Christopher L. Hill is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at Yale University.

National History and the World of Nations

CAPITAL, STATE, AND THE RHETORIC OF HISTORY IN JAPAN, FRANCE, AND THE UNITED STATESBy Christopher L. Hill

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4298-4

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………….ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………..xv1. National History and the Shape of the Nineteenth-Century World…………………12. Liberal Social Imaginaries and the Interiority of History……………………..473. The Nationality of Expansion……………………………………………….824. Decline, Renewal, and the Rhetoric of Will…………………………………..1195. The Rupture of Meiji and the New Japan………………………………………1556. Americanization and Historical Consciousness…………………………………1947. French Revolution, Third Republic…………………………………………..233Conclusion: National History and Other Worlds…………………………………..269Notes………………………………………………………………………283Bibliography………………………………………………………………..309Index………………………………………………………………………329

Chapter One

NATIONAL HISTORY AND THE SHAPE OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORLD

In 1869, the year that the Suez Canal linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and a rail line joined the coasts of North America, the year after a “restorationist” government seized power in the city renamed Tokyo, a Japanese reformer named Fukuzawa Yukichi published a geography primer called All the Countries of the World (Sekai kuni zukushi). This rhythmically phrased chapbook offers a survey of the political geography of the world beginning in Asia and passing through Africa, Europe, and North and South America, ending finally in the islands of the Pacific. Fukuzawa’s sketch of the world does not stop with the enumeration of countries, although the names alone of most of them would probably have been unfamiliar to his readers, whom he assumed to be the women and children of the new Japanese state. Fukuzawa’s descriptions, elaborated in sidebars to the main text, focus on the countries’ inhabitants and their activities and routinely recur to a handful of criteria: literacy, the pursuit of knowledge, and “character” (seishitsu) or “manners” (fuzoku). Together Fukuzawa calls these “civilization” (bunmei).

As he leads his tour of the world, Fukuzawa also offers another criterion: independence. Possession of independence is an issue only for countries outside Europe. Countries on that continent are assumed to have it. Colonialism, in fact, informs the entire tableau of the world: the student-reader encounters it on the first stop, China, long before reaching the colonial powers themselves in Europe. If colonialism and independence are at stake, then so too is the nation-state. This is clear in the pains that Fukuzawa takes to explain the relationship of such geopolitical questions to civilization. Independence alone does not amount to civilization. The kingdoms west of India such as Afghanistan are independent in name, he says, but the inhabitants “are only savages [ebisu] of coarse customs.” True independence comes only with a collective self-cultivation that Fukuzawa repeatedly exhorts his readers to undertake. His models are Egypt, Brazil, and Chile-for Fukuzawa, countries that have thrown off the foreign yoke to pursue lasting independence through civilization.

All the Countries of the World ends with elusive comments on a Pacific archipelago: “Northeast of New Zealand, beyond many thousands of islands and north of the equator, the Sandwich Islands have a population of scarcely seventy thousand. The land is cramped, but it is an independent country; it governs an isolated, distant part of the North Pacific. The islands’ sole market, Honolulu on the island of Oahu, is a port of call for whalers. Ships from England and the countries of America also stop, and with the commerce entering and departing, the land has become more and more prosperous.” Still a sovereign kingdom at the time, Hawaii seems to epitomize an ideal for Fukuzawa: independent because geographically insulated, prosperous despite slight resources, taking part in the business of the world and gaining from it. Not anticipating the ambitions of the North American planters who dominated the islands’ economy, Fukuzawa suggests that commercial vigor and the personal industriousness it implies are in themselves a guarantee of independence and a bulwark against the colonialism that haunts his picture of the world. That Fukuzawa concludes All the Countries of the World with such comments suggests that Hawaii is a figure for Japan, or at least for a Japan that Fukuzawa, an Anglophile liberal, wants to see appear: one that has taken its place in the world as a nation among nations, one that is a meeting ground of nations, one that has eschewed barbarian independence for civilization and the promise of a progressively greater future.

