This dissertation examines the trajectory of Japan's aviation from its birth in 1910 until 1937, when, on the eve of war with China, Japanese military aviation matched and in many aspects even surpassed that of the West. In particular this study, which draws predominantly on archival material from Japan and Germany, seeks to demonstrate that German influence on Japan's aviation became dominant by the mid-1920s and continued for a decade. German assistance prepared Japanese engineers for the important transition from imitation to independent design. It also profoundly reshaped the Japanese military's air fleet and air strategy.

The 1919 Versailles Treaty drew the attention of the Japanese to the high standard of German aviation technology when it granted the Japanese free access to German factories and military facilities. These visits, together with the arrival of German war trophy aircraft in Japan, prompted the Japanese to purchase German airplanes and production licenses and to invite German engineers to Japan to educate a new generation of Japanese aircraft designers.

German aircraft manufacturers became instrumental in the rise of the Imperial Japanese Navy's air power. German hardware and know-how laid the foundation for the design and production of flying boats and carrier airplanes. These state-of the-art aircraft substantially enhanced the navy's strike force and emboldened its air strategists to embrace a technology-driven hawkishness.

With the help of German aviation specialists the Imperial Japanese Army also modernized its air squadrons. During the 1931 invasion of Manchuria the army deployed some of the world's most advanced military aircraft. Yet, the successes of these airplanes made the army's planners complacent. They drifted into a doctrinal slumber that paid little attention to the further development of an advanced air strategy.

Shifting the focus from aircraft design toward aircraft production, the dissertation also addresses the limits of German influence. The Japanese were aware of the advances in Germany's production technology. However, the military's emphasis on aircraft with ever higher performance and the industry's continuing reliance on small subcontractors took a heavy toll on productivity. An industry that built world-class fighters and bombers was ill-prepared to produce them efficiently in large numbers.

This dissertation analyzes the role of sound in language use in early Chinese texts. By focusing on developments of sound-based recurrences such as rhyme and paronomasia, focusing on the classical, foundational texts from the third to first centuries BCE, I offer a new understanding of how textuality, the writing system, and language itself were conceptualized during these centuries. Overall, I argue that these sound-based devices underwent transformative functional and structural changes, in which their primary focus shifted from composition to interpretation. I trace the importance of sound in language use from the Later Mohist textual material through other Warring States texts, including the “Masters’ literature” (zǐ shū 子書), all the way to Hàn dynasty material. Specifically, this dissertation highlights that sound recurrences in early Chinese texts occur both as a structuring element for longer material – whereby sound coordinates textual units – and as a means to express conceptual and ontological connections valid for ancient language users. Additionally, this dissertation proposes to computationally apply existing historical phonological data at scale to digitized early Chinese textual material in order to detect phonological recurrences. Key findings of this study include, firstly, that early Chinese rhymes and paronomasia did not only fulfill ornamental and mnemonic functions but could also form the basis for performative segments, arguments, and ontological connections postulated by and in texts. Secondly, functions of paronomasia shift over centuries, changing from compositional devices to decidedly interpretive tools.

Manchukuo was a state that was established by the Japanese military in Manchuria (Northeast China) in 1932 and collapsed in 1945 with the defeat of Japan. Immediately after its founding, the Japanese Kwantung Army, later joined by the Manchukuo Army, initiated a series of "bandit suppression"(tōbatsu; 討伐) campaigns to consolidate the new regime. This dissertation will focus on "bandit suppression" in Manchukuo as a means of illuminating the state's claims to legitimacy, its ability to mobilize at different levels, and the involvement of "bandit suppression" in other dimensions of state building. By examining how "bandit suppression" was perceived, represented, and practiced in the context of Manchukuo's state building, I will argue that the perception of the "bandit problem" and the practice of suppression campaigns in Manchukuo embodied the state's pursuit of legitimacy. Furthermore, the ideological, administrative, and legal construction of the state, as well the widespread mobilization of different groups of people in the "anti-bandit" campaigns also facilitated the state building process of Manchukuo.

