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WiSe 18/19: The Japanese Empire Among Empires

Nadin Heé

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Today the legacy of the Japanese Empire remains a hotly debated politically sensitive topic in East Asia and some perceive direct connections between Japanese Imperialism and territorial disputes or economic crises in the region. Given the political and economic impact that Japanese Imperialism still has up to now, it is surprising that it remains marginalized within international scholarship on Empires and is often described either as ‘anomaly’ or ‘mimetic imperialism’ whereby the British Empire (and from time to time the French) is generally treated as the archetypal model. In this seminar, we critically re-examine the place of the Japanese Empire among Empires. The aim is not so much to systematically compare various Empires, but to zoom in on different empirical levels. Some of the questions we will consider are: How was Japanese Imperialism perceived from within, and how did other contemporaries see Imperial Japan? How did Japan compete cooperate or connect with other Imperial Powers, be it on the level of politicians or anti-imperial subjects? And how can we write imperial histories as global history? Background reading: Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, ‘The Japanese Empire’, in William M. Tsutsui, ed., A Companion to Japanese History, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, 224-241. Andrew Gordon, ‘Part 3: Imperial Japan from Ascendance to Ashes’, in ibid, A Modern History of Japan, New York et al: Oxford University Press, 2003, 139-243. close