Brokers Of Empire

"Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians—merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers—left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state’s ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea. Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties—between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole—this study examines how these “brokers of empire” advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan."

"Explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."--Author's Web site.

Korea Between Empires chronicles the development of a Korean national consciousness. It focuses on two critical periods in Korean history and asks how key concepts and symbols were created and integrated into political programs to create an original Korean understanding of national identity, the nation-state, and nationalism. Looking at the often-ignored questions of representation, narrative, and rhetoric in the construction of public sentiment, Andre Schmid traces the genealogies of cultural assumptions and linguistic turns evident in Korea's major newspapers during the social and political upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Newspapers were the primary location for the re-imagining of the nation, enabling readers to move away from the conceptual framework inherited from a Confucian and dynastic past toward a nationalist vision that was deeply rooted in global ideologies of capitalist modernity. As producers and disseminators of knowledge about the nation, newspapers mediated perceptions of Korea's precarious place amid Chinese and Japanese colonial ambitions and were vitally important to the rise of a nationalist movement in Korea.

During the seventeenth century Hungary's diverse population of peasants, townsmen, soldiers, and county nobles rose up against the violent imposition of the Counter-Reformation, the Habsburg military occupation, and exhorbitant war taxes. In The Habsburg Empire under Siege Georg Michels explores the little-known grassroots revolts that threatened the Habsburgs' hold over the Hungarian borderlands. Based on extensive research in Hungarian, Austrian, and Dutch archives, this revisionist study shifts attention away from high politics, diplomacy, and military confrontation to the popular revolts that took place during the two decades before the 1683 siege of Vienna. Michels reveals a complex environment in which Calvinist Hungarians, Lutheran Slovaks, Lutheran Germans, and Orthodox Ukrainians worked to defend their religion against brutal Habsburg Counter-Reformation campaigns. Challenging preconceived notions of European, Middle Eastern, and East European history, this book tells a dramatic story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation violence, covering proxy wars, guerrilla warfare, refugee flight, migration from Hungary into Ottoman territory, and largely unknown Christian-Muslim encounters. Offering a trans-imperial perspective that reassesses the complex relationship between Hungarians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, The Habsburg Empire under Siege portrays the resistance of ordinary men and women and their hopes for liberation from Habsburg oppression, reclaiming their place in history.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the early modern military history of Portugal and its possessions in Africa, the Americas, and Asia from the perspective of the military revolution historiographical debate. The existence of a military revolution in the early modern period has been much debated in international historiography, and this volume fills a significant gap in its relation to the history of Portugal and its overseas empire. It examines different forms of military change in specifically Portuguese case studies but also adopts a global perspective through the analysis of different contexts and episodes in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Contributors explore whether there is evidence of what could be defined as aspects of a military revolution or whether other explanatory models are needed to account for different forms of military change. In this way, it offers the reader a variety of perspectives that contribute to the debate over the applicability of the military revolution concept to Portugal and its empire during the early modern period. Broken down into four thematic parts and broad in both chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of the art of warfare in Portugal and its empire and demonstrates how the military revolution debate can be used to examine military change in a global perspective. This is an essential text for scholars and students of military history, military architecture, global history, Asian history, and the history of Iberian empires.

"One of the most important contributions of this book is its compelling portrait of the various itinerants within, and often without, early-modern Japan's status system. Even though the topic is a rather serious one, Howell reveals a refreshing sense of humor and an original approach. This is a pleasure to read."—Brett L. Walker, author of The Conquest of Ainu Lands "David Howell's immersion in contemporary Japanese scholarship is evident on every page of this masterful book. A probing work of great erudition."—Kären Wigen, author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of pioneers between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.