Introduction
This article examines a particular moment in the twentieth century when a burgeoning internationalist movement in Britain in the wake of the First World War coincided with growing nationalist activities in the non-European world, notably in Asia. It explores the intellectual implications of this juncture through the lens of two prominent British internationalists: G. P. Gooch and H. G. Wells. Both men were central (though by no means the only) figures in a series of discussions on “world history” that emerged in Britain around this time, Gooch as president of the Historical Association and chief advocate of school instruction in world history, and Wells as a best-selling author of world history. Through a close study of their world-historical visions, I demonstrate how the sequence of Asian nationalist “awakenings” (first in Japan, then after 1905 in India and China) was interpreted by British liberals as evidence of mankind's universal progress towards a uniform (Western) modernity. The effect of burgeoning Asian nationalism, in other words, was ironically to reinvigorate a highly Eurocentric liberal account of world order.Footnote 1 I build on this analysis to consider the broader implications for our own present intellectual engagement with the world-historical challenge of Europe's Eurocentric past.
The perceived causes and manifest consequences of the First World War gave rise in inter-war Britain, as elsewhere, to debates on alternative world orders and alternative ways of being in the world. Seen in light of the excesses of great-power rivalry, the preeminence of the “nation” as the established mode of human existence was subject to reconsideration against the emergent possibilities of the “international” and the “world.” Led chiefly by liberal internationalists such as Gooch and Wells, discussions on and works of “world history” presented one important discursive space in which these reflections on world orders and individual subjectivities came together. A world-historical approach demonstrating mankind's unity in a common evolutionary process towards civilization was thought to provide an intellectual rationale for a more cooperative coexistence, including the organizational means to achieve this end (an end that for most meant the League of Nations). At the same time, reflecting a classic liberal internationalist faith in education for moral development, the inculcation of such a historical perspective was conceived as a means to shaping new, less parochial, individual subjectivities as “citizens of the world.”Footnote 2
In this context, anxious to achieve more inclusive, global scales of analysis, proponents of world history such as Gooch and Wells incorporated not only European but also non-European pasts. Of particular significance amongst the latter, and forming the focus here, were the recent historical developments of Asia. The national turn in Asia, beginning with the rise of Japan in the late nineteenth century, followed by the nationalist awakening of the East after 1905 (especially India and China) and culminating in the non-European fervor around the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination in 1919, was interpreted by certain liberal internationalists as evidence of non-European evolution towards a uniform (Western) political modernity, and thus a growing unity of world history along a Eurocentric path. The development of non-European national consciousness, in other words, was the vital form of “progress” that signified, in liberal eyes, the advancement of those non-Europeans towards a universal “civilization.” Eurocentric internationalism, within this framework, was bolstered in part by the unfolding nationalism of the non-European world.
Such an analysis marks a historiographical departure in two important ways. First, Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Moment has influentially elucidated the global reverberations of Wilsonian internationalism and its enshrinement of self-determination for anticolonial nationalist movements in the non-European world.Footnote 3 But the directionality of ideational impact in this historic moment was not one-way. Focusing on prominent British intellectuals, this article considers the relationship in reverse: it brings to light the formative intellectual significance of non-European nationalism for liberal internationalism, beginning the task of recovering the European intellectual dimension of this historic moment. The second point of departure relates to a notable feature of many recent works on liberal internationalism and the League of Nations, namely their postcolonial sensitivity to the underlying Eurocentrism of much liberal internationalist thinking.Footnote 4 Historians have pointed especially to the prevailing universalist ideology of “civilization,” an ideology rooted in the nineteenth-century liberal imperialist logic of demarcating non-Europeans as “not yet” civilized.Footnote 5 The reinvigoration of internationalist universalism through Asian nationalism, however, highlights the need to go beyond critiques of civilizational ideology—to think also about how this universalist ideal was being sustained across time. The writings surveyed in this article show that far from being a timeless utopianism, universalism was in part conditioned by the empirical reality of early twentieth-century events that gave it a new and definitive vigor—not least events in the non-European world.Footnote 6
What follows begins by exploring the intellectual compatibility between nationalism and internationalism by considering the specific rationale behind “world history” and the related concept of “world citizenship.” As will become clear, of the two historians in focus, Gooch represents a more mainstream liberal internationalist perspective whilst Wells held a more idiosyncratic cosmopolitan vision of world order. But both crucially shared a similarly Eurocentric interpretation of the recent evolutions of Japan and China, the contours and implications of which will be in expounded in the following two sections. With the aim of providing a broader comparative context, the final section considers internationalists whose views on Asia diverged from the more optimistic universalist interpretations of Wells and Gooch. I end by reflecting on the broader implications for our present intellectual engagement with the world-historical challenge of Europe's Eurocentric past.
