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The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

W. Puck Brecher

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese ... More

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.Less

Ancient Ryukyu: An Archaeological Study of Island Communities

Richard Pearson

Who are the people of the Ryukyu Islands? How could they survive and prosper on small, isolated islands? How did the independent Ryukyu Kingdom become a major player in East Asian medieval trade? ... More

Who are the people of the Ryukyu Islands? How could they survive and prosper on small, isolated islands? How did the independent Ryukyu Kingdom become a major player in East Asian medieval trade? This book explores 30,000 years of human occupation in the Ryukyu Islands, from the earliest human presence in the region up to AD 1609 and the emergence of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It focuses on the unique geopolitical position of the islands, their environment, and the many human communities whose historical activities can be discerned. The book describes explorers and sojourners and colonists who arrived thousands of years ago, and their ancient trade links to Japan, Korea, and China. Through a case study focused on the medieval castles and palaces of the Ryukyu Kingdom, it demonstrates the vigorous trade taking place in East Asia before the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century AD It also shows how archaeologists have sought to reconstruct monuments on Okinawa Island that were obliterated in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The book shows that many modern features of the culture, politics, and economy of the Ryukyu Islands have very deep roots. It concludes with a discussion of aspects of Ryukyu archaeology that are significant for world archaeology and the archaeology of islands.Less

A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930

M. Cody Poulton

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century ... More

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama and includes translations of representative one-act plays. The book looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theatre (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested. Following introductory chapters on the development of Japanese drama from the 1880s to the early 1930s, are translations of nine seminal one-act plays by nine dramatists, including two women, Okada Yachiyo and Hasegawa Shigure. The subject matter of these plays is that of modern drama everywhere: discord between men and women, between parents and children, and the resulting disintegration of marriages and families. Realism prevails as the mode of modernity, but other styles are presented: the symbolism of brittle melodrama, minimalistic lyricism, politically incisive expressionism, and a proto-absurdist work by Japan's master of prewar drama, Kishida Kunio.Less

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China

N. Harry Rothschild and Leslie V. Wallace (eds)

Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places ... More

Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places center stage transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized and marginalized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that many of these so-called miscreants—treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, depraved poet-literati, and disloyal officials—were deemed so not because of a set of immutable social and religious norms, but by decisions and circumstances influenced by personal taste, contradictory value systems, and negotiations of political and social power.Less

Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea

Albert L. Park

Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule ... More

Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945)? Questions about religion’s relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between colonialism, religion, and modernity in Korea. Yet, getting answers to these questions has been a challenge because of narrow historical investigations that fail to study religious processes in relation to political, economic, social, and cultural developments. In Building a Heaven on Earth, Albert L. Park’s studies the progressive drives by religious groups to contest standard conceptions of modernity and forge a heavenly kingdom on the Korean peninsula to relieve people from fierce ruptures in their everyday lives. The results of his study will reconfigure the debates on colonial modernity, the origins of faith-based social activism in Korea, and the role of religion in a modern world. Building a Heaven on Earth, in particular, presents a compelling story about the determination of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Presbyterian Church, and the Ch’ŏndogyo to carry out large-scale rural movements to form a paradise on earth anchored in religion, agriculture and a pastoral life. It is a transnational story of leaders from these three groups leaning on ideas and systems from countries, such as Denmark, France, Japan, and the United States, to help them reform political, economic, social and cultural structures in colonial Korea. This book shows that these religious institutions provided discursive and material frameworks that allowed for an alternative form of modernity that featured new forms of agency, social organization, and the nation. In so doing, Building a Heaven on Earth repositions our understandings of modern Korean history.Less

Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East

Jon K. Chang

This study focuses on two primary arguments. First, it demonstrates how the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic or maligned nationality during the Tsarist and ... More

