READING EUROPEAN UNIVERSAL HISTORIES IN JAPAN, 1790s–1840s

• Published in: The Historical journal Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 43 - 69
• Main Author: MERVART, DAVID
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.02.2021
• Subjects: 18th century; 19th century; Celebrities; Chinese languages; Dutch language; Historiography; Japanese language; Philology; Special Issue: Uses of the Past Between Europe and East Asia; Translation; East Asia; Europe; Japan
• ISSN: 0018-246X; 1469-5103
• DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X19000670

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.