Western Lives and Letters in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan

This talk celebrates the launch of a new book, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia, in which scholars from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan present intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in the world of the treaty ports. It examines how Westerners ‘chronicled’ their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the ‘connectivities’ between its subjects, and their implications for empire, as Westerners’ lives intersected across the 19th-century maritime world.

Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Lives, Linkages, and Imperial Connections, edited by Robert S.G. Fletcher and Robert Hellyer, is published by Bloomsbury (2022). It is available for purchase via this link.

About the contributors

Robert S.G. Fletcher

Robert S.G. Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Professor of British History at the University of Missouri, USA. His work explores the history of Britain and its Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the interplay of national, transnational, and global histories. He previously worked at Warwick and Exeter, and as the Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global History at Oxford. His most recent book, The Ghost of Namamugi: Charles Lenox Richardson and the Anglo-Satsuma War, examined mercantile ambition and imperial power in the nineteenth-century port cities of Yokohama and Shanghai.

Robert Hellyer

Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University (USA).  A historian of early modern and modern Japan, Hellyer has explored foreign relations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, research presented in Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard, 2009).  He co-organized a multi-year project that examined the Meiji Restoration surrounding the 150-year anniversary in 2018, an initiative that resulted in Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess, eds., The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation (Cambridge, 2020).  The research and writing of his most recent monograph, Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups (Columbia, 2021), was supported by Smithsonian, Japan Foundation, Hakuhodo Foundation, Sainsbury Institute, and NEH fellowships.