Showing papers on "Expansionism published in 1995"

The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910

Abstract: What forces were behind Japan's emergence as the first non-Western colonial power at the turn of the twentieth century? Peter Duus brings a new perspective to Meiji expansionism in this pathbreaking study of Japan's acquisition of Korea, the largest of its colonial possessions. He shows how Japan's drive for empire was part of a larger goal to become the economic, diplomatic, and strategic equal of the Western countries who had imposed a humiliating treaty settlement on the country in the 1850s. Duus maintains that two separate but interlinked processes, one political/military and the other economic, propelled Japan's imperialism. Every attempt at increasing Japanese political influence licensed new opportunities for trade, and each new push for Japanese economic interests buttressed, and sometimes justified, further political advances. The sword was the servant of the abacus, the abacus the agent of the sword. While suggesting that Meiji imperialism shared much with the Western colonial expansion that provided both model and context, Duus also argues that it was 'backward imperialism' shaped by a sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the West. Along with his detailed diplomatic and economic history, Duus offers a unique social history that illuminates the motivations and lifestyles of the overseas Japanese of the time, as well as the views that contemporary Japanese had of themselves and their fellow Asians.

America, a European Power

Abstract: necessary component of the continental balance for half a century. Conversely, an unstable Europe would still threaten essential national security interests of the United States. This is as true after as it was during the Cold War. I do not intend, of course, to suggest that nothing has changed. The end of the Cold War, which can best be dated to that symbolic moment at midnight on December 25,1991, when the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time, began an era of change of historic proportions. Local conflicts, internal political and economic instability, and the return of historical grievances have now replaced Soviet expansionism as the greatest threat to peace in Europe. West ern Europe and America must jointly ensure that tolerant democra cies become rooted throughout all of Europe and that the seething, angry, unresolved legacies of the past are contained and solved.

Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914

Abstract: Europeans in the nineteenth century were fascinated with the wild and the primitive. So compelling was the craving for a first-hand experience of wilderness that it provided a lasting foundation for tourism as a consumer industry. In this book, Patricia Jasen shows how the region now known as Ontario held special appeal for tourists seeking to indulge a passion for wild country or act out their fantasies of primitive life. Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, Muskoka, and the far reaches of Lake Superior all offered the experiences tourists valued most: the tranquil pleasures of the picturesque, the excitement of the sublime, and the sensations of nostalgia associated with Canada's disappearing wilderness.Jasen situates her work within the context of recent writings about tourism history and the semiotics of tourism, about landscape perception and images of 'wildness' and 'wilderness,' and about the travel narrative as a literary genre. She explores a number of major themes, including the imperialistic appropriation and commercialization of landscape into tourist images, services, and souvenirs. In a study of class, gender, and race, Jasen finds that by the end of the century, most workers still had little opportunity for travel, while the middle classes had come to regard holidays as a right and a duty in light of Social Darwinist concerns about preserving the health of the 'race.' Women travellers have been disregarded or marginalized in many studies of the history of tourism, but this book makes their presence known and analyses their experience. It also examines, against the backdrop of nineteenth-century racism and expansionism, the major role played by Native people in the tourist industry.The first book to explore the cultural foundations of tourism in Ontario, Wild Things also makes a major contribution to the literature on the wilderness ideal in North America.

The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities

Abstract: trate on the external aspects of empire, investigating the roots of expansionism, for instance, or the military and economic sinews of power.2 Others have looked at the domestic constitutions of empires, analysing, for example, the management of multi-ethnicity.3 One major problem is that 'empire' in the contemporary world is a word with very strong negative connotations. A century ago, European countries and their rulers welcomed the term. It implied not only that a country was powerful but also, probably, that it was in the forefront of progress, one of that very small group of great powers entrusted, in Hegelian terms, with leading mankind towards higher levels of culture, wealth and freedom. Flattering comparisons were made with the great civilizations of the past, almost all of them embodied in political terms in empires. In the late twentieth century, however, empire implies exploitation of weak communities by stronger ones, as well, particularly, as the suppression of the Third World by Western power and culture. Empire is seen, moreover, not merely as wicked but also as anachronistic and doomed to disappear. In the post-1945 global economy, autarchy and physical control of territory are viewed as largely irrelevant: peaceful access to food, raw materials and markets seems assured, and the skills, unity and motivation of a country's workforce are regarded as the keys to prosperity and even power. Countries are unwilling to take upon themselves

Japanese Banking: A History, 1859–1959

Abstract: How did the Japanese achieve their unrivalled position in world banking? This book, first published in 1995, provides a full account in English of the banking industry in Japan for the century following the opening of the country to the outside world in 1859. Professor Tamaki begins by considering the period of experimentation during the Meiji Restoration which resulted in the adoption of the Gold Standard in 1891. He then offers a detailed examination of the highly profitable years up to the end of the First World War and of the subsequent crisis which was hastened by the earthquake that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923 and sealed by the financial collapse of 1927. New light is thrown on the extraordinary role played by the banking industry during the period of military expansionism which culminated with defeat in the Second World War. The book ends with an assessment of the post-war financial system which developed out of the Macarthur directives and the subsequent American 'democratisation' programme.

