territory', 'nation', 'expansion'—that have long underpinned representations of Portugal's imperial enterprise as a 'linear process of diffusionist-cum-universalist power-building' (p. 40). Biedermann's call for an excavation and acknowledgment of early-modern Portuguese subjects' attraction to and interaction with 'powerful, prosperous and self-confident' extra-European cultural centres (ibid.), and the substantial input of these into the cultures and praxis of colonial and postcolonial world systems, is echoed in José Lingna Nafafé and Toby Green's fascinating critique of the concept of lusofonia, tracing the roots of an instrumentalization of language for imperialist ends back to the writings of Padre António Vieira, but revealing the extent...