East Asia in Global Perspective: Transnational Movement and Exchange in the Age of Empire, c.1850-1950
The conclusion of the so-called “unequal treaties” between Euro-American powers and East Asian states brought a growing number of foreigners to China, Korea and Japan. Treaty ports and foreign settlements such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Harbin, Jemulpo, Nagasaki, Kobe and Yokohama, as well as the British colony of Hong Kong and the German lease of Jiaozhou, developed into lively trading centres. The rise of Japanese imperialism in Korea and Taiwan added a further dimension from the late nineteenth century on. Competition, cooperation and conflict between different imperial and national projects found expression in multiple ways. This conference provides a forum to discuss the social, political and cultural implications of the Japanese and Euro-American colonial presence in East Asia from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War.
With a strong focus on the cultural interactions and exchanges between imperial powers and East Asian societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we welcome different disciplinary approaches that explore both formal and informal manifestations of empire, the legacy and afterlives of the Japanese and Euro-American presence in East Asia, as well as the different ways in which empire was reconstituted and colonial relationships reconfigured in the early post-war decolonization period.
We are particularly interested in papers that address the multiple forms of cooperation and competition that existed between different imperial and national visions in colonial East Asia, as well as the imbrications or comparisons between the Japanese and Euro-American powers themselves. However, proposals that examine only one of these nations in China, Korea or Japan will also be considered. Papers can explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Competing visions of different imperial projects
- Foreign education, curricula, and international schooling
- Clubs, sport associations and other social/cultural institutions
- Expatriate communities, popular culture and associational life
- Trade networks, commercial links and the business world
- Foreign literary culture: popular reading, travel writing, theatre and drama
- Colonial print, visual and material culture: exhibitions, fairs, museums and libraries
- Missionary life, religious activity and spiritual culture
- International broadcasting, mass media, and the foreignlanguage press
- Cultures of intellectual ‘improvement’ and exclusion based on race, class or gender
- Influence of women, working class expatriates, indigenous and minority groups
- Public health, western medicine and the colonial environment
- Legal and administrative cultures
- Colonial and imperial identities: expressions of national and transnational belonging
- Science, technology and the pursuit of colonial knowledge