Nationalism, World History And The Unity Of Civilization
The best-selling author of world history during the 1920s was H. G. Wells (1866–1946), whose The Outline of History (published in 1920 as the first volume of three) would go on to sell over a million copies worldwide by 1931.Footnote 7 Spanning continents and traversing time from the origin of the Earth to his vision for a future world order, Wells's rendition of mankind's universal history was envisaged as a direct corrective to the problem of “nationalism,” which Wells identified as the underlying cause of the recent war.
Although usually treated as an idiosyncratic effort comparable to those of Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee,Footnote 8 Wells's grand attempt at world history formed a part of what was in fact a more widespread intellectual effort around the time. As Helen McCarthy has argued, whilst in other states the League of Nations was identified with the historical rupture of the First World War that left continental Europe politically fractured and emotionally scarred, in Britain embrace of League of Nations internationalism marked a reassuring continuity with the nation's self-ascribed duty to provide exemplary leadership to the world.Footnote 9 Preoccupation with world history was an integral part of this aspirational internationalism. Tellingly, the organization that most actively promoted the studying and teaching of world history in interwar Britain was the League of Nations Union (LNU). A civic association formed in 1918, the LNU aimed to mobilize British support for the League of Nations, and was the largest and most successful of the dozens of league societies that emerged across Europe and beyond after 1919. The LNU's chief educational concern was to encourage the teaching of the league's work through history, geography or civic lessons in school, but, committed more broadly to fostering a “spirit of the League” and a sense of “world citizenship” (which its members believed would naturally command an allegiance to the league), the LNU also lobbied more generally for an internationalization of the British school curriculum.Footnote 10 The discipline of history was widely considered to offer the most potential, and the LNU found considerable support amongst established academic historians in Britain.Footnote 11 The essential argument was that the scope of history teaching needed to be widened to include instruction in world history in place of the hitherto dominant focus on England's domestic past.Footnote 12 As the LNU Executive Committee stated, “the history of the English people” needed to be presented “as an integral part of the whole story of man's evolution.”Footnote 13 The LNU's financial constraints meant that the publication of history textbooks was left to commercial houses, but it took the initiative in issuing a bibliography of recommended books on world history for school use in cooperation with the Historical Association.Footnote 14 Teachers’ conferences organized by the LNU also helped to promote world history,Footnote 15 and the LNU could at times negotiate with publishers and propose suitable authors for world-history textbooks.Footnote 16 The first volume of Wells's Outline (1920) was in fact an outgrowth of a project suggested to Wells whilst he served on the Research Committee of the LNU. Originally intended as a guide for school history teachers, it was completed with the assistance of his colleagues, including prominent internationalist academics Gilbert Murray and Ernest Barker.Footnote 17
An important figure in promoting the teaching of world history, however, and one that provides the most direct insight into the intellectual visions behind the endeavour, was G. P. Gooch (1873–1968). A historian, former Liberal MP and president of the Historical Association (1923–6), he was chosen along with Wells as spokesman on the subject of world history for the LNU's deputation to the Board of Education.Footnote 18 During the 1920s, he advanced his views on the importance of history education for world citizenship through lectures for the LNU as well as some external outlets, including the Contemporary Review (of which he was editor from 1911 to 1960). As an independent historian, he was also author of a number of scholarly works of his own that outlined his personal interpretations of the world's recent past. Requesting that Gooch's lectures be published (which they later were by the LNU), the minutes of the LNU's Education Committee point to a considerable endorsement of his conception of world history.Footnote 19 Described by Casper Sylvest as “intensely liberal,”Footnote 20 his wide-ranging writings from the period provide a useful point of entry into the complex dynamics between “world history,” “world citizenship” and “nationalism” in the liberal imaginary.
First, Gooch's endorsement of world history was driven by certain ethical considerations. Like many other internationalists of the period, Gooch disapproved greatly of what he described as a “narrow-hearted and narrow-minded nationalism,” which he regarded as the chief cause of the recent world war.Footnote 21 Gooch thus proposed an alternative form of subjectivity built around notions of a “common humanity” and the “mutual obligation” of its members—a conception envisaged as a restoration of the medieval Christian notion of “world citizenship,” but in an updated, secularized form.Footnote 22 Gooch's conceptions of this “world citizenship” are revealing. Although the term “citizenship” is invoked here, the discussions are devoid of any specific description of the rights and obligations entailed by such citizenship. “Obligations,” considered to exist between members and expected to induce “feelings” of obligation, appear to imply pre-social bonds rather than prescribed duties, as suggested by the recurrent metaphor of the “family” used to describe the superseding ties of humanity.Footnote 23 Read together with his use of medieval Christendom as a point of reference, “citizenship” in this formulation emerges as a natural and spiritual mode of being, rather than being conceived in social-contractual or institutional terms. Abundant in moral instruction but politically somewhat thin, Gooch's vision is best understood as a broad universalistic ethical orientation eschewing parochial, especially national, limitations or prejudices.
