Part

2025-10-01

Treaty-making was integral to European imperialism and colonialism in the early modern period. Europeans did not seek to enter into equal treaties with indigenous rulers or peoples, but to conclude agreements that advanced their own claims to trade and/or territory. Two case studies – the Banda Islands and the Hudson Valley in the seventeenth century – serve to illustrate this point. Of course, the extent to which Europeans achieved their aims depended on local power constellations in Africa, Asia or the Americas, and the diplomatic fallout back in Europe. Still, in a world of endemic violence, treaty and alliance making were essential preparations for the next round of warfare and, thus, empire-building.

How Not to Possess an Island: Pitcairn and the Legal Circuits of British Empire in the Pacific World

Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales (English edition) · 2025-04-29

Abstracts Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty . British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each attached to a particular timeline, about how Pitcairn became British. One prominent view is that a single British navy captain took possession of the island in 1838. We challenge this and other prevailing accounts by showing how repeated reconfigurations of island-imperial connections kept Pitcairn from being either enfolded into the empire or established as an independent entity. Intermittent visits by British naval officers gradually constituted a makeshift legal system, while rival factions of islanders steered imperial agents to support local schemes, including bids for island rule. For a century and a half, these processes held Pitcairn on the threshold of the empire. The significance of the narrative recounted here extends beyond one small island. This microhistory illustrates broad processes of interpolity ordering and locates the origins of sovereign indeterminacy in the “legal circuitry” of nineteenth-century empire.

Commodities and Power: Tracking Europe's Relations With Asia in the Classroom

History Compass · 2025-03-01

ABSTRACT From their high point in the early 2000s, commodity histories seem to be in decline. If the publishing world has retreated, it is also the case that teaching with commodities has never been more rewarding. For the past few years, I have been experimenting with different variants of a class that aims to use recent scholarship on a half dozen commodities not to track their long trajectories across time but rather to help students work through one of the great questions of global history: the changing relationship between Europe and Asia across the period from roughly 1500–1900. Looking at everyday commodities provides a more concrete way to consider this question, revealing how Asian or European consumers who never ventured far from home participated in a global shift with enormous consequences. In this brief historiographical essay, I explore a selection of works examining six different commodities—silver, spices, deerskins, porcelain, tea and opium—that provide a clear sense of shifting relations between Europe and Asia across the early modern period.

Part

2025-10-01

The west coast of India and the east coast of Africa were linked through an exchange of cotton textiles for ivory. This trade was instrumental in the rise of Surat as a trading centre. Scholars have debated when the commercial centre of northwest India shifted from Surat to Bombay, with dates ranging from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that Surat remained an important commercial entrepôt well into the nineteenth century because indigenous patterns of trade and consumption of ivory were tenacious and not easily altered by British attempts to shift activity to Bombay.

L’art de ne pas posséder une île

Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales · 2024-12-01

Les historiens ont fait preuve d’une étonnante indifférence à l’égard des dimensions juridiques de l’« empire informel ». Cet article montre que les pratiques juridiques ont en réalité créé et soutenu une indétermination de souveraineté. Nous nous intéressons à Pitcairn, une petite île isolée du Pacifique, peuplée en 1789 par une poignée de Britanniques et de Tahitiens après la mutinerie du Bounty . Administrateurs britanniques, professionnels du droit, voyageurs et historiens ont avancé un enchevêtrement de revendications, chacune liée à une chronologie particulière, sur la manière dont Pitcairn est devenue britannique. Une des thèses qui ressort de ces controverses est qu’un capitaine de la marine britannique aurait pris possession de l’île en 1838. Nous remettons en question cette version ainsi que d’autres récits prédominants en montrant comment les multiples reconfigurations des liens entre l’île et l’empire ont non seulement empêché la première d’être absorbée dans le second, mais également de devenir une entité indépendante. Les visites intermittentes des officiers de la marine britannique ont progressivement constitué un système juridique improvisé, tandis que des factions rivales parmi les habitants de l’île ont orienté les agents impériaux dans le soutien de projets locaux, y compris des tentatives de prise de pouvoir sur l’île. Pendant un siècle et demi, ces processus ont maintenu Pitcairn au seuil de l’empire. La portée de cette histoire dépasse largement le cas de ce minuscule territoire. En nous appuyant sur une étude micro-historique de Pitcairn afin d’éclairer plus largement l’agencement des relations entre entités politiques, nous montrerons que cette souveraineté indécise a pour origine ce que nous proposons d’appeler les « circuits juridiques » de l’empire au xix e siècle.

Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives

The Journal of Asian Studies · 2024 · 15 citations

• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Political Science

Stephen Roach has written a fascinating and important study that should be required reading for policymakers, journalists, CEOs, students, and anyone interested in this critical relationship. Accidental Conflict:America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives is a dense book backed up by an abundance of evidence but one that is also strikingly well written, punctuated by intriguing claims, and underpinned by a powerful argument that courses through every page.This is a complex book with a straightforward argument. The United States and China blame each other for problems that are largely structural and of their own creation. Roach returns again and again to a crucial point: nations like the United States that have low domestic savings need money, so they “borrow surplus saving from abroad in order to invest and grow” (306). This means that the United States runs not one bilateral deficit with China but rather dozens—in fact, 106 bilateral deficits in 2021. Because of this basic fact, targeting China or painting it as a uniquely bad actor cannot fix the problem of the United States’ “increasingly insidious macroeconomic imbalances” (95). But China is, of course, an easy target, and it is much easier to pin America's expanding deficits on one geopolitical villain than it is to take painful action to reorient these imbalances.Accidental Conflict aims to counter false narratives on both sides, but it is most successful when digging into the disconnect between accusation and fact on the US end. Perhaps the strongest section of the book deals with the 2018 “Section 301” complaint alleging massive Chinese malpractice in trade that was authored by the Office of the US Trade Representative and pushed especially by Robert Lighthizer. Through a forensic analysis often of individual footnotes, Roach takes us into the sometimes stunningly meager evidence at the heart of the complaint. One example is the accusation of unprecedented intellectual property theft, which proves to be based on assumptions that when pushed into dubious formulas spew out huge numbers. On page after page, Roach walks us through the “shaky evidence and flawed analytics” used to build the case against China.My particular interest in this book comes from two places. First, how do current complaints against China mirror the language used against Japan, my own area of interest, in the 1980s when so-called “Japan-bashing” was a recurring feature of US politics? As Roach shows, they are essentially parallel, borrowing similar logic and language and sometimes featuring the same cast of trade warriors, including Robert Lighthizer, who returns for a second act. Although this is not a book about Japan, it is extremely helpful in illuminating the changing trajectory of the US-Japan relationship.Second, how do these “false narratives” fit along an even longer trajectory? My own work looks at the Dutch East India Company, which emerged as the most powerful European overseas enterprise in the seventeenth century and had a long and contentious relationship with Chinese states. Some four decades ago, Leonard Blussé, a historian of the company and China, wrote a groundbreaking article focused on how false constructs powered conflict. In Blussé’s words, “In times of tension and conflict when mutual understanding between the two parties is lacking,” the result is inevitable: “scorn, hate, fear, or surprise will be given free rein.” Company officials insisted that their quest for free trade and equal economic relations was constantly thwarted by China, which they described as a “perjured, traitorous, perfidious, timorous and mendacious nation that is not to be equalled in this world.”1 Roach shows how little has changed, and some of the most incendiary language used by Dutch officials would not be out of place in US complaints about Chinese trade.Roach's analysis of the Chinese side is less effective but still illuminating. He takes aims at Beijing's sprawling censorship regime, which “enables a profusion of false narratives that distort Chinese impressions of the United States” (168). Just like their counterparts in the United States, Chinese policymakers confront profound structural issues, most notably the rebalancing of the economy toward domestic consumers. When these prove difficult to solve, it is far easier to shift attention to an external villain. In both cases, the “politics of blame” are a siren song not easily resisted (276).This is a big, bold book that is capable of speaking to different audiences, but its sprawling scope opens up gaps. There is, for example, very little about the people actually trapped within these false narratives. Examples include a whole cohort of international students from China whose genuine desire to learn and advance their careers is caught up in a wider political narrative, or Chinese immigrants to the United States, who, as they struggle along a long path to citizenship created by the demands of a uniquely labyrinthine immigration system, find themselves potentially targeted by state bans on Chinese landownership. The possible conflict looming on the horizon should horrify us, but we should not forget the human consequences playing out right now. To his credit, Roach has as one of his remedies for this clash of false narratives a suggestion to reopen shuttered consulates, make the process of applying for visas easier, and restart exchange opportunities. As someone who became a Japan specialist precisely because the Japanese government invested in supporting international students, I couldn't agree more. More and not less exchange offers one way out of this clash.Roach also shifts uneasily between a wider view that structural imbalances create false narratives and a far more focused critique of one man, Xi Jinping, whose unprecedented centralization of power has made him a very different Chinese leader. As Roach willingly concedes, the “clash with the United States may indeed be more about Xi Jinping than about China” (274). If so, then far more of the book's four-hundred-plus pages should be devoted this figure and the forces that shaped him. At times, Roach seems as well to dismiss too readily the vast implications of China's looming demographic crisis. While there are different scenarios, all suggest a dramatic drop-off in population and a series of connected issues resulting from this decline. And just like Japan, China will find it difficult if not impossible to arrest these declines by increasing birth rates or encouraging immigration.Finally, the book both benefits and is constrained by its narrow focus on the United States and China, even though such false narratives are certainly present in other bilateral relations. One thinks, for example, of James Curran's recent book, which charts the move “from euphoria to fear” in relations between Australia and China, and which covers similar ground in a different context.2None of these points should, however, detract from Roach's monumental study. Roach's framing is powerful and effective, his warnings are important, and his prescriptions are admirable. We may be trapped in a depressingly familiar cycle, but Accidental Conflict:America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives has done a huge service in helping us understand it better.