The optimistic if urgent message of Fukuzawa’s geographical aperu is belied by admissions along the way, grudging in tone, that some nations have fallen from their civilizational zenith. That Fukuzawa makes such an observation about China-the victim of self-satisfaction, he says-is predictable given his long-standing interest in promoting Europe over China as a model for national striving. Yet in Europe itself, he says, once-glorious Spain now lags behind France and England in civilization because of the indolent character of the Spanish people. Indeed, in Europe countries rise and fall according to something that Fukuzawa calls the “tendency of the age” (jisei). He sees Russia, Prussia, Austria, England, and France as the “dawning” powers of the continent, but he leaves open the possibility that they too may decline. Time thus creeps into Fukuzawa’s tableau of the world. In his view, the civilization of nations and their standing in the world are subject to a process of change according to which they form and grow, gain or lose power and independence. Fukuzawa does not name this process in All the Countries of the World, although he will later ponder it at greater length. Fukuzawa and his contemporaries around the world might simply have called it “national history.”

This book is concerned with the narrative and rhetorical forms that national history assumed in three countries, Japan, the United States, and France, in the last third of the nineteenth century. These forms, I argue, allowed writers to explain the place of their nation-a relatively new kind of community-in the world and its relationship to the types of community and political territoriality that preceded it. Such explanations were marked by local and geopolitical conditions, as well as the specific pasts of the places where they were crafted, but reveal compelling similarities in their treatment of problems such as social heterogeneity and the formation of national unity, and in the strategies of narrative and rhetoric they use to transform the past into stories of collective becoming. Although I have called them “explanations,” they were not innocent: one of the most important characteristics of the writing of national history in this period was its labor to channel, constrain, and in some cases extinguish objections to the nation as a form of community and the activities of the state to guarantee its existence.

All the Countries of the World shows many marks of its era. Imperialist expansion and rivalry are facts of the world for Fukuzawa, as is the expansion of world markets that imperial rivalry spurred. But perhaps what Fukuzawa had most in common with historians, novelists, and social philosophers in other parts of the world as they confronted such transformations was his preoccupation with understanding the process of social change in the abstract and Japan’s current stage of development in comparison to other countries. For Fukuzawa, such an understanding was the key not only to geopolitics but also to the problem of what to do with the men, women, and children who had been inducted into the newly created nation-state of Japan. It was the key, then, not only to national independence but also to domestic political stability, the two being aspects of a continuous process of political consolidation centered on the new state. Given Fukuzawa’s conviction of the ultimate political efficacy of knowing the processes of social evolution, it was natural that he would believe such knowledge must not only be gathered by the student of society but also inculcated in society’s students.

The attitude explains Fukuzawa’s choice of audience for All the Countries of the World and the primer’s accessible form. When Fukuzawa declares that China “is moving backward in civilization and enlightenment” because its people have let their manners slacken and neither pursue virtue nor cultivate their intellect, he does not muddy the message with a definition of his terms. An explanation of the voguish idea of “civilization” might interest sophisticates, but Fukuzawa’s discussion of China and its history reflects his contention in the book’s preface that the intelligence of the “nation” (kokumin) is the source of the happiness and woes of a realm. He aims to exhort readers through a negative example: cultivate yourselves or suffer the fate of China, rocked by domestic chaos and progressively losing position against the European and American powers. (An explanation of civilization finally appears in an appendix on political geography, where Fukuzawa explains that civilization is the final stage of social development, following chaos, barbarism, and semi-enlightenment.)

Fukuzawa’s attitude toward his readers suggests that he considers their knowledge of history part of a national mobilization in which the self-cultivation of individuals combines in a collective movement of progress and self-protection. Yet reading All the Countries of the World in the twenty-first century, when economic and political events have diminished the apparent universality of the nation-state as a political form, one can recognize that it is Fukuzawa’s hortatory position, and not his description of geographic and political boundaries, that projects and thus creates the primer’s audience of a striving national “people.” Indeed, the performative quality of All the Countries of the World-it creates something in the utterance, rather than describing something that is already there-should alert us to the possibility that national history is preeminently a practice of writing, not an explication of facts (such as origins and turning points) that exist prior to their representation. If we examine national history as a practice of writing, comprising specific rhetorical figures and narrative techniques, we can see that invoking threats to the nation’s existence and exhorting the people to mobilize are inseparable, nearly indistinguishable, from the story it tells about the national past, present, and future. How such a practice works and what political possibilities it opens and forecloses are the major topics of this book.