And it is perhaps fitting that it was as a means to inculcating such a subjectivity of worldly belonging—an appreciation of “family” ties—that Gooch turned to history. The connective logic in this context between “world citizenship” and “world history” was to be found in a universalist interpretation of history as one of mankind's “growth from savagery to civilisation”Footnote 24—a clear echo of the stadial theories of Enlightenment's “universal history”—which underpinned Gooch's insistence on the “essential oneness of the human race.”Footnote 25 Thus followed the logic: “the key to the study of history is the unity of civilisation, and the key to the conception of world citizenship is also the unity of civilisation.”Footnote 26 Within this evolutionist vision, far from constituting a mere expedient necessitated by the war, the very formation of the League of Nations as the latest advance in the organization of human life marked an ineluctable stage, or the “consummation,” as Gooch insisted repeatedly, of human development itself.Footnote 27
Such an endorsement of the league also sheds light on Gooch's political outlook, and holds key implications for the conceptual relationship between nationalism and internationalism. As noted above, Gooch's advocacy of “world citizenship” was in pursuit of an ethical ideal, to be distinguished from political cosmopolitanism, the latter being a position that advocates a world-scale polis or polity of the kind favoured by H. G. Wells.Footnote 28 Whereas Wells, as will be elaborated later, idealized a post-national “world-state,” what Gooch (and most authors of world-history textbooksFootnote 29) sought in terms of an institutional means to peace was clearly not a supranational “world government” (consistent with Gooch's politically underdeveloped formulation of “world citizenship” in the absence of a corresponding “world-state”), but an international organization as embodied by the league's structure. For all his insistence on developing a sense of “world citizenship,” Gooch was not “antinational” in any straightforward sense. Indeed, his “world citizenship” was deemed compatible with national citizenship in so far as Britain was now a member of the league and this membership brought “duties just as definite and … important” as membership of the British Empire and “English citizenship.”Footnote 30 Despite the lack of specificity regarding those duties, Gooch clearly assumed an unproblematic harmony between loyalty to the nation, the empire and the league, and his problematization of “nationalism” as a “complacent provincialism” should not be equated with a rejection of the nation-state framework per se. Rather, it was a rejection of the nation as the locus of one's exclusive or primary moral allegiance that might otherwise inhibit an identification with “humanity.”Footnote 31 The perceived compatibility between the “national” and the “international” was such that Gooch apparently saw no contradiction in describing himself as a “nationalist and an internationalist all my life.”Footnote 32
It is therefore significant, but not entirely surprising, that Gooch also penned a tract entitled Nationalism in 1920, which largely endorsed the national, whilst still revealing much consistency with his concurrent discussions on world citizenship and world history. In considering this internal coherence, it is first worth noting his conception of what constitutes a nation, as outlined in the introduction:
Nationalism denotes the resolve of a group of human beings to share their fortunes, and to exercise exclusive control over their own actions. Where such a conscious determination exists there should be a state, and there will be no abiding peace until there is a state. Where there is a soul there should be a body in which it may dwell.Footnote 33
Underpinning this definition was the special importance he placed on the “spiritual characteristics” underlying the “self-consciousness of a nation” (over “natural foundations” such as race and language), and the particular significance in this context of a possession of a national history and a sense of a common destiny (his endorsement of world history as a foundation for world citizenship marking a logical extension of this formulation), a point he discussed through extensive reference to the seminal arguments of John Stuart Mill and Ernest Renan.Footnote 34 The conception of nationalism as the exercise of self-determination, as evident in the above extract, was typical amongst British liberal-minded intellectuals of the day who viewed nationality as an expression not of instinct, but rather of consciousness and a capacity to exercise will—a social-evolutionary perspective now also underpinned by some emergent psychological theories of national subjectivities.Footnote 35 Such an understanding of nationality was typically linked to broader British ideas of national difference that defined the more emotive kind of nationalism associated with the Germans as the antithesis of the British ideal of nationalism as a civilizational attainment.Footnote 36
Accordingly, in the case of Gooch, the “civilizational” perspective on nationalism emerges as an important connective logic between his endorsement of “world history” and “nationalism.” Critical here is his own account of the world's past, History of Our Time 1885–1911, which pre-dated the interwar internationalist vogue in its observation that “as the world contracts the human race grows more conscious of its unity. Ideas, ideals, and experiments make the tour of the globe. Civilisation has become international.”Footnote 37 A key constituent of this “civilization” for Gooch was the “advance of democracy,” which, he noted, now represented a “world-movement,” as evidenced by the parliaments of Japan, Persia and Turkey, and “the demand for self-government” in China, India, Egypt and the Philippines, revealing the “attraction of democratic ideas.”Footnote 38 And significantly, it is to this theme of nationalism that he returns in 1920.Footnote 39 His Nationalism (1920) was in part a reflection on the recent world war and its relation to nationalisms in Europe in terms of cause and effect, including rising aspirations for self-determination in Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote 40 But Gooch remained anxious to demonstrate the full geographical spread of the movement in recent history, devoting a full chapter to the “awakening of the East.”Footnote 41 Describing the “principles of