International Economy and Japan at the Dawn of the Early Modern Era

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-23

In the early modern period, Japan emerged as a key node in global trading networks. While a vast range of goods were traded, Japan’s position was underpinned by the silk-for-silver exchange that acted as a powerful magnet for foreign merchants. This chapter aims to situate Japan within global trade by exploring the underlying commercial dynamic that drove engagement and the crowded commercial landscape that emerged as a result. The focus is, first, on successive challengers including the Portuguese, shuinsen merchants, the Dutch, the English, and the Chinese and, second, on Tokugawa attempts to channel trade through sanctioned pathways while cutting links with any group that might inject volatility into a precariously balanced system. The chapter concludes by examining the Zheng maritime organization, which emerged to challenge the Dutch East India Company for control over trade routes in East and Southeast Asia.

Long-Distance Japanese Trade in the Early Modern Era

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-12

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

From Shōgun to Ghost of Tsushima : Using and Challenging Historical Video Games

Journal of Japanese Studies · 2023-06-01 · 1 citations

Abstract: In 1975, James Clavell's Shōgun rocketed up the bestseller lists. While many historians criticized the novel for distorting the past, others argued that we should recognize its value as a conduit for engagement with Japan. The contemporary equivalent to Shōgun is a 2020 video game called Ghost of Tsushima which has now sold over 10 million copies. This article considers how the creators of Ghost of Tsushima view their responsibility to history. It then discusses the reductive Mongol-versus-samurai binary at the center of the game before shifting to explore the surprising depths of the world created by the developers.

Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics

Law and History Review · 2023-06-01 · 2 citations

Abstract Challenging the common assumption that legal misunderstanding was pervasive, this article analyzes jurisdictional politics as an element of “interpolity law”—a broad framework for legal interactions across polities and regions in the early modern world. It draws on recent research on jurisdictional politics to show how such an approach allows historians to avoid some of the familiar pitfalls associated with studies of legal pluralism. This approach provides clear methodological advantages over the study of global legal history as a function of multi-normativity. Political communities across the globe centered on internal and external conflicts on the nature and reach of legal authority. By focusing on jurisdiction as a touchstone of legal action and tracing how legal authority was produced through conflict, our approach treats legal pluralism as a valuable descriptive term rather than an analytical framework. The study of jurisdictional politics portrays state authority as potentially one among many forms of legal authority, and it brings into sharp focus continuities within and across pluri-political regions. By tracking broad institutional shifts that occurred when empires and states moved to assert power over multi-jurisdictional orders, the perspective informs new narratives about trajectories of regional and global legal order.