Italian fascism, 1919-1945

Abstract: Acknowledgement - PART 1 THE CONQUEST OF POWER, 1919-1929 - The Postwar Crisis and the Rise of Fascism, 1919-1922 - Between 'Normalization' and 'Revolution', 1922-1925 - The Construction of the 'Totalitarian' State, 1925-1929 - PART 2 THE FASCIST REGIME, 1929-1936 - The Years of the Great Depression, 1929-1934 - The Creation of the Fascist Empire, 1935-1936 - PART 3 FASCIST EXPANSIONISM AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1936-1943 - The Axis Connection and the 'Fascistization of Italian Society, 1936-1940 - Fascist Italy at War, 1940-1943 - Epilogue: The Italian Social Republic, 1943-1945 - Footnotes - Map - Select Bibliography

The Politics of the Strategic Triangle: The U.S., COCOM, and Export Controls on China, 1979-1989

Abstract: This article documents and analyzes the evolution of the so-called “china differential” in the 1980s whereby the United States and its COCOM allies accorded a more favorable export control policy toward China than the one they continued to impose on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. At the same time, a limited Sino-U.S. military relationship evolved, resulting in increased bilateral defense-related exchanges and American arms sales to China. The author argues that the development of the “China differential” was clearly influenced by considerations of the strategic triangle and that the relaxation of restrictions on technology transfer to China was meant to serve broader U.S. politico-strategic objectives of containing Soviet expansionism and enhancing its power position vis-a-vis that of the Soviet Union.

Gerald of Wales' 'Topographia Hibernica': Sex and the Irish Nation

Abstract: Assessed from a modern perspective, the Topographia Hibernica is of little value as a work of ethnography. Although promoted by its author as a lucid circumscription of Ireland and its inhabitants, it clearly and disconcertingly swerves between fact and fiction; and, although rhetorically endorsed by the testimony of impartial experience, it betrays a variety of authorial prejudices. The result is a written landscape that is inhabited by a bizarre menagerie of outlandish monstrosities and vitiated by inflections of scorn, disdain and slander. If Gerald's zoological observations are to be believed, the Ireland of the 1180's accommodated not only such familiar creatures as eagles, hares, weasels and geese, but also such oddities as a portentous frog, a prophetic werewolf, a population of banished fleas, a flock of unboilable ducks, and a species of fish remarkable for its golden dentures.(1) Similarly, if his ethnological remarks are given any credit, then it must be assumed that the twelfth-century Irish were indeed scrofulous barbarians notable for their addiction to unbounded turpitudes of lust, for these ostensible monsters of perversion allegedly practiced incest, granted bestiality a ritualistic function in ceremonies of kingship, and idiosyncratically displayed the stigmata of hermaphroditism as the physical consequences of their ethnic deviance.(2) In short, if we believe all Gerald tells us, then we must also accept that the nature of twelfth-century Ireland and its inhabitants paradoxically ran "contra naturae cursum" (II, Incipit). The veracity of the Topographia has of course long been discredited, and the earliest systematic demolitions to be undertaken from an Irish perspective were made in the seventeenth century. The first was Stephen White's Apologia pro Hibernia, written in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I, and therefore during specifically the period in which the Catholics of Ulster were being forcibly displaced by protestant immigrants;(3) the second, the Cambrensis eversus of John Lynch, was published in the early years of the Restoration and in the aftermath of Cromwell's punitive campaign of 1649.(4) That the work of a medieval author should have gained such celebrity over four hundred years after its composition is in itself remarkable, if not unique. But this attention hardly redounds to Gerald's credit. For both White and Lynch, the Topographia represented a timeless declaration of imperialism and belligerence, its pejorative rhetoric perversely transformed into an immutable truth that could be used to justify any Insular intervention in Irish affairs.(5) In the view of both, therefore, it had become a paradigm, a veritable institution of conflict which had at all costs to be dismantled. There is a great deal that justifies this view. Gerald holds the disreputable distinction of being the first inhabitant of Britain to depict the Irish as idle, disorganized and little better than animals;(6) and he is as an early apologist for foreign invasion, his derogatory treatise often reading as an imperialistically inflected act of containment. It is dedicated to Henry II, who himself led an expeditionary force to Ireland in 1171 and subsequently nominated Prince John as its new Overlord;(6) it documents apparent historical facts interpreted to ratify the Kings of Britain as the rightful monarchs of Ireland;(8) and it performs in its very title a gesture of total appropriation, territory (topos) constituted and regulated by writing (graphia) in facilitating and glorifying rehearsal of the full imposition of Angevin power.(9) Gerald accordingly anticipates later developments both by presenting the Irish in prejudicial terms and by aligning such a stratagem with contemporary Insular movements of territorial and cultural expansionism. And the inferences to be drawn from his text can be summarized through a perverse reasoning, which, with variations of ambiguous subtlety, can still be heard today: if the Irish are in such egregious need of the civilizing and natural culture of Britain, it is specifically because they are so barbarically marginal to the green and pleasant land in which civilization, culture, and presumably also nature itself, so egregiously flourish. …