Through the lens of "bandit suppression," I will suggest that the crucial concern of the state was to obtain legitimacy as the foundation of governmental power. Confronted with domestic disorder and the influence of Chinese nationalism, for Manchukuo itself to gain recognition and legitimacy for its continued existence as a state, it had to create a consciousness of its right to govern and the recognition by the governed of that right. Besides, to obtain legitimacy and consolidate state authority also involved "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society." Therefore, the campaigns against "bandits" were often accompanied by the proclamation of the founding ideas of Manchukuo, including the principles of the "Kingly Way" (ōdō; 王道), "ethnic harmony," and bringing peace and order to the people. In this sense, "bandit suppression" embodied "a state historiographic discourse about order, ordering, justice, and freedom."

This study consists of the cultural and intellectual interactions between literary elites in China and Korea that took place from the late nineteenth century to 1945. Although most of the relevant historiography of modern Korea emphasizes the influence of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) on Korea’s modern historical path, I examine the ways that the post-nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual interactions between the literary elites in China and Korea contributed to the rise of modern Korea. In particular, I focus on Korean literary elites in China—envoys, educators, and exiles—to account for the ways that their engagement with Chinese officials and intellectuals stimulated the swift metamorphosis of Korea that began in the 1860s and continued until the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945).

The first two chapters of the dissertation investigate early Sino-Korean relations before the arrival of Western influences, examining these relations through exchange envoys and the modern print culture in Shanghai, which strongly influenced Korea in the late nineteenth century. These chapters comprise the first part of the dissertation that focuses on Korea’s encounter with the modern world through China. I show how the perceptions of Korean intellectuals in China contributed directly to the change in Korea’s attitude toward the West, and indeed the world, pushing perspectives far beyond the traditional tributary system toward embracing a broader intellectual curiosity and pursuit. Following this, the next two chapters explore the interactions between Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Shanghai during the Japanese colonial period. Each chapter focuses on influential Korean nationalist thinkers and their activities to legitimize Korea’s anticolonial struggle through a Sino-Korean nationalist dialogue and the political impact of Sino-Korean nationalism in East Asia in the twentieth century.

 Sino-Korean relations in the early twentieth century illustrate the essential transnational role of intellectual ideas relating to reform, national history, and nationalist thought in shaping cultures and countries. In the conclusion, I suggest how such a historical argument can support the construction of a regional history of East Asia as an approach for examining the political tension in East Asia that has been caused by historical disputes. This study of sinographic dialogues within the East Asia region contributes in developing a nuanced understanding of regional interaction and its dynamic in East Asia.

This dissertation bridges the gap of modern Chinese history divided by the Taiping wars. The first three chapters cover the consolidation of commercial taxes and charitable organizations by the central state, which culminated in the reinvention of the lijin merchant funds for public finance in the 1850s. The middle chapter on upper-gentry activism during the Taiping wars details how elites altered national policies in diplomacy as well as military deployment. From Shanghai, upper-gentry elites persuaded the central state to request foreign powers to intervene in the Chinese civil war. Elites also lured the Hunan army commanded by Li Hongzhang to Shanghai with lijin revenue. The final two chapters document how upper-gentry elites drew from both recent experiences and long-established practices to achieve the gentrification of lijin by perpetuating war-time contingencies for the long-term successes of their families. By formalizing lijin as a replacement of land tax in the post-war reconstruction period, upper-gentry elites shifted the fiscal burden from landowners to everyday consumers.At the core of this dissertation is a prosopography on a group of upper-gentry elites associated with Suzhou. Having earned the official status with exam degrees and/or office purchase, their experience as refugees in Shanghai during the Taiping wars enabled new plans for the future: some left officialdom and became indulged in collecting art; some continued to work for the public sector and benefited from social networks forged during the war; some built new business empires and expanded them to charitable organizations; some got lost in the economic downturn after the war and had to live on borrowing. By joining individual experiences with long-term structural changes, this study revises prevalent conclusions on post-Taiping China as either in devolution or restoration. Challenges from the Taiping rebels and foreign imperialists in the new era were simultaneously opportunities for the elites and the state to bound more firmly. This trusting and interdependent relationship between the emperor and his ministers in and out of office, I argue, is the crucial condition to understand Qing history, which also hints why everything seemed different in the twentieth century.