self-determination” as the “essence of nationalism,” Gooch observed a “sensational development of national consciousness in Asia.”Footnote 42 This phenomenon, he explained, was “mainly due to the emergence of Japan from her hermit life” in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in particular, Japan's unprecedented victory over a major European power in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), which had “thrilled Asia with a confidence and self-respect she had never known” before.Footnote 43 Gooch's discussion of China, for example, noted how the Japanese victory had “opened a new chapter” in China's history, and having listed an extensive series of domestic, including political, reforms as China made its transformation from the Qing dynasty to a republic with the revolution of 1911, concluded that there could be “no more doubt as to the abiding vitality of the race and for its desire for national self-determination.”Footnote 44 It is this capacity for self-government—the classic liberal test of “civilization” as famously propounded by John Stuart Mill—that consistently underpins Gooch's conception of civilization and progress.Footnote 45 “Nationalism” and the “unity of civilization” on this account proved compatible in so far as it was the internationalization of nationalism (defined as self-government)—in other words, the universalization of Western political modernity—that was believed to drive the world's convergence along a common evolutionary path. And this was a vision that now seemed to acquire a new empirical validity for the non-European world in light of the sequence of events apparently beginning with, and triggered by, the rise of Japan as the first non-Western modern power.
Gooch's underlying thoughts about nationalism and internationalism here are congruent with the dominant liberal internationalist assumption of the day which typically viewed the nation-state not as antithetical to the international, but instead as an essential transitional stage in the broader evolution of humanity towards an international community. The clearest embodiment of this conviction was none other than the League of Nations, which institutionally defined the “international” as a summation of nationalities.Footnote 46 Within such an intellectual context, Gooch's world-historical interpretation of the growing non-European national consciousness was by no means unusual. Another prominent liberal internationalist historian, Ramsay Muir (who similarly asserted that “internationalism is necessary as the fulfilment of nationalism”Footnote 47), observed in 1918 that national self-government constituted a “vital element in the life of Western civilisation,” which was now becoming “world-embracing in its scope.”Footnote 48 The “almost universal” spread of parliament as an institution of self-government was again a case in point, as Muir noted how the self-governing colonies as well as the Japanese had adopted this “characteristically Western mode of government,” while “even China and Persia had made experiments in the same direction.”Footnote 49 Muir's exact definition of this “Western” civilization is evident from his subsequent remark that “in every case these systems had been modelled, directly or indirectly, on the British system.”Footnote 50 Likewise, in Nationality as a Factor in Modern History, the Cambridge historian John Holland Rose identified Japan as the “most surprising of all national movements in our age,” remarking on its sudden transformation from a medieval into a modern state through its absorption of European civilization. And he predicted, “perhaps soon we shall add China.”Footnote 51
In the textbooks on world history published during this period, the political progress of Asia was typically contextualized within a broader Eurocentric narrative of non-European modernization. In all of these accounts, the recent history of Japan—the most extensive transformation to date—garnered much praise, its remarkable success emphatically presented as a testament to Meiji Japan's openness to Western influences.Footnote 52 Of particular significance, however, is the world history of H. G. Wells. As noted earlier, Wells was unusual in going as far as espousing a political–cosmopolitan ideal of a federal world-state—a concept first introduced in Anticipations (1902) but only fully developed in reaction to the First World War.Footnote 53 Wells was critical of the League of Nations for leaving untouched what he saw as the two major sources of international conflict: national sovereignty and imperialism. His 1920 opus on world history, The Outline of History, served both as a platform for proposing an alternative polity and as an educational resource for realizing such an alternative. This alternative was one of a federal world-state, envisaged as a “league of men,” and explicitly not as a “league of nations” or a “mere league of peoples.”Footnote 54 Whilst his formulation in The Outline lacks precision on the exact mechanisms of such governance, this new polity was clearly intended to supersede national sovereignty.Footnote 55 Wells continued to develop his blueprint during the interwar years, expounding a model of global governance by function—what he came to characterize as a “world business organisation” in which all duties of the state such as the provision of health care and education would be conducted by relevant faculty bodies. This world government in its ultimate form was not to be structured around a delegated power of “nations” or a popular democracy in the form of a “world parliament,” but was envisaged instead as a post-democratic polity (“After Democracy,” in Wells's own wordsFootnote 56)—a meritocratic organization of managerial expertise whereby a central democratic government would be rendered redundant.Footnote 57 But as Wells recognized from the outset, any step towards a world-state required first and foremost a universal instruction in the idea of “humanity,” and to this end a common interpretation of history, and this was where his world history sought to make an intervention.Footnote 58
