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

Review “This volume reminds us that global history is comprised of the activities and experiences of individuals whose own lives are deeply connected to places, families, and people they encounter. Through personal letters, eyewitness narratives, and historical analysis, Chronicling Westerners joins expatriats' ordinary expression of day-to-day concerns with vivid accounts of their extraordinary activities and experiences in nineteenth-century maritime East Asia to demonstrate how the spread of capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism both fostered opportunity and wrought violence and death. Highly recommended.” ―Catherine L. Phipps, Associate Professor, University of Memphis, USA Product Description 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. About the Author Robert S.G. Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Institute Professor of British History at University of Missouri, USA. He is the author of British Imperialism and 'The Tribal Question': Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (2015) and The Ghost of Namamugi (2019).Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, U