Asian History

This book is a study of the political and economic activities of an important group of British businessmen in India between 1850 and 1960. Though denounced by Indian nationalists as the economic arm of the British Raj, the firms of these ‘Managing Agents’ seemed unassailable before the First World War. However, during the inter-war period they rapidly lost their commanding position to both Indian and other foreign competitors. The author argues that the failure of these firms was, in part, the consequence of their particular (and ultimately self-defeating) attitudes towards business, politics, and race. She casts new light on British colonial society in India, and makes an important contribution to current debates on the nature of the British Empire and the causes of Britain’s relative economic decline.

For the most of the twentieth century, the country of Vietnam has served as a symbol of the bipolar system of rival ideological blocs that characterized the Cold War. As the conflict over communism waned in the 1980s, Vietnam faced the tough task of remaking itself as nation in the eyes of its people and of the world. This book chronicles the evolution of the Vietnamese state as we know it today. With the collapse of communist regimes in Europe, Vietnam witnessed the dissolution of the cornerstone of its policies toward the outside world. Fearing that a full commitment to deep integration in a globalizing world would lead to the collapse of their own current political system, the Vietnamese political elite made slow, cautious steps to involvement with the larger international community. By the year 2000, however, Vietnam had “taken the plunge” and opted for greater participation in the global economic system, leading to its membership in the World Trade Organization in 2006. This book illustrates that the politicians who took a limited approach to international involvement ultimately had condemned Vietnam to a permanent state of underdevelopment. It is only at the turn of the twenty-first century when the Vietnamese state began to relax its policies toward the international community that the nation began to experience a period of revitalization. Remarkably, these changes have happened without Vietnam losing its unique political identity as many had expected. It remains an authoritarian state, but offers far more breathing space to its citizens than in pre-reform era. Far from leading the nation to be absorbed into a Western-inspired development model, globalization has led to a complex domestic diversification and localization that has reinforced Vietnam's distinctive identity rather than obliterating it. The culmination of decades of research and cultural exchange, this book documents the unique story of the birth of a nation amidst the challenges of the post-Cold War era.

Between 1894 and 1905 the question of the Chinese Empire's future development, its survival even, was the most pressing overseas problem facing the Great Powers. The China Question had the most profound implications for the Powers. Since China's defeat by Japan in 1894–5, the country's complete disintegration was widely anticipated. Fuelling imperial rivalries, a wider Great Power conflict in the event of China's implosion, seemed to be on the cards. At times, that prospect seemed very real. Crucially, the prospect of China's break-up and of large–scale international conflict in its wake altered the configuration among the Great Powers. Instability in the Far East had ramifications beyond the confines of the region; and, as this study shows, with the events of 1894–5 began a wider transformation of international politics. No Power was more affected by these changes than Britain. The ‘China Question’ provides an ideal prism for the study of the problems of late 19th-century British world policy. This study seeks to break new ground by adopting a deliberately global approach, emphasizing the connections between European and overseas developments, and by encompassing diplomatic, commercial, financial, and strategic factors as well as the politics of foreign policy. The notion of a British policy of ‘splendid isolation’, usually associated with the person of Lord Salisbury, Britain's prime minister and foreign secretary at the time, is the chief focus of this study. Controversially, the book concludes that, while ‘isolation’ was reaffirmed at the end of the Russo–Japanese War, this apparent success helped to undermine its continued justification.

This overview of China's development since Mao's death in 1976 has been expanded for the new edition to take into account changes of recent years. Special attention is paid in this edition to recent student protests; the social effects of Deng Xiaoping's “capitalistic” reforms; the cultural impact of the Open Door policy; and the evolving relations between Taiwan and mainland China. The book includes a postscript on the demonstrations at Tian–an–men Square and the crackdown of June 3–4 1989, along with an analysis of the social and political effects of these events.

This book offers a complete, archive-based account of the relationship between China and the British Left, from the rise of modern Chinese nationalism to the death of Mao Tse tung. Beginning with the ‘Hands Off China’ movement of the mid-1920s, the book charts the mobilisation of British opinion in defence of China against Japanese aggression, 1931–45, and the role of the British left in relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. It shows how this relationship was placed under stress by the growing unpredictability of Communist China, above all by the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Cultural Revolution, which meant that by the 1960s China was actively supported only by a dwindling group of enthusiasts. The impact of the suppression of the student protests in Tiananmen Square (June 1989) is addressed as an epilogue. This book argues that the significance of the left's relationship with China has been unjustly overlooked. There were many occasions, such as the mid-1920s, the late 1930s and the early 1950s, when China demanded the full attention of the British left. The book also argues that there is nothing new in the current fascination with China's emergence as an economic power. Throughout these decades the British left was aware of the immense, unrealised potential of the Chinese economy, and of how China's economic growth could transform the world. In addition to analysing the role of the political parties and pressure groups of the left, the book sheds new light on the activities of many well-known figures in support of China, including intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, R H Tawney and Joseph Needham. Many other interesting stories emerge, concerning less well-known figures, which show the complexity of personal links between Britain and China during the 20th century. The book is based on many fascinating new archival sources, as well as a close reading of the left-wing press.