Yet for the cosmopolitan-minded Wells, too, non-European nationalist awakenings constituted a promising preliminary development. Observing that the “civilisation of the modern type … becomes at the present time worldwide,” The Outline included an account of the unfolding “modernization” of China. Predicting that the country will soon be equipped with such things as a “modernized … script,” “a press,” “modern universities,” “a reorganized industrial system” and a “growing body of scientific and economic inquiry,” the model that he expected the Chinese to follow was recognizably European. In this process, moreover, the Chinese were seen to be following the example of the Japanese (“the pioneer country”), who, Wells claimed, had become a “completely Westernised people” by 1899.Footnote 59 Although not a nationalist or an imperialist in any obvious sense unlike Gooch or Muir, Wells clearly shared with the other internationalist historians an ostensibly Eurocentric conception of “civilization.” And, more importantly, he shared a recognition of the progressive potentiality of non-European “national awakenings” in the process of its universalization.Footnote 60
Universalizing “Europe”
On one level, these universalist interpretations of world history signify an important intellectual continuity. They represent a particular manifestation of the enduring significance of nineteenth-century liberal–imperialist ideologies, with clear foundational roots in Enlightenment universalism, as demonstrated by the close conceptual resemblance to the “universal histories” of eighteenth-century thinkers. The Eurocentrism of the world histories may also be read as an essential feature of liberal internationalism, arising from its simultaneous emphasis on humanity's “progress” and “unity.”
A closer, more contextualized, reading of the world histories suggests, however, that the universalist views reflect intellectual change as much as continuity in the form of a newly reinvigorated Eurocentrism. An instructive case in point is Wells. His emphatic account of Asia's westernization in his Outline of History (1920) forms a stark contrast to his earlier depiction of the Japanese around the time of Japan's success in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), when his Modern Utopia (1905) had chosen to stress Japan's particularity rather than its westernization by naming the ruling elite of his imaginary utopia the “Samurai.”Footnote 61 This was a naming which, as he later explained, was motivated by broader public interest at the time in the apparent uniqueness of modern Japanese civilization (e.g. a high conception of patriotic duty and extraordinary capacity for organization) as a way of coming to terms with Japan's unprecedented victory over a white European power.Footnote 62 Wells was also a member at the time of the Coefficient Club, a cross-party discussion group founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the wake of British disasters in the Boer War (1899–1902), which similarly located Japan's progressive capacity in its Japanese particularities rather than its successful westernization.Footnote 63 The Wellsian worldview of the 1900s thus points to a significantly different interpretation of Japan from that offered in his 1920 Outline that the Japanese, by “1899,” had become a “completely Westernised people.”Footnote 64
Pivotal to determining British interpretations of Japan were British perceptions of China. During the 1900s, the initial belief in the uniqueness of the Japanese was closely linked to widespread assumptions of Chinese “lethargy” as opinion makers at the time of the Russo-Japanese War typically identified “gulfs” and “differences” in character between the “progressive” Japanese and the “lethargic” Chinese with their contempt for Western civilization (the latter being a well-entrenched image in the Victorian/Edwardian popular and intellectual imaginationFootnote 65). Failing in this way to foresee the wider impact of the Japanese victory and the rise of Chinese nationalism that was soon to follow, such perceived differences between Japan and China promoted widespread Edwardian perceptions of Japan as an exception amongst “Asiatics” rather than as the beginning of a broader trend towards an “Eastern awakening.” The same assumptions also formed the basis of British counterarguments against the idea of a “yellow peril,” more strongly pronounced in the Continental press, that the rise of Japan would be followed by the rise of a hostile East and culminate in a joint crusade against Western civilization.Footnote 66
This initial tendency during the 1900s to view Japan as a non-European aberration needs to be contextualized within the broader history of changing British conceptions of non-Europeans in the decades preceding the rise of Japan. Focusing on the social theorist and colonial administrator Henry Maine (1822–88), Karuna Mantena has argued that a growing frustration with the slow progress of the “civilizing mission” in the British empire led to conceptions of social evolution as occurring over a much-extended timescale, and that this very failure of the “civilizing mission” and the need to protect native cultures became a reason for the British to stay, creating “alibis of empire.”Footnote 67 Whilst Mantena's categorical equation of the British sensitivity to local custom to a sentiment of “disillusion” may be questionable—the shift may have reflected as much an emergent recognition of the possibility of an alternative, specifically Indian, path to modernityFootnote 68—and the shifting intellectual trajectory of one liberal thinker and of colonial policy in India alone cannot stand for a general transformation of metropolitan British liberalism,Footnote 69 what does seem likely is that the universalizability of European civilization was not necessarily axiomatic in the late nineteenth century. Rather, the period saw mounting issues of the “color question” arising from exclusionary immigration legislation in the self-governing dominions. It was also marked by the onset of the age of “high imperialism” (epitomized by the scramble for Africa), underpinned by growing racial perspectives rooted in a “scientific naturalism” that viewed the extermination of aborigines as an inevitable social Darwinian process. In view of such developments, the closing decades of the nineteenth century have been associated with the rise of an increasingly exclusionary conception of European civilization as the exclusive property of white people—far removed from the mid-Victorian universalist vision of a color-blind empire.Footnote 70 Against such a backdrop, it is easy to see how ideas of Japanese exceptionalism and its civilizational uniqueness dominated the early British discourses on the rise of the first—and at that time only—non-European people to a recognizable state of power and modernity.
