Reading european universal histories in Japan, 1790s-1840s
Author
Mervart, DavidEntity
UAM. Departamento de Lingüística, Lenguas Modernas, Lógica y Fª de la Ciencia y Tª de la Literatura y Literatura ComparadaPublisher
Cambridge University PressDate
2021-02-01Citation
10.1017/S0018246X19000670
Historical Journal 64.1 (2020): 43-69
ISSN
0018-246XDOI
10.1017/S0018246X19000670Funded by
The collaborative research project whose outcome this article is has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement no. 649307. The financial support came from Spain’s Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, through the HERA programme of the European CommissionProject
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/649307/EU//HERAEditor's Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000670Subjects
European; East Asia; philological and historiographical; Chinese; LiteraturaRights
© 2020 The authorsEsta obra está bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional.
Abstract
This article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool- alongside the long-established Sinological erudition-for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to the medical and astronomical manuals of the occidentals but also to their histories. The translation-cum-commentary Miscellanea from the western seas by Yamamura Saisuke (1801) is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as the European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent, while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan now exposed to the dynamics of the global European presence.
Files in this item
Google Scholar:Mervart, David
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.