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The China of Tomorrow: Japan and the Limits of Victorian Expansion.
The China of Tomorrow: Japan and the Limits of Victorian Expansion.
- Source :
-
Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History . Oct2019, Vol. 47 Issue 5, p851-883. 33p. - Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- This article contributes to the literature on the mechanisms, rhetoric, and limits of mid-Victorian expansion by asking how far late Tokugawa Japan was subject to forms of British imperialism. In September 1862 a British merchant was murdered on the high road between Edo and Kyoto; a year later, a British fleet bombarded Kagoshima in retaliation. By engaging with John Darwin's concept of the 'bridgehead', this article examines the circumstances in which a lonely death on the frontiers of British commerce could be transformed into a Victorian 'outrage'. It considers what we stand to gain by bringing an imperial history perspective to bear on what remains, for most imperial historians, a largely forgotten conflict. In positing Yokohama as a bridgehead that could gain only fitful purchase in London, it asks new questions about the conduct of 'gunboat diplomacy' and the fault lines of mid-Victorian expansion; the place of Japan in British political imaginaries; the nature of informal empire; and the discourses buffeting British expansion in the turbulent 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *IMPERIALISM
*GUNBOATS
JAPAN-United States relations
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 03086534
- Volume :
- 47
- Issue :
- 5
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 139413654
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1677338