This book reopens the question of consular jurisdiction and extraterritoriality in China and Japan. The book combines recent findings in Qing history on the nature of ethnicity and law with the history of the treaty ports in both China and Japan, especially Shanghai, Yokohama, and Nagasaki. Extraterritoriality was not implanted into East Asia as a ready-made product but developed in a dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions, which are best understood within the complex triangular relationship between China, Japan and the West. A close reading of treaty texts and other relevant documents suggests that a Qing institution for the adjudication for Manchu-Chinese disputes served as the model for both the International Mixed Court in Shanghai and the extraterritorial arrangements in Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in 1871. The adaptability of Qing legal procedure provided for a relatively seamless transition into the treaty port era, which would have momentous consequences for China’s national sovereignty in the twentieth century. There was no parallel to this development in the Japanese case. Instead, Japanese authorities chose not to integrate consular courts and mixed courts into the indigenous legal order, and as a consequence, consular jurisdiction remained an alien body in the Japanese state, and Japanese policymakers were determined to keep it that way.

This book begins with two simple questions: Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? And what can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China, and, more broadly, about the historical development of the universal subject of modernity? Insofar as it responds to those questions, this book is a history of the Western imagination. But it is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, the explosion in international commerce that dates from the 18th century and goes by the name of “globalization,” the theories of human rights, and the history of the idea of modernity. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the latter would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples (including medical case reports, photographs, novels, paintings, and travellers' reports) in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. The representational and historical apparatus that produces these examples has organized the West's explicit relation to China and served as a crucial mode of expression for the West's most fundamental values.

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The chapters here address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China. This critical biography tells the story of his remarkable life, one that bridged Counter‐Reformation Catholic Europe and China under the Ming dynasty. Using Chinese and western sources, Hsia follows the life of Ricci from his childhood in Macerata, through his education in Rome, to his sojourn in Portuguese India, before embarking on the long journey of self‐discovery and cultural encounter in the Ming realm. Along the way, we glimpse the workings of the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia, the mission of the Society of Jesus, and life in the European enclave of Macau on the Chinese coast. The book offers sketches of Ricci's fellow Jesuits and portraits of Chinese mandarins, who formed networks indispensible for Ricci's success. Examining new sources, Hsia offers new information and insight into Ricci's long period of trial and frustration in Guangdong province, where he first appeared in the persona of a foreign Buddhist monk. After 12 years in China, Ricci achieved in 1595 the crucial breakthrough in his career. Ricci's move to Nanchang enabled him to engage in sustained intellectual conversation with a leading Confucian scholar and consequently, to find a synthesis between Christianity and Confucianism in propagating the Gospels in China. With his expertise in cartography, mathematics and astronomy, Ricci quickly won recognition, especially after he had settled in Nanjing in 1598. As his reputation and friendships grew, Ricci launched into a sharp polemic against Buddhism, while his career took its crowning achievement in the imperial capital of Beijing. The life, work, and legacy of Ricci is alive today, as the author reflects on a century of Ricci scholarship and commemoration.

Sir William Jones (1746–94), poet, philologist, polymath, polyglot, and acknowledged legislator was the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time. He re–drew the map of European thought. ‘Orientalist’ Jones was an extraordinary man and an intensely colourful figure. At the age of twenty–six, Jones was elected to Dr Johnson’s Literary Club, on terms of intimacy with the metropolitan luminaries of the day. The names of his friends in Britain and India presents a roll–call of late eighteenth–century glitterati: Johnson, Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Craven, Boswell, Reynolds, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth Vesey, Elizabeth Montagu, Franklin, Price, Priestley, Burke, Hastings, Zoffany, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Percy, Sheridan, Fox, Pitt, Wilkes, Warton, Garrick, etc.. In Bengal his Sanskrit researches marked the beginning of Indo–European comparative grammar, and modern comparative–historical linguistics, of Indology, and the disciplines of comparative literature, philology, mythology, and law. He did more than any other writer to destroy Eurocentric prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient. Jones’s remarkable career embodies a reverse transculturation in suggesting that enlightened tolerance was Asia’s gift to Europe. His commitment to the translation of culture, a multiculturalism fascinated as much by similitude as difference, profoundly influenced European and British Romanticism, offering the West disconcerting new relationships and disorienting orientations. Jones’s translation of Śakuntalā (1789) accomplished Oriental renaissance in the West and cultural revolution in India. William Jones is remembered with great affection throughout the subcontinent as a man who facilitated India’s cultural assimilation into the modern world, helping to build India’s future on the immensity, sophistication, and pluralism of its past.