The same point can be illustrated through James Bryce's introductory essay to the English edition of H. F. Helmolt's nine-volume world history, an early German example of world-historical writing.Footnote 71 In this essay Bryce identified the Japanese as a “question of special interest” for being the “one non-European race which, having an old civilisation of its own … has shown an amazing aptitude for appropriating European institutions and ideas.”Footnote 72 Yet regarding the future of the non-European world at large, Bryce displayed uncertainty:
As regards the peoples not of European stock, who are, broadly speaking, the more backward, it is not yet possible to say what will be the influence of the European type of culture upon their intellectual development. The material side of their civilisation will after a time conform to the European type, though perhaps to forms that are not the most progressive …Footnote 73
Bryce concluded the essay with a number of predictions for the world's future, including a continuing increase in population, improvements in communication technology and the extinction or absorption of the “small and weak races,” but made no reference to any future development of the non-European people.Footnote 74 The modernization of Japan, in this 1901 reading, stands more as an aberration than as the beginning of a broader non-European phenomenon.Footnote 75
What made such early twentieth-century insistence on Japanese exceptionalism increasingly untenable was the subsequent sequence of non-Western “awakenings” triggered after 1905 by the iconic success of Japan, and it is in this particular historical context, and as part of this intellectual reconfiguration, that the universalism of the interwar world histories needs to be understood. The significance of China's awakening for Gooch can be discerned from his detailed account of its modernizing reforms:
The victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 opened a new chapter in the history of China. The reactionary nationalism which had culminated in the Boxer rising gave place to enthusiasm for western learning and western methods. Decrees were issued condemning foot binding, approving inter-marriage between Manchus and Chinese, abolishing literary examinations for official employment, and forbidding torture and mutilation. Railways were built, schools were opened, Japanese instructors were imported, and students flocked to foreign Universities. Provincial assemblies were established in 1909, a National Assembly, composed chiefly of officials and nominees, met at Pekin in 1910, and the Manchu dynasty was deposed in 1912. The first Parliament met in 1913, and, after a revolt in the south had been suppressed, elected Yuan Shi Kai as the first President of the Republic. Still more remarkable as an evidence of reforming zeal was the crusade against opium. Though the changes have been on the whole disappointing in their results, there could be no more doubt as to the abiding vitality of the race and for its desire for national self-determination.Footnote 76
Spanning a range of issues from material progress and political reform to the status of women and openness to the West, the description corresponds closely to his more general conception of “civilization” defined elsewhere as “implying certain standards” of “order, liberty, justice, morality, culture, and material-being.”Footnote 77 Measured against these ostensibly European, liberal standards, the widely held assumption of Chinese lethargy and Japanese exceptionalism now demanded revision.