The military in early nineteenth century China (1800-1840) has often been portrayed as an institution in steep decline, its troops addicted to opium and its officers incompetent and corrupt. This dissertation argues that the narrative of decline has overshadowed significant changes in the relation between military and society during the same period. These changes were shaped most profoundly by the White Lotus War (1796-1804), a major conflict between the Qing dynasty and White Lotus sectarians in central China.

Many of the most neglected effects of the White Lotus War emerged through the deaths and lives of its military participants. In the decades after the war, the tens of thousands of Chinese war dead and military veterans, most of them members of the Green Standard branch of the Qing military, became the focus of cultural practices across the empire. These men are the main subjects of the dissertation. Chapters 2 to 4 explore the commemoration and representation of the Chinese war dead, with case studies on the construction of prefectural Manifest Loyalty Shrines, the issuing and reception of hereditary titles to officers killed in battle, and the writing and compilation of nonofficial and official biographies. Chapters 5 to 7 look at the veterans of the war, men who took advantage of loosening state control over discourse on military topics to tell their own stories and were, in turn, the objects of fascination at many levels of society.

The cultural practices discussed in the dissertation emerged at the intersection of state initiatives, cultural tradition, representational space, and personal history. They were a sign of both the hegemony of ideas about the state and the limits of the Qing state as a system. I suggest that the early nineteenth century state took on the role of a cultural authority, authorizing certain sites and symbols related to war as legitimate objects of cultural practice, but increasingly unable or unwilling to directly choreograph war commemoration and military spectacle. The elaborate and top-down production of military culture that had been typical of the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) gave way under the Jiaqing emperor (1796-1820) to diverse practices organized but not controlled by the state.

This dissertation examines the role of intermediaries and ritual in reconciling conflicting interests in fifteenth century Japan. The first half of the century was a moment of comparative peace but also desperate improvisation. Administrative and judicial institutions survived but overlapped and were mutable, bending to the erratic demands of warlords. The dissertation argues that oaths and ceremonies provided certainty where institutions no longer could, structuring communities to enable conflict resolution at relatively predictable intervals. Unofficial intermediaries, here called conciliators, stepped in for devalued official ones, using their prestige to intercede with authority figures and buffer disputes or reinforce settlements. These pragmatic expedients fueled the personalization of power, revealing the process by which individuals absorbed the power of institutions.Central Japan in the fifteenth century produced an unusual preponderance of materials that reveal the negotiations underlying official action. These include diary-chronicles (kanbun nikki), many of them by professional intermediaries and others by people who relied on their aid; the lists, drafts, social poetry, and other semi-ephemeral documents on the reverse sides of the paper used to produce the diary-chronicles (shihai monjo); and the meeting records of councils that governed a large and wealthy temple. These, supplemented by sources more focused on final outcomes, are analyzed through two primary lenses: ritual and communication via intermediaries. Both intermediaries and ritual, individually and in concert, bridged the gaps between institutional structures and what the people inhabiting them could achieve and accept. By examining the ways that these strategies served communities’ needs while widening the very gaps they bridged, the dissertation illuminates a change often dismissed as mere decline: the loss of interconnected multi-regional institutions—even as inter-regional trade and communication expanded—in favor of the increased authority of individuals over their immediate communities.

My dissertation is a history of the nine ranks system, an institution that guided the selection of officials in early medieval China (220-589), with an emphasis on the intellectual dimension of its inception, development, and impacts. The two central questions I seek to answer are: why did China adopt this unique system of arraying official candidates into nine ranks for more than three hundred years? What impact did this political institution have over Chinese individuals, over their social and intellectual lives? By examining primary sources from this period, I characterize the nine ranks system as a meritocratic experiment that sought to overcome the shortcomings of the recommendation-based system yet diverged from its initial design and further stifled social mobility in this period. Moreover, by analyzing the intellectual discourses about the nine ranks, I contend that this political institution also shaped the social and religious lives of individuals through its impact on their perceptions of merit, power, order, and social hierarchy.

