The project to install a permanent naval station on the South American shores of the Pacific attracted the consensus of Spain's political-intellectual, military, and diplomatic elites during the reign of Isabel II(1844-1868). This article reconstructs the constellation of strategic, economic, legal, and political arguments used by the Spanish monarchy's diplomatic agents to support the need to station warships in its former Pacific dominions. It also identifies these agents' socioeconomic coordinates, networks, and interests, evaluating the factual consequences of their attempts to create the station. We will argue that Spanish political elites conceived the naval station as a critical element in the new repertoire of instruments of power necessary for configuring a "second Spanish empire" based on the ideological postulates of navalism, pan-Hispanism, and the imperialism of free trade. This case study allows us to make some theoretical contributions to understanding the crucial functions that naval stations performed as elements of imperial power in the nineteenth century.
This article analyzes the importance of Korean skilled workers in Japan during and after the East Asian War of 1592-1598. By tracing the story of the Korean Pak Hoin and his descendants, this article demonstrates the close relationship between domains and migrants. In doing so, it demonstrates that migrants were not only widespread throughout early Tokugawa Japan, but also that their experiences were highly varied. By placing Hoin's experience next to that of other Korean migrants, this article identifies some of the factors that influenced migrant experiences and the varying impact they had on their local environments.
This article explores the dynamic development of the Federation of British trade-political interests in technology and engineering. It argues that the tural initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s-advancing cultural diplomacy while a multi-perspective approach that combines institutional analysis and biographical research, the article moves beyond traditional narratives of modernization, patriotism, and Sino-British friendship to uncover key tensions within in foreign manufacturing exports, the mismatch between Chinese engineering resourcing in cultural diplomacy, and Chinese engineers' frustrations under exchanges in the twentieth century.
This article examines the 1932 Hongkou Park Bombing Incident in Shanghai as a critical episode of anti-colonial resistance that reveals the entangled dynamics of empire, nationalism, and global political activism in the interwar period. Despite its historical significance, the incident remains relatively understudied in English-language scholarship. This article addresses that gap by situating the bombing within the distinctive urban setting of interwar Shanghai. Drawing on multilingual archival sources and press coverage, this study shows how the bombing incident catalyzed a range of responses: it exposed the contradictions of British imperial strategy, prompted Franco-Japanese collaboration in colonial policing, and deepened covert support from the Chinese Nationalist Government. This article argues that the Hongkou Incident not only brought into sharp relief existing power differentials but also served as a catalyst for renegotiating power relations and modes of interaction among agents of multiple empires and local Chinese authorities in the city of Shanghai. In doing so, it contributes to global historiographies of anti-colonialism by demonstrating how interwar Shanghai functioned not only as a site of colonial governance and repression but also as a crucible of trans-Asian political mobilization and media discourse.
This article explores emergent radical political discourse in East Asia driven, at least partially, by regionalized national socialism, which was one of the two most influential revolutionary ideologies, alongside communism, in the early twentieth-century world. Despite a wealth of scholarship about national struggles and communist movements in the political radicalization of East Asia from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, it is still difficult to understand the role national socialism played in this radicalization, as seen in the ascendance of Kita Ikki and Zeng Qi, the two leading national socialists in Japan and China in this era. By comparing Kita's and Zeng's transformative ideas, this article documents radical discursive changes.
In recent years, historians have increasingly drawn attention to the myriad weaknesses that plagued colonial empires during the second half of the nineteenth century. One of these shortcomings was the ease with which contraband traversed their borders. In this regard, environmental knowledge has been highlighted as critical in helping smugglers to skirt attempts at regulation and repression. The challenges faced by these smugglers, however, have received less attention. Using gunrunning in the Arabian Sea as an analytical lens, the following article contends that smuggling networks evolved in response to environmental vulnerabilities as much as advantages. Topography, seasonality, and climate all imposed spatial and temporal constraints on gunrunning operations. In turn, these pressures influenced how imperial authority was contested and upheld along colonial frontiers.
This article analyzes the impact of genetics on colonial agriculture in the British Empire, examining two case studies of cotton breeding in early twentiethcentury Egypt and Uganda. Scholars have long been skeptical that genetics had any immediate impact on plant breeding. I argue that such skepticism is justified. Genetics made little practical difference to cotton breeding in the first decade of the twentieth century. Colonial administrators and agriculturalists in this period were concerned with longstanding biological problems rooted in persistent social and economic anxieties: notably the degeneration of plants and varietal mixing. In the early 1900s, colonial officials implemented programs of seed selection and-most dramatically-the complete destruction of mixed cotton stocks in Uganda, with the goal of restarting the industry from scratch. These schemes, however, relied not on genetics, but drew on established techniques or existing economic and eugenical principles.
This article carries out a general analysis and quantification of the evolution of international coffee markets since the late 1980s, when the economic clauses of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), in force since 1962, were suspended. These clauses assigned export quotas to different producing countries and established fluctuation bands for prices to keep them within a range that made them predictable for producers and consumers. The failure to renew the ICA economic clauses, together with the asymmetries in the value chain, the oligopolistic and oligopsonistic concentration of the market, and the financialization of the sector at the international level, had a negative impact on the income of small producers, who supply most of the world's coffee output. In this article, the case of Mexico is used to exemplify these impacts on peasant economies.
This article explores the mission of two French cannon founders, Dupont Sr. and his son Fran & ccedil;ois, to build a new foundry and produce cannons for the Ottoman Algerian authorities in 1772-1775. The analysis of consular correspondence and Arabic and Ottoman inscriptions on the cannons produced in Algiers between 1775 and 1782 challenges the preconceived notion of a mere technological transfer from Europe to an Islamic country. Focusing on Dupont's experience as migrant-expert, it becomes clear that a successful technological enterprise requires a dialogue between foreign and local experts. This dialogue involved technical features as well as socio-religious matters concerning the migrant's experience in a foreign place. Using the technologies of cannon making as a case study, this micro-global analysis examines the successful development of an innovative product by migrants coming from different parts of the Mediterranean world, such as Rochefort, Algiers, Switzerland, and Istanbul.
The existing literature suggests that African Americans historically approached China either as a reliable ally or as a supplicant to white people. However, these perspectives mainly pertain to the post-1930s relationship. Prior to this period, African Americans ascribed a different significance to China in their quest for equality. They regarded it as an inadvertent destabilizer of America's prevailing racial hierarchy, which marginalized African Americans as nonmembers of the nation. They asserted their claim to national inclusion by expressing pride in the supposed appeal of American civilization among the Chinese, protesting the neglect by white Americans, and pledging to adopt resistance strategies from China. These assertions, aimed at proving African Americans' eligibility for full American identity, reflect complex attitudes toward a non-white Other as well as their resourcefulness in seeking pathways to achieve equality.
