Paper short abstract:

It is surprisingly difficult to find western imperial powers like Britain designated ‘empires’ in East Asian tongues prior to the 1870s. But if earlier Japanese commentators did not see the global exploits of the Occidentals as an instance of ‘empire’, what did they see it as an instance of?

Paper long abstract:

Although textbooks commonly inform us that the nineteenth century was the age of high imperialism, it is surprisingly difficult to find western imperial powers like Spain or Britain designated as ‘empires’ in East Asian tongues. Now, by the late eighteenth century there had already existed a well-established convention of translating post-Roman nomenclature of European universal sovereignty (Caesar, Kayzer, Keiser, Tsar; Imperator, Emperador) into the equally universalist modes of the post-classical Chinese political theology. By extension, it had become possible to speak of an ‘emperor-land’ (Ch: diguo; J: teikoku) as a type of polity.

Yet, despite these conditions of translatability by means of such comparative political vocabulary, curiously, the expansion of European powers over the globe was not described in the language of Sino-Japanese equivalent of ‘empire’ until late in the nineteenth century. In fact, I am aware of no example pre-dating the 1870s, nearly a century into vigorous writing about the western states' past and present exploits, and well past the Opium wars or the imposition of extraterritorial treaties upon Qing and Tokugawa states.

Which raises a question: Given that Japanese commentators in the early- through mid-nineteenth century did *not* see the conquest and settlement of the non-European world as an instance of ‘empire’, what conceptual vocabulary *did* they use? Which is really to ask: What recorded historical memory serving as a general precedent did they suggest the exploits of the Occidentals to be an intuitive recollection of? And does it make any difference, beyond the pedantic niceties of historical semantics?

Querying a range of primary sources from 1790s to 1840s, this talk will try to offer some answers while sketching an alternative, historically documented way of articulating the ‘age of empire’.