From Co-operation to Confrontation: The End of Rapallo and the Turn to Collective Security, 1933–1935

Abstract: At the moment of Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933 the Rapallo relationship between Soviet Russia and Germany was still largely intact. Over the next 12 months, however, a decade of political, military and economic co-operation between the two states was liquidated. Military co-operation was terminated, trade began to plummet, and in December 1933 the USSR embarked on an anti-German policy of ‘collective security’ — a quest for a grand alliance of states to contain Nazi aggression and expansionism. In pursuit of this quest the USSR joined the League of Nations in September 1934, participated in negotiations for a regional defence agreement in Eastern Europe and, in May 1935, signed mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia. All of these Soviet actions were directed against Germany. Germany, the USSR’s most important ally in the capitalist world in the 1920s, had become the object of Soviet encirclement and confrontation.

To the Brink of War: The Czechoslovakian Crisis of 1938

Abstract: Russia’s involvement in the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938 stemmed from two sources. Firstly, the USSR’s commitment to collective resistance against Nazi aggression and expansionism — a policy which Litvinov had affirmed time and time again in public statements in 1936–7.l Secondly, there was the Soviet-Czechoslovak mutual assistance treaty of 1935 under which the Soviet Union pledged military aid to Czechoslovakia in the event of an attack on that country by a third party. Soviet assistance was, however, conditional upon France, which also had a mutual assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, simultaneously fulfilling its aid obligations — a clause inserted in the Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of 1935 at the suggestion of Benes/ , the Czech President.2

A View From the Right: Catholic Conservatives

Abstract: In recent years historians have become increasingly more interested in American conservatism. A sure sign of this was a forum on the writing of the history of American conservatism featured in a recent issue of the American Historical Review. In the lead essay Alan Brinkley sought to explain why "twentieth-century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." Brinkley attributed the neglect principally to the liberal, progressive analyses that the majority of historians use to interpret recent U.S. history.' Another way of putting this is to acknowledge that historians, who are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics, "are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest."2 For this reason the majority of historians have avoided studying American conservatism. The rise of a new political and religious Right in the 1980s has changed the situation and a new generation of historians is beginning to reexamine the place of conservatism in twentieth-century U.S. history. For many of the same reasons a similar scenario of prolonged neglect followed by increased interest has prevailed in the writing of American religious history. Historians have traditionally interpreted the history of American Protestantism according to a liberal, progressive paradigm. In this interpretation the Great Awakening was a key catalyst in the development of the democratic revolution of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism shaped the culture of the nation and, according to William McLoughlin, spurred the people on "to those heights of social reform, missionary endeavor, and imperialistic expansionism which constitute the moving forces of our history in that century."3 The decline of the social gospel in the post-World War I period signaled the demise of liberal Protestantism and much of the writing about the history of religion in the twentieth century has been an effort to explain this decline. This interpretation identified conservative Protestantism with the commercialism and ballyhoo of big city

Japan’s Alliance after the Cold War

Abstract: This book has sought to illustrate the existence of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of Japan’s alliance with the United States. The perpetuation of the notion that the alliance is based upon an identity of interest continues to belie the reality of parallel, and increasingly divergent, respective national interests. Tensions arise from the dysfunction between superstructural myth and substructural power relations. These tensions, unable to find release during the era of the United States’ inordinate fear of communism, were offered amelioration with the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War. These dramatic events provided an opportunity for the anti-Soviet alliance mythology to be laid to rest, intra-alliance structural power relations to be recognised and a new, more mature and equal relationship to be developed. Yet by the mid-1990s this moment of opportunity was in danger of being lost. Political tension between the allies increased. The Soviet threat to the allies was replaced by North Korea and a potential for renewed Russian expansionism. Finally, the redefinition of security in economic terms threatened simply to reinforce existing tensions.