This dissertation explores Japanese commercial, intellectual, and material engagement with medicines imported by the United East India Company (VOC) and its successors from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Medicinal substances sourced from across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East like cinnamon, cloves, and saffron constituted a major part of Dutch trade to Japan from the seventeenth century onward. Various disruptions and reorganizations of the Dutch trading network at the turn of the nineteenth century caused an increase in the supply of these goods to Japan. This coincided with renewed scholarly efforts to translate and adapt “Dutch medicine” (ranpō) for use by Japanese physicians, apothecaries, and consumers. Interest in and consumption of “Dutch medicine” peaked in the nineteenth century, and it was available across Japan as commercial medicine (baiyaku) sold in shops and by itinerant merchants. Drawing from a wide range of visual, material, and textual sources in Japanese, Dutch, and literary Chinese, this study contributes to a better understanding of the objects, mechanisms, and agents involved in early modern global trade. The Dutch trade in medicinal substances was representative of the inherently hybrid and intra-Asian nature of the goods and ideas brought to Japan by the VOC and its successors. The adaptation and consumption of these products engaged a diverse group of historical actors beyond the socio-political elite, most notably apothecaries and merchants who leveraged growing interest in “Dutch medicine” to sell their wares. As a whole, this dissertation dismantles the teleological and Eurocentric narratives of rangaku and “Dutch influence” that have informed so many histories of early modern and modern Japan, instead offering an understanding of medicine and medical knowledge that is shaped by global circulations, local practices, and the diversity of the early modern marketplace.

This dissertation explores how people living in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) dealt with illness. Doctor-based care has most often captured the attention of historians, but the proportion of time doctors physically spent with patients was dwarfed by that provided by domestic caregivers. To elucidate the medical landscape of Edo and describe how urban residents cared for sick family members, I draw from a rich body of family records. These include more than a dozen diaries and over fifty family records written between 1750 and 1868, composed by men and women of diverse social status and occupation such as samurai, commoners, popular authors, and doctors.

Chapter One illustrates how day-to-day management of illness was implemented by family members rather than by medical practitioners, demonstrating the key role of women as mobile caregivers and the ways in which illness bound families together. Chapter Two examines what sufferers consumed when they fell ill, revealing the importance of adjusting diet, self-medicating, and record keeping within the home. Chapter Three depicts the role of religious sites and therapies in the lives of Edo residents, showing the importance of family members’ prayer by proxy.

Against this backdrop of therapeutic options, Chapter Four explores how families interacted with medical practitioners by using the records of three Edo physicians to trace their daily routines. Diaries of families who hired physicians show that they often saw several doctors over the course of a single illness. Seeing a doctor was not a binary relationship between patient and practitioner but an enterprise that mobilized multiple family members. Chapter Five argues that illness in late Tokugawa Japan was a social event on the scale of weddings or births—one that could bring dozens of visitors to the home, all bringing gifts. In total, this dissertation contends that health care in early modern Japan was rooted in the family, and that the patterns of therapeutic practice seen in early modern diaries were fundamentally shaped by familial participation in illness management.

The Ise shrines are known throughout Japan as the residence of the mythical progenitor of the Japanese Imperial line, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Ise has held long-lasting importance in legitimating the Japanese imperial line and operating as an important site for state-sponsored rituals. Ise maintains an image of unchanged continuity reaching deep into the foundational myths of the country. In fact, Ise fell into ruin in the mid-fifteenth century. The physical destruction of the Ise shrines has long been thought to coincide with the collapse of the Japanese state during a period of internal conflict at the end of the fifteenth century. Conversely, this dissertation posits that the Ise region was selectively ignored by the imperial court who supported the Yoshida family, an ambitious sect of Shintō ritualists, in place of the Ise shrines. The interactions between the court and the Ise shrines reveal a shift in the meaning of Ise as a place of political and religious significance, and not the collapse of the state itself. The Yoshida moved important sites where deities were worshipped and determined the sacred geography of Japan. They relocated Amaterasu’s shrine, first to the capital in Kyoto, and then eventually to the city of Yamaguchi in western Japan. In response to this reconfiguration, local pilgrimage facilitators known as onshi propagated an image of Ise as a desirable location for travel and ritual observance. It was during the important period of division with the Yoshida family that much of the imagery and meaning of what Ise became was developed and came to play a central role in the forms of cultural, religious, and political legitimacy that exist in Japan to this day. The shrines were similarly threatened economically and politically by local actors within their home province. This dissertation also examines the Kitabatake family of Ise province to provide insight into the larger picture of economic and political change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This dissertation aims to provide insight into this dynamic period of contestation and present a new vista of religious and political behavior in Japan.