The Shape of the World: Markets, States, Communication, Travel

The metaphorical layer of meaning in Fukuzawa’s treatment of Hawaii at the end of All the Countries of the World attests to the role that figurative language and related techniques of narrative play in national history’s treatment of the various, diverse pasts of the territory claimed by modern nation-states. Such strategies of language are not crafted in a vacuum but conditioned and constrained by worldly economic, political, and social conditions. This chapter surveys such conditions in the late nineteenth century at the level of the globe and in three countries that I take as points for studying the transnational phenomenon of national history-Japan, the United States, and France-and then considers the question of why representations of history were central to debate on the nation. I make no assumptions about the background knowledge of readers, who may be specialists in one or another of the countries, to establish the perspective for what must be an international, rather than simply comparative, investigation.

Fukuzawa’s figurative substitution of Hawaii for Japan as an independent trading nation in All the Countries of the World succeeds because it is grounded in what Charles Tilly has called “the two interdependent master processes” of the modern era, the formation of a system of national states and a worldwide system of markets and capital accumulation. Hawaii-as-Japan depends for its plausibility on a broad awareness of the unfolding of these two processes, and indeed one can say that the connection between Hawaii as figure and Japan as referent passes through or is mediated by such an awareness. In the figure’s elaboration of a national future, moreover, the processes are interdependent: not only is commercial engagement with the world expected to ensure the independence of the Japanese state, but such political independence is to be the basis for commercial vigor. That Fukuzawa’s view of the world and Japan’s place in it should be so fundamentally informed by knowledge of its geopolitical and economic form suggests that a single global modernity, rooted in the uneven and inequitable but hegemonic systems of states and markets, had emerged by this period. That a social reformer in Japan, a historian in the United States, and the writer of a textbook in France, among others, regarded the conditions of their nations from differing positions in such a single modernity is a basic premise of this book. After observing such general connections, however, one must concede that the processes Tilly outlines not only are “large,” as he says, but also reach back hundreds of years before the late-nineteenth-century moment I take as my subject. The writing of national history, too, has its own history. In the late nineteenth century, it was preoccupied with the particular relationship between capital and political territoriality that prevailed at the time.

We can begin to understand this relationship between capital and territoriality in terms of the transition from the age of “free-trade imperialism” to the second wave of European colonization. Following the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe in 1815, the imperial rivalry and overt calls for overseas territorial acquisition of the eighteenth century faded from the international political scene. Not only did British naval dominance of the seas make expansion difficult for any state save Britain, but the fact that the newly independent states in North and South America were free to trade with anyone they liked also dramatically weakened the classical mercantilist justification for territorial expansion itself. In place of territorial expansion and the establishment of formal rule, Britain in particular pursued a strategy of informal control through trade agreements and financial arrangements, resulting in a great and secure expansion of trade. When the security of British interests was threatened, however, policymakers never hesitated to establish formal control. It was thus that, in the apparently anti-imperialist interregnum between the territorially acquisitive eighteenth century and the return of inter-imperialist conflict in the 1870s, European powers expanded their overseas territories faster than in any earlier period. In 1800, Europe, its territorial claims, and its former colonies made up 55 percent of the earth’s land surface, but the gap between territory claimed and territory controlled was great: actual control extended over just 35 percent of land surface, much of this being Europe itself. By 1878, however, European powers and former colonies exerted control over 67 percent of the earth’s land, a vast increase during an “anti-imperial” era. (The total would reach nearly 85 percent by 1914.)

Giovanni Arrighi has shown that the simultaneous pursuit of free trade and imperial expansion was far from contradictory, but rather essential to the “part-capitalist, part-territorialist,” and fully coherent imperial structure of Britain, which dominated both the world economy and world politics. The practice of free trade during this period was largely unilateral: Britain opened its markets to foreign goods in the 1840s and kept them open until 1931, but a multilateral regime effectively prevailed for only nineteen years, between 1860 and 1879. Britain’s position fostered rapid growth in international trade in which the capitalist market reached nearly every corner of the world. Participation in the market theoretically was open and equal, under the ideally free conditions described by liberal economics. Supported by the dominant positions of the empire in international politics and London in finance, however, the free-trade regime created a world economy that in fact depended on the continued expansion of British wealth and power. Given this reality, British interests were identified with those of the market economy per se, a situation that Arrighi identifies as one of Gramscian hegemony, in which Britain was able to successfully assert that its particular economic and political interests were also the universal interest. While the size of the empire and of the domestic-colonial economy laid the ultimate foundation of such hegemonic aspirations, the identification of Britain with the universal allowed it to exert power over the international state system and world economy to an extent that surpassed Britain’s actual ability to intervene.

(Continues…)

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