This study focuses on two primary arguments. First, it demonstrates how the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic or maligned nationality during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. Second, this study argues that the Soviet state was not free of Russian nationalist, populist and primordial views and influences in their nationalities (national minorities) policies. The aforementioned were the “Tsarist continuities” which blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal citizens. Instead, these influences cast the Koreans as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknowable political loyalties (and therefore, possible fifth columnists). This study found that the Soviet state exerted a tremendous sociopolitical influence on the Korean community primarily through the careful selection, cultivation, and placement of Soviet Korean cadres, informants, and secret police. Additionally, author Jon K. Chang sought to capture the sense of “agency,” initiative, and entrepreneurship that the Koreans added to Soviet life in the Russian Far East. Chang found very few documents of this type in the Soviet archives. Therefore, he went to Central Asia and interviewed over sixty elderly Soviet Korean deportees which he then paired with archival documents to write Burnt by the Sun.Less

Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea

Don Baker and Franklin Rausch

A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18th century. It explores the ... More

A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18th century. It explores the reason most Koreans, especially Confucian scholars and government officials, reacted negatively to Catholic ideas and practices, going so far as to launch an official persecution of Catholics that cost thousands of lives. To render visible the philosophical background to the anti-Catholic movement, this work includes a complete translation of an anti-Catholic essay written before the persecution began. However, it also examines those Koreans, many of whom were also Confucian scholars, who adopted Catholic beliefs and practices even before there were missionaries on the Korean peninsula. To aid in that investigation, it includes an annotated translation of the Silk Letter of Hwang Sayŏng, a first-person account of the persecution of 1801 relating why some Koreans became Catholics, why some later apostatized, and why others remained faithful to their new faith through torture and execution. In addition, it includes a discussion of Korea attitudes toward their nation and its place in the international order before the emergence of modern nationalism.Less

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman's Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan

Laura Nenzi

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the ... More

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the modern Meiji state. Tokiko’s political activism combines focus and visionary flights of the imagination, nuancing our understanding of political consciousness among the non-elites in nineteenth-century Japan by blurring the line between rational and irrational and between discourse and action. Her use of prognostication, her appeals to the cosmic forces, and her conversations with ghosts illuminate original paths to female participation in the political debate of the late Tokugawa on one side, and resourceful ways to preserve identity in the face of modernity, science, and the onset of historical amnesia on the other. Tokiko’s story places the ordinary individual within the frame of large-scale history, squaring well-known historical moments with the private microcosm of a self-described “nobody.” By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji history.Less

A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing's Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryo

In the summer of 1123 Xu Jing travelled on a Chinese embassy ship to Koryŏ. As the secretary in charge of ritual affairs, he was uniquely qualified to observe and record the details of medieval ... More

In the summer of 1123 Xu Jing travelled on a Chinese embassy ship to Koryŏ. As the secretary in charge of ritual affairs, he was uniquely qualified to observe and record the details of medieval Korean society. He divided the work into 40 thematic chapters, each highlighting different aspects of Koryŏ, including its history, political organization, customs, food, local products, and clothing. It also includes a very detailed description of the travel route from Ningbo in China to the Yesŏng Harbor in Korea. Well known for its description of celadon and Korean mores, the information it presents can however not always be accepted uncritically. Besides a comprehensive and fully annotated scholarly translation of the original, this book therefore also includes an introduction that analyzes and contextualizes this important source.Less

City of Marvel and Transformation: Changan and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China

Linda Rui Feng

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an shaped literati identity and the collective imagination through its new relationship to the empire’s most prolific writers. They came through ... More

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an shaped literati identity and the collective imagination through its new relationship to the empire’s most prolific writers. They came through its fold as examination candidates, sojourners, prospective officials, and as participants in pageantries and contests showcasing literary talent. As the central site of examination culture and social transformation, Chang’an emerged in prose narratives with a distinctive and newly formed metropolitan consciousness. In spatially evocative tales and anecdotes featuring literati protagonists, narratives demonstrate the ways in which Chang’an generated new domains of experience and added new perceptual categories to the Tang cultural imagination. In particular, these narratives explore the role of the literati as routine travelers, the interplay between literary prowess and sexual license, and the possibilities for extra-official promotion and unorthodox forms of valuation and livelihood. Because these explorations are subsumed under metropolitan, situational knowledge, they bring to our attention an unprecedented interval of social, existential, and geographical mobility maintained and reinforced by the spatial contiguities of urban space. City of Marvel and Transformation conceptualizes this literary phenomenon, and argues that such narratives amend our understanding of men of letters in between social identities and institutions, as they straddled anonymity and legitimacy.Less

Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan: Buddhist Healing, Chinese Knowledge, Islamic Formulas, and Wounds of War

Andrew Edmund Goble

This is the first book-length exploration in English of issues of medicine and society in premodern Japan. The book expands the parameters of the study of medicine in East Asia and introduces the ... More

This is the first book-length exploration in English of issues of medicine and society in premodern Japan. The book expands the parameters of the study of medicine in East Asia and introduces the dynamics of interaction and exchange that coursed through the East Asian macro-culture. It explores these themes primarily through the two extant works of the Buddhist priest and clinical physician Kajiwara Shōzen (1265–1337), who was active at the medical facility housed at Gokurakuji temple in Kamakura, the capital of Japan's first warrior government. Shōzen was a beneficiary of the efflorescence of trade and exchange across the East China Sea that typifies this era. His break with the restrictions of Japanese medicine is revealed in Ton'ishō (Book of the Simple Physician) and Man'apō (Myriad Relief Formulas). Both of these texts are landmarks. This book brings to the fore the range of factors that influenced the Japanese acquisition of Chinese medical information. It offers the first substantive portrait of the impact of the Song printing revolution in medieval Japan and provides a rare glimpse of Chinese medicine as it was understood outside of China. It is further distinguished by its attention to materia medica and medicinal formulas and to the challenges of technical translation and technological transfer in the reception and incorporation of a new pharmaceutical regime.Less

Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu

Robin McNeal

China's Warring States era (c. fifth–third centuries BCE) was the setting for an explosion of textual production, and one of the most sophisticated and enduring genres of writing from this period was ... More

China's Warring States era (c. fifth–third centuries BCE) was the setting for an explosion of textual production, and one of the most sophisticated and enduring genres of writing from this period was the military text. Social and political changes were driven in large part by the increasing scope and scale of warfare, and some of the best minds of the day devoted their attention to the systematic analysis of all factors involved in waging war. This book makes available a corpus of military texts from a long-neglected Warring States compendium of historical, political, military, and ritual writings known as the Yi Zhou shu, or Remainder of the Zhou Documents. The texts articulate the relationship between military conquest of an enemy and incorporation of conquered territories into one's civilian government, expressed dynamically through the paired Chinese concept of wen and wu, the civil and the martial. Exploring this conceptual dyad provides an alternative view of the social and intellectual history of classical China—one based not primarily on philosophical works but on a complex array of ideological writings concerned with the just, effective, and appropriate use of state power. In addition, the book presents a careful reconstruction of the poetic structure of these texts; analyzes their place in the broader discourse on warfare and governance in early China; introduces the many text historical problems of the Yi Zhou shu itself; and offers a synthetic analysis of early Chinese thinking about warfare, strategy, and the early state's use of coercive power.Less

Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines

Linda A. Newson

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish ... More

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benignt han what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. This book illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions. The book demonstrates that the islands suffered a significant population decline in the early colonial period. It argues that the sparse population of the islands meant that Old World diseases could not become endemic in pre-Spanish times, and also shows that the initial conquest of the Philippines was far bloodier than has often been supposed. Comparisons are made with the impact of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas. The book examines critically each major area in Luzon and the Visayas in turn. It proposes a new estimate for the population of the Visayas and Luzon of 1.57 million in 1565 and calculates that by the mid-seventeenth century this figure may have fallen by about two-thidrs.Less

Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities

Yinghong Cheng

The idea of eliminating undesirable traits from human temperament to create a “new man” has been part of moral and political thinking worldwide for millennia. During the Enlightenment, European ... More