This study investigates Qing institutions and its ventures of conveying ideology in the eighteenth century. It begins with portraying the sovereign’s felt challenges from the scholar-officials’ placement. The Qianlong emperor’s solution utilized commissions to impose bureaucratic trials upon the candidates’ perceived merits. In particular, he made heavy use of the education commissions, which bridged literary policies between the imperial center and the provinces, as the premier venue of evaluation. The commissioners came with the best scholarly credentials. Their omnipresence in compilation, education, and examination tasks had brought ideological production and propagation together under the throne’s heedful observation. Empowered by this new role, the commissioned academicians were able to fulfill an ambitious vision of textual promulgation, moral cultivation, and literary training to achieve an unprecedented level of ideological conformity among the educated sector of the populace. They earned imperial attention and support as a result of the Qianlong emperor’s professionalized approach to a Yongzheng-era reform. In return, newly-minted Classical commentaries produced at the imperial court were distributed through these commissioners to reach the empire’s lettered communities. The outcome, proven by substantial reports, was positive in both the emperor and the commissioners’ favor. Invested in a reciprocal relationship, these commissioners’ efforts were intertwined with the state’s avid agenda for cultivation, education, and examination reforms. This process refreshes our knowledge about this era’s state capacity of ideological practice as well as the state’s institutional integration with scholarly elites during the Yongzheng-Qianlong continuum. The ideological activism of this era was motivated by multiple factors that were highly dependent on the institutional premises. Hence, it was developed as a governing tool as opposed to an imminent need or interest. I use the archives of memorials and edicts to describe and analyze the institutional precondition, logic, setup, function, and logistics of utilizing scholars and delivering ideas. I focus on the institutional changes and their impact on collective performance. I argue for a strong correlation between emperorship and organizational coherence in the use of intellectual projects and the intra-bureaucratic discussions on pertinent topics. Consequently, the institutions of conveying ideology became an organic part of the imperial rule.

The present work treats the Manchu script’s influence on language studies in Qīng China, roughly covering the period 1607–1911. The Manchu script, which had its roots in the Near East, was used to write the language of the Qīng ruling house and parts of its hereditary military elite. The Qīng empire emerged as a regional power in Northeast Asia in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and subsequently ruled China and parts of Inner Asia from the mid-seventeenth century until 1912, when a republic replaced it in China and parts of the other former imperial possessions.

This study argues that Qīng thinkers theorized the Manchu script in reference to ideas from the Inner Asian and partially Buddhist Chinese traditions. As such, the Manchu script formed the basis of a distinct method of serial lexicographic arrangement, eventually applied also to Chinese corpora, and heavily influenced how speech sounds were transcribed across writing systems in Chinese and Manchu dictionaries, thesauri, and language manuals. The study demonstrates this thesis by discussing the development of elementary Manchu language pedagogy, lexicography, and phonology.

The dissertation introduces the languages historically spoken and written in China; gives an overview of education in imperial China and traces the development of Chinese lexicography and phonology as disciplines before the late imperial period; describes the history of script creation in Inner Asia, including in Manchuria; discusses the Manchu bureaucracy, education, and publishing in China in the period of Manchu rule; presents the history of the Manchu syllabary; traces the development of Manchu dictionaries as tools for managing information; argues how the encounter with the Manchu script compelled Chinese scholars to develop new methods of indicating the pronunciation of Chinese characters; and, finally, shows that the Manchu script came to be used to clarify the pronunciation of the emerging standard Chinese language of Mandarin. An appendix problematizes and traces how European scholars came to think of the Manchu script not as a syllabary, as they thought of it in China, but as an alphabet similar to the European script.

"Kara kagami" (The Mirror of China) is something of an enigma--only six of an original ten scrolls survive, and there is no critical edition with comprehensive annotation or previous translation. A work composed for Imperial Prince-cum-Shogun Munetaka by the scion of a distinguished line of Confucian scholars, Fujiwara no Shigenori, on a topic of pressing interest in the thirteenth century--the fate of Continental China--it embodies many of the characteristic concerns of Kamakura Japan. Tensions between privatization and circulation of learning, imperial and warrior authority, Japan's envisioning of China and her relations thereto, as well as a larger cosmological narrative all run through the work. Yet they do so ways that challenge now long-held ideas of language, stance towards the Continent and its traditions, and narratives of generic development and resistance.