By 1920, moreover, not only had China shown signs of awakening, but India too could now be placed squarely on the same unilinear axis of history. India, Wells noted, was now “moving forward with the rest of the world”; there was an “increasing number of educated people affected by Western ideas,” and India's growing sense of grievance against her government, together with recent developments such as the Government of India Act of 1919, were taken as evidence of the democratic possibility in the future of a “free and willing group of Indian peoples taking an equal place” in the world.Footnote 78 Such a reading of Indian nationalism is congruent with Wells's broader political vision of a federal world-state, which (not entirely unlike the league's Mandate system) envisaged the initial necessity of elevating backward peoples to a level of political and administrative competence where they could become active participants in his functional (ultimately post-democratic) cosmopolitan polity.Footnote 79 In Nationalism, Gooch similarly approved of the 1919 Act as an appropriate recognition of the fact that “India had come of age.”Footnote 80 Both these reactions reflect the liberal internationalist assumption of the time that the national formed an essential transitional phase to a more advanced phase of human organization, even if opinions diverged over whether this future was to be international or cosmopolitan, democratic or post-democratic. Above all, these interpretations demonstrate that the Eurocentric universalism of the internationalist historians cannot be reduced to a timeless continuity of a nineteenth-century ideal. Rather, it was grounded in the empirical reality of the world's very recent past that gave a new and definitive vigor to the idea of a single universal trajectory of progress—occurring first in Europe, then in Japan, now in the rest of Asia, and, implicitly, “not yet” elsewhere.
It may be no coincidence that both Gooch and Wells had attended the Universal Races Congress in 1911, an unprecedented undertaking held in London, which brought together over two thousand participants from fifty different (European and non-European) countries and 160 professional societies to discuss contemporary race relations across anthropological, economic and political themes.Footnote 81 The highly diverse, and at times contradictory, nature of the discussions has been noted by scholars, especially over conceptions of race in relation to biological differences, and it would be rash to assume that either Gooch or Wells left with any definitive notion of “race.”Footnote 82 But the proceedings of the congress and the pre-circulated papers do point to a number of recurrent themes, later central to the world-historical views of both men, including the significance of the Russo-Japanese War in challenging ideas of racial inferiority, signs of growing non-Western nationalisms, and the question of their capacity for parliamentary government.Footnote 83 Wells's own views on human difference are subsequently made clear in his world history, including his rejection of the possibility of racial purity on the ground that human races “interbreed”—a fact he thought worth constantly bearing in mind to avoid “cruel delusions and prejudices.”Footnote 84 He also explicitly denied any link between race and capacity for progress in renouncing late nineteenth-century European imperialist assumptions of “some innate intellectual drive in the West,” and criticizing his contemporaries who still failed to grasp that “in Asia the average brain is not one whit inferior in quality to the average European brain.”Footnote 85 As discussed earlier, Wells's Eurocentrism is clear from his ideas about non-European modernization; but for this very belief in the universality of European civilization, his vision of Europe's relationship with the non-West ought to be understood less in terms of an essential racial supremacism than in terms of a belief in Europe's civilizational advancedness. Such a worldview meant in turn that Europe's pole position on the stadial ladder could not be deemed permanent. Reflecting on the rise of the non-Western world, Wells was to observe in his later updated edition of The Outline that “the front of progress widens, and those who were once the leaders must now be content to march with the others.”Footnote 86
In their emphasis on progress, and their particular conception of the mutuality between the national and the international, the discussions of world history explored in this article may be characterized as distinctly liberal internationalist. This becomes clear when their interpretation of the developments in Asia is compared with that of the broader British public opinion of the time, which displayed a more subdued commitment to internationalism. Indeed, one commentator neatly captured the changing mood when he observed in July 1919 that whereas the British people had been able to “watch with interest … but without concern” the Eastern awakening when confined to Japan and China, this “attitude of detachment” was no longer possible in the case of Indian nationalism: “the thing has come home to us.”Footnote 87 Viewed from the perspective of Gooch or Wells, the widespread non-European demand for self-government underscored the universal appeal of democracy—a universalization of European “civilization”—and thus the unity of world history. But viewed from the so-called “narrow-minded” nationalist standpoint of an Englishman, such “progress” by their fellow world citizens signified more strongly a threat to Britain's imperial future.