The idea of eliminating undesirable traits from human temperament to create a “new man” has been part of moral and political thinking worldwide for millennia. During the Enlightenment, European philosophers sought to construct an ideological framework for reshaping human nature. But it was only among the communist regimes of the twentieth century that such ideas were actually put into practice on a nationwide scale. This book examines three culturally diverse sociopolitical experiments—the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cuba under Castro—in an attempt to better understand the origins and development of the “new man.” The book's fundamental concerns are how these communist revolutions strove to create a new, morally and psychologically superior, human being and how this task paralleled efforts to create a superior society. It begins by exploring the origins of the idea of human perfectibility during the Enlightenment. The discussion moves to other European intellectual movements, and then to the creation of the Soviet Man, the first communist new man in world history. Subsequent chapters examine China's experiment with human nature, starting with the nationalistic debate about a new national character at the turn of the twentieth century; and Cuban perceptions of the new man and his role in propelling the revolution from a nationalist, to a socialist, and finally a communist movement. The last chapter considers the global influence of the Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban experiments.Less

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia

Erik Esselstrom

For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimushō) possessed an independent police force that operated within Japan's informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged ... More

For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimushō) possessed an independent police force that operated within Japan's informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with “protecting and controlling” local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book describes how the Gaimushō police became deeply involved in the surveillance and suppression of the Korean independence movement in exile throughout Chinese treaty ports and the Manchurian frontier during the 1920s and 1930s. It had in fact evolved over the years from a relatively benign public security organization into a full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending purveyors of “dangerous thought” throughout the empire. While historians often still depict the Gaimushō as an inhibitor of unilateral military expansionism during the first half of the twentieth century, the book's exposé on the activities and ideology of the consular police dramatically challenges this narrative. Revealing a far greater complexity of motivation behind the Japanese colonial mission, it illustrates how the imperial Japanese state viewed political security at home as inextricably connected to political security abroad from as early as 1919—nearly a decade before overt military aggression began—and approaches northeast Asia as a region of intricate and dynamic social, economic, and political forces.Less

Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan

Philip C. Brown

This book challenges the common understanding of Japanese economic and social history by uncovering diverse landholding practices in early modern Japan. It argues that it was joint landownership of ... More

This book challenges the common understanding of Japanese economic and social history by uncovering diverse landholding practices in early modern Japan. It argues that it was joint landownership of arable land that characterized a few large areas of Japan in the early modern period and even survived in some places down to the late twentieth century. The practice adapted to changing political and economic circumstances and was compatible with increasing farm involvement in the market. Land rights were the product of villages and, to some degree, daimyo policies. Joint ownership structured a number of practices compatible with longer-term investment in and maintenance of arable land. The book provides new perspectives on how villagers organized themselves and their lands, and how their practices were articulated (or were not articulated) to higher layers of administration. It employs an unusually wide array of sources and methodologies: In addition to manuscripts from local archives, it exploits interviews with modern informants who used joint ownership and a combination of modern geographical tools to investigate the degree to which the most common form of joint ownership reflected efforts to ameliorate flood and landslide hazard risk as well as microclimate variation. Further it explores the nature of Japanese agricultural practice, its demand on natural resources, and the role of broader environmental factors—all of which infuse the study with new environmental perspectives and approaches.Less

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan

G. Clinton Godart

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine demonstrates that evolutionary theory was never passively accepted, but played active and controversial roles in modern Japanese thought. Evolutionary theory was ... More

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine demonstrates that evolutionary theory was never passively accepted, but played active and controversial roles in modern Japanese thought. Evolutionary theory was controversial and of a major concern to Japanese Buddhist, Shintō, Confucian, and Christian thinkers, who actively debated and contested the theory. As the Japanese redefined their relation to the world, to nature, and built a modern nation-state, evolutionary theory also became an intellectual battleground, and Japanese state ideology became increasingly hostile to evolutionary theory. Japanese intellectuals and religious thinkers actively and constructively, and often critically, appropriated evolutionary theory for a wide variety of ends, but the religious reception of evolution in Japan was dominated by a long and continuous fear of the idea of nature and society as a cold, materialist, world, governed by a mindless “struggle for survival.” This aversion engendered many religious thinkers, philosophers, and biologists, to find goodness, beauty, and the divine within nature and evolution itself. It was this drive that shaped much of Japan’s modern intellectual history, and changed Japanese understandings of nature, society, and the sacred.Less

Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld

Revealing the fundamental continuities that exist between vernacular fiction and exorcist, martial rituals in the vernacular language, this book argues that a specific type of Daoist exorcism helped ... More

Revealing the fundamental continuities that exist between vernacular fiction and exorcist, martial rituals in the vernacular language, this book argues that a specific type of Daoist exorcism helped shape vernacular novels in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Focusing on the once famous novel Fengshen yanyi (Canonization of the Gods), the book maps out the general ritual structure and divine protagonists that it borrows from much older systems of Daoist exorcism. By exploring how the novel reflects the specific concerns of communities associated with Canonization of the Gods and its ideology, the book is able to reconstruct the cultural sphere in which Daoist exorcist rituals informed late imperial “novels.” It first looks at temple networks and their religious festivals. Much attention is given to local militias who embodied “demon soldiers” as part of their defensive strategies. The book establishes the importance of understanding the idealized realities of literary texts within a larger context of cultural practice and socio-political history. Of particular importance is the ongoing dialog with religious ideology that informs these different discourses. The book makes a convincing case for the need to debunk the retrospective reading of China through the modern, secular Western categories of “literature,” “society,” and “politics.” It shows that this disregard of religious dynamics has distorted our understanding of China and that “religion” cannot be conveniently isolated from scholarly analysis.Less

Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania

Ned Bertz

The Swahili coast port city of Dar es Salaam hosts a diasporic population that emanated in waves from the Indian subcontinent. Based on archival, oral, and newspaper sources from Tanzania and India, ... More

The Swahili coast port city of Dar es Salaam hosts a diasporic population that emanated in waves from the Indian subcontinent. Based on archival, oral, and newspaper sources from Tanzania and India, this book explores the history of encounters across the wider Indian Ocean that shaped regional ideas of diaspora and nationalism from the earliest days of colonialism in Tanganyika to contemporary Tanzania. It focuses on education and leisure in the form of two prominent city locations, schools and cinemas. Through institutional apparatuses like networks of Indian teacher importation, and the market predominance of the Indian film industry, schools and cinemas in East Africa historically were busy urban spaces influenced by actions and ideas that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean. Diaspora and Nation argues that the deployment of an Indian Ocean scale across twentieth-century history enables an examination of the transnational production of ideas about race against the backdrop of changing relationships among movement, place, and claims of belonging as new notions of nationhood and diaspora emerged. The book also demonstrates that much of the creative production of diasporic Indian identities that formed in East Africa was a result of local (albeit cosmopolitan) encounters across cities like Dar es Salaam.Less

The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion

Yucheng Qin

This is a striking, original portrait of the Chinese Six Companies (Zhonghua huiguan), or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the most prominent support organization for Chinese immigrants ... More

This is a striking, original portrait of the Chinese Six Companies (Zhonghua huiguan), or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the most prominent support organization for Chinese immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century. As a federation of “native-place associations” (huiguan) in California, the Six Companies responded to racist acts and legislation by organizing immigrant communities and employing effective diplomatic strategies against exclusion. The book substantiates recent arguments that Chinese immigrants were resourceful in fighting for their rights and argues that through the Six Companies they created a political rhetoric and civic agenda that were then officially adopted by Qing court officials. Out of necessity, these officials turned to the Six Companies for assistance and would in time adopt the tone and format of its programs during China’s turbulent transition from a tributary system to that of a modern nation-state. Eventually the Six Companies and Qing diplomats were defeated by a coalition of anti-Chinese interest groups, but their struggle produced a template for modern Chinese nationalism—a political identity that transcends native place—in nineteenth-century America. The book redefines the historical significance of the huiguan, paying close attention to the transnational experience of the Six Companies, which provides a feasible framework for linking its diplomatic activism with Chinese history as well as the history of Chinese Americans and Sino-American relations.Less