This dissertation explores the ways in which "The Mirror of China" defies familiar-yet-passé conceptions of medieval Japan. It examines afresh how three issues in medieval discourse--language selection, portrayals of China, and narrating Japan--are refracted in "The Mirror of China" in order to better understand text-based claims of political, cultural, and philosophical authority. "The Mirror of China"'s linguistically diverse manuscripts invite question of the worldviews or allegiances of identity a multilingual text can intimate. Its depiction of China and the implied narratives such a vision creates likewise differ markedly from those of contemporary works. And lastly, the linguistic and thematic innovation it brings to the Heian genre of "Mirror" writing marks a previously obscured turning point in medieval historiographic writing, one that allows an appreciation of the genre as a medieval experiment in crafting histories as legitimating narratives. Drawing on multiple understudied works in addition to better-known writings, this dissertation provides a new understanding of how medieval thinkers exploited languages, images, and traditions in order to create their own visions of authority.

This dissertation examines religion and warrior culture during Japan's sixteenth century. It views the period from the perspective of the Otomo warrior band, which provides an ideal case study, because its members supported not only cultic sites established for the veneration of traditional gods (kami) and buddhas (hotoke), but also ones for the Christian God (Deus) as well. It demonstrates how the incorporation of Christianity's innovative and disruptive elements into the military organization affected Japan's encounter with Europeans and Christianity. In particular, it connects the initial acceptance and eventual rejection of missionary efforts to issues of religious practice.

The career of Otomo Sorin (1530-1587) illustrates the potential for change that Christianity brought to Japan after it was introduced in 1549. The leader of the Otomo warrior band first embraced Buddhism as a lay monk in 1562, and then was baptized as a Catholic in 1578, before finally experiencing a postmortem reversion back to Buddhism at the hands of his son in 1587. On the one hand, he represents the religious stance of a typical military leader; during most of his life he patronized multiple temples and shrines in order to align himself strategically with important religious and political centers, while also seeking to mobilize the deities housed at these sites to support him. On the other hand, he was a visionary; in the last decade of his life he retired and attempted to establish a Christian kingdom in Japan that would operate according to Western customs without the assistance of gods and buddhas. Previous research on Japan's sixteenth century has focused on the commercial interests of Christian lords like him in order to account for the initial appeal of the foreign faith. It has also emphasized the ideological fears that authoritarian warlords had of organized religion in order to explain their later rejection of it. Yet, scholarship thus far has had little to say about religious practice. Through an exploration of conditions in the Otomo warrior band, this dissertation exposes some of the relatively unexplored religious fault lines that could disrupt military organizations.

This dissertation tracks three interrelated developments at a local level: the origins of pearl cultivation in the Japanese empire, the rise of European machine-mediated gemological testing designed to identify “cultured” pearls from Japan, and the contentious transformation of the cultured pearl into a ubiquitous object of adornment in the United States. It argues that Japanese pearl cultivation and the products of pearl cultivation redrew distinctions between nature and culture in the twentieth-century world. Its structure comes from the company controlled by a figure later known inside and outside the Japanese empire as the “Pearl King.”

Some of the Japanese empire’s largest farms appeared not on land, but in the water. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Japanese man named Mikimoto Kōkichi began to raise living shellfish and surgically manipulate them in order to produce pearls for export. In the formal terms of imperial Japanese industrial property and fisheries law, pearl oysters became ownable creatures that were susceptible to tinkering and capable of producing pearls on demand. Wide-ranging kinship, labor, patronage, and property relationships supported Mikimoto’s reputation as an individual whose business was raising shellfish and selling the pearls they were made to produce. Mikimoto made the first exclusive ownership claims over pearl oysters, their habitats, and their productive capabilities, but those same moves resulted in legal and extralegal disputes with fishers and other would-be cultivators in Japan. The advantages of monopoly and monoculture also revealed social and ecological fissures amid constant battles to keep human and non-human interlopers out of individually-claimed ocean space.

