Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia

Robert S.G. Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Institute Professor of British History at University of Missouri, USA. He is the author of British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (2015) and The Ghost of Namamugi (2019).Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, USA. He is the author of Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (2009) and the co-editor, along with Harald Fuess, of The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation (2020).

• Introduction. William Alt and Charles Richardson: family, fortune and fortuity in nineteenth-century East Asia, Robert Fletcher (University of Missouri, USA) and Robert Hellyer (Wake Forest University, USA)1. Disturbed Reciprocity: Rutherford Alcock’s diplomacy and merchant communities in China and Japan, Sano Mayuko (Kyoto University, Japan)2. George S. Morrison and Japan’s First British Consulate at Nagasaki Brian Burke-Gaffney (Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science, Japan)3. Making Safe the Settlement: the British troops at Yokohama and their influence on foreign Japanese society, Nakatake (Hori) Kanami (Yokohama Archives of History, Japan)4. Between Trade and Diplomacy: The Commercial Activities of the Swiss Silk Merchants Siber & Brennwald in late Edo and early Meiji Japan, Mariko Fukuoka (National Museum of Japanese History, Japan) and Alexis Schwarzenbach (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland)5. Afterlife of the Wealthy: the burial of merchant communities in nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong, Bobby Tam (University of Warwick, UK)7. Charlotte Jane: National Symbol and Global Reality, Annette Bainbridge (Independent Scholar, New Zealand)8. Dreams of Expanding the British Empire: The Life of George Windsor Earl, Ranald Noel-Paton (Independent Scholar, UK)BibliographyIndex

This volume reminds us that global history is comprised of the activities and experiences of individuals whose own lives are deeply connected to places, families, and people they encounter. Through personal letters, eyewitness narratives, and historical analysis, Chronicling Westerners joins expatriats’ ordinary expression of day-to-day concerns with vivid accounts of their extraordinary activities and experiences in nineteenth-century maritime East Asia to demonstrate how the spread of capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism both fostered opportunity and wrought violence and death. Highly recommended.