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British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society.

We provide an account of how Protestantism promoted economic prosperity in China—a country in which Protestant missionaries penetrated far and wide during 1840–1920, but only a tiny fraction of the population had converted to Christianity. By exploiting the spatial variation in the missionaries' retreat due to the Boxer Uprising to identify the diffusion of Protestantism, we find that the conversion of an additional communicant per 10,000 people increases the overall urbanization rate by 18.8% when evaluated at the mean. Moreover, 90% of this effect comes from knowledge diffusion activities associated with schools and hospitals erected by the missionaries.

William Elliot Griffis (1843 - 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as \"the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

This volume presents critical editions of two previously unpublished missionary accounts of Ayutthaya and the East Indies scene after the National Revolution of 1688 in Thailand: Relation de Voyage aux Indes , 1690-99, by Guy Tachard, a French Jesuit; and Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina (ca. 1707), by Nicola Cima, an Italian Augustinian. These interesting, substantial texts tell us a lot both about the Europeans who were writing them, and about Southeast Asia in a period when information was in much shorter supply than prior to 1688.

From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati’s scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China’s scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati’s scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress.

When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of \"the black hole of Calcutta\" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects.The Black Hole of Empirefollows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the \"civilizing\" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

This article estimates the impact of completed higher education on economic prosperity across Indian districts. To address the endogeneity of higher education, we use the location of Catholic missionaries circa 1911 as an instrument. Catholics constitute a very small share of the population in India and their influence beyond higher education has been limited. Our instrumental variable results find a positive effect of higher education on development, as measured by light density. The results are robust to alternative measures of development, and are not driven by lower levels of schooling or other channels by which missionaries could impact current income.

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Most often, their destination was China, which became a major mission field for the U.S. Protestant missionary movement as the United States emerged to become an imperial power. These missionary women formed a cohort of new women who sought to be liberated from traditional gender roles. As educators and benevolent emancipators, they attempted to transform Chinese women into self-sufficient middle-class professional women just like themselves. As Motoe Sasaki shows inRedemption and Revolution, these aspirations ran parallel to and were in conflict with those of the Chinesexin nüxing(New Women) they encountered. The subjectivity of the New Woman was an element of global modernity expressing gendered visions of progress. At the same time it was closely intertwined with the view of historical progress in the nation. Though American and Chinese New Women emphasized individual autonomy in that each sought to act as historical agents for modern progress, their notions of subjectivity were in different ways linked to the ideologies of historical progress of their nations. Sasaki's transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history, where the nation-state increased its presence as a universal unit in an ever-interconnecting global context.

Edwin Walter Kemmerer traveled to many countries on economic missions during his career. This article studies the process that led him to become, in the 1920s, one of the most prominent ``money doctors'' in the history of economics. The goal is to explore how Kemmerer's travels helped define him as both an economist and a political economist, observing how Kemmerer acted and reflected on his actions as scientist and policy maker, especially during his first missions. The case of Kemmerer exemplifies how visiting other countries and engaging different realities, while not necessarily prompting a transformation of economists' core beliefs (in Kemmerer's case, the gold standard), may still lead to new tools and skills adjusted to the role of missionary. Kemmerer developed a rhetoric as policy maker and diplomatic envoy that allowed him to effectively interact with governors, bankers, and other trading interests. The network he built during his first trips to the Philippines, and well as his first publications, contributed to wide circulation of his ideas, which were then used as a lobbying instrument to disseminate a simple but multipurpose design for monetary reform based on the gold standard. Even if the hosts changed more than the visitor, Kemmerer's travels played an essential role in the development of his persona as a political economist.