From the early 1920s onward, pearl dealers in Paris and London attempted to create and enforce distinctions between pearls cultivated in the Japanese empire and the “oriental” pearls that they themselves bought and sold. Members of Europe’s largest pearl wholesaler associations turned the “Japanese pearl” into an issue of legal demarcation, product testing, and advertising rhetoric. Despite claiming to be connoisseurs of surfaces, anti-cultivation wholesalers began to argue that a pearl’s value could be ascertained only after an examination of its internal structure. European pearl dealers tried to shore up trust between buyers and sellers by shedding light on what they saw as the innate differences between a natural and a cultured object. Years of legal and scientific debate resulted in a transnational system for separating “cultured” pearls from “natural” ones.

Markets for “natural” and “cultured” pearls changed dramatically amid the global repercussions of post-1929 financial crisis and post-1931 Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland. A standard view in the historiography of the Persian Gulf region is that Japanese pearl cultivation decimated the region’s hitherto dominant pearl economy as its oil economy was taking shape. This dissertation argues that mass pearl cultivation was a contradictory response to a rising number of cultivators in 1930s Japan. Mikimoto tried to control competing Japanese pearl production through the use of patent-sharing agreements, even as his own farms processed more shellfish than ever before.

The 1920s European battles over pearl nomenclature moved to a new and different field in the interwar United States. In New York City, the world’s largest post World War I market for pearls and precious stones, the affordability of cultured pearl necklaces became part of gendered depression-era appeals by Mikimoto’s salesmen—and newly arrived American cultured pearl dealers—to entice American women to purchase objects of adornment rather than objects of investment.

Even as Mikimoto made claims to intervene in the lives of marine shellfish in order to produce more pearls, his claims fueled clashes over how, and by whom, those interventions and products would be controlled and represented. Precisely because there were multiple and often competing meanings of cultivation, relationships between humans and mollusks—as well as the products that resulted from them—became flashpoints of conflict on land and sea.

This dissertation investigates Chinese impressions of Guangdong, the southernmost province of the Qing Empire (1644-1912), as an administrative or territorial unit, as a political concept, and—most importantly—as a source of identity. It interprets autobiographies, biographies, poems, literary letters, and political treatises as expressions of a new provincial identity informed by imperial decline, foreign ideas, and transcultural exchanges. By the beginning of the twentieth century, long before Guangdong would experiment with capitalism and economic decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s, its literati were already grappling with the issues of local autonomy, state control, and self-representation. By examining the writings of five literati who experienced China’s tumultuous transition from empire to nation—He Ruzhang 何如璋 (1838-1891), Deng Chengxiu 鄧承修 (1841-1892), Qiu Fengjia 丘逢甲 (1864-1912), Ou Jujia 歐榘甲 (1870-1911), and Liang Jushi 梁居實 (1843-1911)—this dissertation explores the historical context of the autonomy of contemporary Chinese provinces. It suggests that narrating a history of provincial identity and central-local relations outside the purview of statist and nation-centric perspectives can infuse fresh insights into tired historiographical and political credos about reform and revolution as well as provide an example that would supplement studies of nationalism of other parts of the world. Created in its current form during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, Guangdong has developed a life of its own. It represents a locus for identity that is simultaneously cultural, ethnic, political, and personal. This dissertation thus focuses less on textual representations than on the personal inventions of provincial identity by selected Guangdong literati. Although marginal to the dominant discourses on state-oriented reform and revolution of their day, the vision of Chinese provincialism articulated by these literati accompanied the rise of ethnic Han nationalism. Through them, this dissertation explores the provincial roots of China’s national identity. It demonstrates how provincialism was fused with nationalist ideas in the late Qing Empire and has continued to influence debates on culture, history, and statecraft in contemporary China.

This dissertation documents the evolution of geography as a scholarly field from the high point of the Qing dynasty to its last decades, and its enduring impacts on China and the world. Specifically, I examine how a paradigm shift in geographical scholarship contributed

to the Qing’s reconquest of Xinjiang in the British-Russian Great Game and the establishment of the Xinjiang province in the 1870s and 1880s. My research reveals that in the wake of the sweeping socio-political transition at the turn of the eighteenth century, a policy-oriented geographical scholarship that connected the knowledge of archaic toponyms with that of present terrains and subjects took form. The fiscal and geopolitical lenses provided by the new scholarship shaped the ways the imperial state overhauled the Xinjiang society in the 1870s and 1880s.

