A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940 aims to explore the changing concepts of the social and the economic during a period of fundamental change across Asia. Case studies show how adopting Western words reflected regional concepts of economy and society. Hagen Schulz-Forberg and his contributors are on the cutting-edge of transnational history, writes Jeff Roquen

Roquen, Jeff

LSE Research Online

2014-10-22Book Review: A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940 by Hagen Schulz-Forbergblogs.lse.ac.uk /lsereviewofbooks/2014/10/22/book-review-a-global-conceptual-history-of-asia-1860-1940-by-hagen-schulz-forberg/A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940  aims to explore the changing concepts of the socialand the economic during a period of fundamental change across Asia. Case studies show how adopting Westernwords reflected regional concepts of economy and society. Hagen Schulz-Forberg and his contributors are on thecutting-edge of transnational history, writes Jeff Roquen.A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940. Hagen Schulz-Forberg.Pickering & Chatto. 2014.Find this book: By the end of the nineteenth century, the first wave of globalization in the post-Napoleonic era, which had been fueled by a burgeoning humanitarian movement andthe advent of instant communication, was approaching its zenith. Slavery had not onlybeen abolished in the Spanish colonies (beginning in 1820), the British Empire (1833),the United States (1865), and Brazil (1888), but serfdom had also come to an end inWestern Europe and Russia (1861). Concurrent to the completion of the Suez Canaland the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States (1869), telegraph cables newlyconnected London to disparate parts of the world across the Atlantic, the Red Sea, andthe Indian Ocean.As a result of rapid technological innovation and a decline in religious dogma, the relationship between man, thestate, and the world underwent a transformative and worldwide reconceptualization. In an edited collection ofscholarly essays on how Western ideas of society and economy penetrated, permeated, and ultimately remade Asiaand the expanse of the late Ottoman Empire, the potency of nineteenth century European thought and its impact onthe Far East has been brilliantly illuminated and robustly measured in a volume by Hagen Schulz-Forberg entitled AGlobal Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940.In the immediate decades subsequent to the end of its isolation in 1876, the Korean Kingdom, according to authorMyoung-Kyu Park, was fundamentally altered by the introduction of Western political concepts. In 1881, the Joseondynasty, which had ruled the peninsula since 1392, sent a number of students to post-Mejji Restoration Japan andChina under the fading Qing dynasty to gauge the benefits of modernization. From the intercultural exchange, twoword-concepts, gyoengje (economy) and sahoe (society) were derived from the Japanese terms keiji (economy)and shakai (society) and employed to rebalance the power of the state. Over the next decade, Koreans challengedtheir elitist Confucian order and demanded an expansion of individual and property rights based on the two terms.After the fall of Joseon in 1897 and the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, Park effectively demonstrates howgyeongie and sahoe served as the conceptual basis of the national March First Movement for independence in 1919– a year pregnant with the idea of “self-determination” as espoused by American President Woodrow Wilson. InChina, the same two concepts also worked to undermine its archaic regime.1/3Archive postcard showing the East Gate, Hamhung, North Korea’s second largest city, c1910.Two essays on China in the late and post-Qing era entitled “Differing Translations, Contested Meanings: A Motor forthe 1911 Revolution in China?,” and “Notions of Society in Early Twentieth Century China, 1900-25” by Hailong Tianand Dominic Sachsenmaier respectively, reveal the extent to which the imported word shehui (society) served toremake the state. On the basis of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (19 November 1863), Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925) preached “Three Principles” in his revolutionary campaign: Minzu (“The people’s relation or government of thepeople”), Minquan (“The people’s power or government by the people”), and Minsheng (“The people’s welfare orgovernment for the people”). For his rival Liang Qichao (1873-1929), social implied restructuring China’s enervatednational institutions amid threats to its sovereignty. Despite challenges to the power of the ruling clique, both theEmpress Dowager and the entrenched term for “social” (qun) remained ascendant for several more years after thefailed scholar-bureaucratic Wuxu or Hundred Days’ Reforms of 1898.By 1905, however, shehui, which had been linguistically culled from xiakayi in Japanese, began to supplant qun andran intellectually parallel to Sun’s principle of Minsheng. After a long quest to end extreme forms of patriarchy (i.e.footbinding and concubinage) and peasant poverty through the implementation of a socialist program, Suntriumphed briefly in the wake of the Revolution of 1911. Yet, the ensuing power vacuum resulted in anotherconceptual contest between proponents of shehui and advocates of qun – led by the scholar Yan Fu (1854-1921).By the late 1910s, Chinese students, who had studied Western concepts of society abroad, had infused nationalisticmeaning into shehui and demanded both a combination of socialist and democratic reforms and a strong, unifiedstate. Although Tian and Sachsenmaier unquestionably enlighten the tumultuous events of late and post-Qing China,the anti-modernist Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 deserves larger consideration in evaluating the intellectualdynamics of the era.In “The Conceptualization of the Social in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Arabic Thought andLanguage,” Ilham Khuri-Makdisi analyzes the Tanzimat or the reformation of the languid Ottoman Empire. From1830-1880, Constantinople officially ended social and legal discrimination against non-Muslims and introducedmeasures to distribute land on a more egalitarian basis. When intellectuals in Beirut and Cairo injected Westernideas of individual rights and citizenship into Arabic culture, three concepts, sawalih mushtaraka (“shared benefits orpublic interests”), qawm (“a people”), and tamaddun (civilization), inspired an anti-elitist drive for a new hay’aijtima’iyya (social configuration). In order to achieve a genuine state of tamaddun, Beirut scholar-reformer Butrus al-Bustani (1819-1883) declared that ‘adl (justice) and huququhum al-jumhuriyya (republican rights) were essential to2/3ensuring the political and material well-being of the community. These semi-secularized terms merged with otherhermeneutically-modified concepts, including umma (“nation”), irtiqa’ (“progress and evolution”), and ma’arif(“knowledge”), to both recognize and give primacy to “civil society.”By the 1880s, the concept of social had arrived and was being disseminated throughout the Ottoman Empire.Influential newspaperAl-Muqtataf, which became a journalistic organ of Western ideas, published “ Al-ijtima ‘al-bashari aw al-‘umran’” (“Human Society or Civilization”) by Bustani’s Egypt-based contemporary Shibli Shumayyil(1850-1917) in 1885. Rather than a “crowd,” Shumayyil re-articulated the term al-jumhur as the “public” or the“masses.” At the same time, a number of reformist intellectuals also began to embrace both the concept of al-iqtisadal-siyasi (“political economy”) and the cooperative socialism of French intellectual Charles Gide (1847-1932).Although successful to a degree, their valiant attempt to make the state subservient to the idea of “society” failed tosave “The Eternal State” from collapse in 1923.The remaining essays, which assess the conceptual impact of the social and economic in early twentieth centuryMalaya (Paula Pannu), the Dutch East Indies (Leena Avonius), and Siam (Morakot Jewachinda Meyer) – along withan article on the two semantic concepts through time, space, and culture by Klaus Karttunen, prove equallyengaging and accomplished. In all, A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860-1940  sheds new light on fin de siècleAsia by uncovering the complex and revolutionary socio-intellectual currents of the age. As such, Schulz-Forbergand his contributors are on the cutting-edge of transnational history.Jeff Roquen is an independent writer and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Lehigh University inPennsylvania (USA). Read more reviews by Jeff.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: a global conceptual history of Asia, 1860-1940 by Hagen Schulz-Forberg

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

LSE Research Online