How does a nation become a great power? A global order was emerging in the nineteenth century, one in which all nations were included. This book explores the multiple legal grounds of Meiji Japan's assertion of sovereign statehood within that order: natural law, treaty law, international administrative law, and the laws of war. Contrary to arguments that Japan was victimized by 'unequal' treaties, or that Japan was required to meet a 'standard of civilization' before it could participate in international society, Howland argues that the Westernizing Japanese state was a player from the start....
How does a nation become a great power? A global order was emerging in the nineteenth century, one in which all nations were included. This book explo...
Blame for the putative failure of liberalism in late-nineteenth-century Japan and China has often been placed on an insufficient grasp of modernity among East Asian leaders or on their cultural commitments to traditional values. In Personal Liberty and Public Good, Douglas Howland refutes this view, turning to the central text of liberalism in that era: John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.
Howland offers absorbing analyses of the translations of the book into Japanese and Chinese, which at times reveal astonishing emendations. As with their political leaders, Mill's Japanese and...
Blame for the putative failure of liberalism in late-nineteenth-century Japan and China has often been placed on an insufficient grasp of modernity...
D. R. Howland explores China s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of brushtalk, in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the...
D. R. Howland explores China s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural a...
In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts--liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society--from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state.
Where scholars have previously treated the...
In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmissi...
The State of Sovereignty examines how it came to pass that the nation-state became the prevailing form of governance in the world today. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and addressing colonization and decolonization around the globe, these essays argue that sovereignty is a set of historically contingent practices, and not something that accrues naturally to states. The contributors explore the different ways in which sovereign political forms have been defined and have defined themselves, placing recent debates about nations and national identity within a broader history of...
The State of Sovereignty examines how it came to pass that the nation-state became the prevailing form of governance in the world today. Spanning t...
Douglas Howland Elizabeth Lillehoj Maximilian Mayer
This volume aims to question, challenge, supplement, and revise current understandings of the relationship between aesthetic and political operations. The authors transcend disciplinary boundaries and nurture a wide-ranging sensibility about art and sovereignty, two highly complex and interwoven dimensions of human experience that have rarely been explored by scholars in one conceptual space. Several chapters consider the intertwining of modern philosophical currents and modernist artistic forms, in particular those revealing formal abstraction, stylistic experimentation, self-conscious...
This volume aims to question, challenge, supplement, and revise current understandings of the relationship between aesthetic and political operatio...