This dissertation is composed of five chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate the burgeoning of geographical literature on Xinjiang from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century in conjunction with the expansion of resident bureaucrats and exiles’ efforts to make Xinjiang fiscally legible. Military governors and exiles were the pillars of the Qing administration. The two chapters respectively examine travel writings and gazetteers produced by the two groups and the transmission of these texts, which provided Chinese scholars with a fiscal perspective into the once-mystical “Western Regions.”

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss how the changing domestic and international environment urged the Qing to reevaluate Xinjiang’s fiscal and geopolitical value, thereby providing geographical scholars in official and non-official capacities with the means to participate in national politics. Their studies of fresh water and other natural resources aimed to persuade statesmen that Xinjiang was a fertile borderland with enormous revenue potential: with proper management, the revenues generated by agricultural colonies were bound to meet control costs. The studies of Russia and Britain in the post-Opium War era urged policy makers to reassess the strategic importance of Xinjiang in the international order.

Chapter 5 looks at how geographical knowledge played a critical role in the grand policy debate on the fate of Xinjiang in 1874 and the Qing’s negotiation with Russia on the return of the Ili region in 1880-1881. Through two cases, I demonstrate how scholarship was translated into policies, thereby influencing the empire’s grand strategy in Inner Asia.

This dissertation charts Japan’s rise in world shipping from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. At the turn of the century, several companies established the first transoceanic shipping services under the Japanese flag. Japanese ships could soon be found in ports on every continent, and by the end of the First World War (1914–1918) the nation boasted a fleet that was the world’s third largest. In the interwar period, Japanese ships continued to advance into world trade routes, but with the outbreak of the Pacific War (1941–1945), they were mobilized to create an autarkic bloc in Asia. The subsequent destruction of the commercial fleet, however, precipitated the collapse of Japan’s empire.

By examining Japanese efforts to develop a national fleet and promote its advance into overseas trade routes, this study argues that Japan’s rise as a modern nation-state and imperial power rested on its ships becoming integral components of systems of global transportation. As military transports and naval auxiliaries, commercial ships contributed to imperial expansion by projecting military power overseas. As commercial transports, they contributed to the consolidation of Japan’s empire by facilitating movements of people, goods, and information between territories. At the same time, Japanese companies, often with state support, developed shipping services in trade routes beyond the empire. By examining these trajectories of oceanic expansion, this study argues that officials, business leaders, and intellectuals sought to secure Japan’s position as a world power by making the nation an agent of global interconnectedness.

Efforts to promote Japanese shipping, moreover, were often influenced by the observation of rival maritime powers. The transnational flows of information made possible by shipping and other infrastructure informed approaches to shipping and maritime affairs in Japan and beyond. By examining how Japan’s maritime leaders engaged with and produced ideas about world shipping, this dissertation tells a global story about the ways that imperial competition motivated efforts to create connections across borders and seas.

In this dissertation I set out to question the status of the Analects (Lunyu 論語, or The Selected Sayings) as the most authoritative source of Confucius's teachings and, in the process, to rethink Confucius's place in early Chinese intellectual history.

Part one is a roadmap to the thousands of Confucius sayings preserved in the early corpus. It includes an in-depth discussion of Confucius quotation markers as well as a comprehensive list of texts that quote Confucius. In the course of the chapter, I argue that Confucius quotation before the advent of the <italic>Analects</italic> was a dynamic, creative practice in which authors treated Confucius sayings as venues for the re-performance of inherited wisdom.
							
Part two presents the main argument for revising the dating of the Analects based on a reverse chronological survey of Confucius quotation practice in the early period. I conclude the chapter with the argument that the Analects was compiled between the 150s and 130s BCE, roughly three centuries later than the traditional account would have it.
							
Part three brings the focus back to the <italic>Analects</italic> itself to read the text as a product of a Western Han political, intellectual, and textual milieu. The chapter develops as a series of nine case studies, each of which identifies a different compilation strategy employed by the <italic>Analects<italic> compilers. 
							
In a concluding chapter, I synthesize the arguments of the first three parts and discuss the implications of my findings for the study of early Chinese thought. In an epilogue, I also develop one concrete scenario for the creation of a Western Han <italic>Analects</italic>.