Statecraft and Spectacle in East Asia is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that explores the intertwined histories of Taiwan and Japan across the long sweep of the early modern and modern periods. Drawing on new research by scholars from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, it moves beyond the conventional focus on the mechanics of the Japanese colonial state to provide new perspectives on a highly significant relationship that shaped the nature of the modern East Asian political landscape. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the chaotic aftermath of empire, the papers collected...

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process.

This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again--from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from...

East India Companies; Empire, Trade; Diplomacy; Warfare