Republic of Letters, Empire of Textbooks: Globalizing Western Knowledge, 1790-1895

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to answer two overarching questions: what was “Western knowledge” in the nineteenth century, and how did it become a global knowledge form? I do so by sketching a transnational history of the networks and practices that moved “Western knowledge” into Japan, the first non-Western country to putatively “modernize,” from the period roughly preceding the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. Using archival materials from four countries and in seven languages, I contend the following: 1) that “Western knowledge” globalized primarily through the form of cheap educational print, represented by the modern textbook, rather than through major canonical works; 2) that Japan’s access to and understanding of these textbooks was mediated by multiple sites of print production across South, Southeast, and East Asia; 3) that the constant mediation of these textbooks through circulation transformed “Western knowledge” into something utterly different by the time it reached Japan. The dissertation is thus both a rehabilitation of textbooks as dynamic epistemic tools, and a deconstruction of “Western knowledge” as a series of global movements and transformations in print, thereby transcending any easy binary of knowledge “Eastern” and “Western.” In the process, I intervene in ongoing debates in intellectual history, book history, and the history of science, bringing them together in a reevaluation of the history of modernity at large. Chapter 1 begins by examining the case of a popular Dutch educational periodical as it traveled from the Netherlands, through colonial Java, and into Japan. I highlight the material transformations undergone by books during the course of their circulation, and demonstrate how the integrity of “Western knowledge” was destabilized by the fragility of the physical artifacts that carried it. Chapters 2 and 3 then examine the role of Chinese port towns in the circulation of textbooks to Japan. In Chapter 2, I trace the movement of a British textbook for deaf students to Hong Kong then into Nagasaki. The function of textbooks may be to teach, but the globalization of textbooks is often, I argue, a story of how disparate audiences give radically different answers to the question of what content, exactly, is actually being taught. At the same time, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, there are also cases of unexpected convergence between ideologically opposed actors. Textbooks, for instance, functioned as a site of convergence between Christian missionaries in China, and the nominally anti-Christian shogunate in Japan. Chapter 4 switches narrative strategies to move away from textbooks themselves, and instead focus on the lives of key actors in the textbook economy. Specifically, I recover two forgotten figures of the early Meiji period instrumental to the history of textbook circulation: John Hartley, a British bookseller in Yokohama, and Jakob Kaderli, an itinerant Swiss adventurer and textbook author in Edo-Tokyo. Finally, Chapter 5 turns to mid- and late Meiji in order to examine why textbooks, despite their importance, vanished from the record of Japanese modernity, leading to the rise of a new paradigm of Western knowledge.