Also instructive as a point of comparison are more radical world histories written by socialists, used similarly to legitimate alternative world orders.Footnote 88 The interwar period in Britain saw the publication of world histories aimed at workers, the most elaborate of which was Alfred Barton's A World History for the Workers, written, as declared in the subtitle, “from the standpoint of the disinherited.”Footnote 89 As with the more liberal world histories endorsed by the LNU, “progress” and the “unification of mankind” were central to Barton's narrative.Footnote 90 Indeed, “progress” was conceived of as universal in so far as he thought it “very doubtful” that the colored races belonged to a “lower stage of mental development than the white ones.”Footnote 91 Furthermore, whilst Wells advocated a cosmopolitan “World State,” Barton also wrote (loosely) of a “World State” (and a “Co-operative Commonwealth”) as the endpoint of his progressive history, which, though not envisaged as post-national, would involve the exercise of a “superior international power” over national hostilities and a collective ownership or trusteeship of the world's natural resources.Footnote 92 Where Barton diverged was on the conception of “civilization”. Whilst Wells and other liberal internationalists wrote approvingly of the diffusion of Western political-economic modernity as humankind's progress, Barton (citing Marx) condemned the existing “civilisation,” endorsed by “bourgeois liberalism,” as a “capitalist civilisation” and thus as “primitive.”Footnote 93 Such a belief distinguished Barton's interpretation of China's recent history. With China “wakened into activity,” Barton viewed convergence as likely but undesirable under the universalizing force of capital: “China may have to go through the phase of capitalist exploitation as the Western peoples have done, unless the collective intelligence of her people can avert the necessity by socialised organisation of industry.”Footnote 94 For Barton, hope for the world's future lay in revolutionary Russia, the “pioneer” in “State Socialism.” Lamenting the fact that Russia had not received more support from workers in other countries, he envisaged as the possible means to achieving a future “league of socialised communities” an “International League of Workers,” and welcomed the emergence of trade unions in China and India, viewing it as “the duty of the workers of the Western world to assist this tendency.”Footnote 95 For Barton, universal progress meant one thing: the universal overthrow of capitalism.Footnote 96
Finally, discussions of world history and civilization also burgeoned in Asia during this period. It is impossible to do them justice in this limited space, but a few examples are particularly noteworthy, if only to appreciate the broader prevalence of civilizational thinking as well as its internal variability. Perhaps the best-known author of world history in this context is Jawaharlal Nehru. In Glimpses of World History (1934), Nehru recalled the excitement he had felt as a teenager over the Russo-Japanese War, noting how the Japanese victory had provided a “great pick-me-up for Asia,” which “lessened” India's “feeling of inferiority.”Footnote 97 But significantly, Nehru maintained that this wave of Asian nationalist excitement was not anti-Western on all accounts: the nationalism spreading then “was not a mere return to the past, a clinging on to old customs and beliefs. Japan's victory was seen to be due to her adoption of the new industrial methods of the West, and these ideas and methods became more popular all over the East.”Footnote 98 In congruence with the British world-historical vision, then, in Nehru's narrative, Japan's particular significance for non-European reformers lay in its successful assimilation of Western modernity, and the proof that this provided of the universality of Western-originated modernity.Footnote 99 For some, Japan's mastery of Western civilization was all the more significant because of Japan's supposed retention of its “Eastern civilization.” Such an argument formed the basis of a civilizational synthesis thesis, tōzai bunmei no chōwa (harmony of Eastern and Western civilizations), articulated influentially in Japan by Meiji statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu as a justification for Japan's civilizational leadership in Asia, and widely discussed in the years between the Russo-Japanese War and the aftermath of the First World War.Footnote 100 But Japan's civilizational leadership could also be envisioned on more strongly anti-Western terms. Galvanized by Western restrictions on Japanese (and other Asian) immigration, the 1920s saw more radical pan-Asianist ideas gain increasing prominence in Japanese public debates.Footnote 101 “Asia”—a merely abstract romantic vision of solidarity in the Meiji period—came to be more explicitly defined as a programme for regional integration in the Far East, with a clearly defined “base of Asianism” (cultural unity, racial kinship, geographical proximity and a common destiny), posing a direct civilizational challenge to Western universalism.Footnote 102
Other conceptions of Japanese civilization were articulated contemporaneously by prominent Japanese intellectuals of a (pro-Western) liberal internationalist orientation. Most notably, Nitobe Inazō, under-secretary general of the League of Nations (1919–1926), a Quaker, and famed author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), made continued efforts to acquaint Western readers with Japanese culture in the post-First World War international climate of cooperation and understanding. His Japanese Traits and Foreign Influences warned, “it is too easy to forget the unity of mankind in the clamour of national ambition, and to widen the gap between East and West.”Footnote 103 But unlike his British counterparts, Nitobe's internationalist universalism rested not so much on the westernization of the world as on his belief in the fundamental commonality of man, finding such proof in archaeology and shared aesthetic sensibilities across Japan and the West.Footnote 104 Where less essential differences existed between the East and West, Nitobe maintained, the two might learn from each other.Footnote 105
Unity In Uniformity And Diversity
The unanimous insistence on “unity” and “convergence” by the world historians discussed above may appear to lend support to the frequent association of universalist histories with a tendency towards a monistic vision of humanity. In reality, however, the “unity of civilization” as envisaged by the likes of Gooch was not necessarily a perspective that eschewed all forms of plurality. Studies of individual theorists in the canon of British international thought have highlighted the conscious and diverse efforts through which liberal thinkers have advanced arguments about reconciling nationalism with universalism, or unity with diversity, and Gooch, in this respect, was no exception.Footnote 106 In an address delivered at an LNU-organized event on the subject of the “unity of civilisation,” his account of the developmental process of “English civilisation” stressed “contact” and “connections” with the wider stream of European history, highlighting Greece's foundational contribution to democracy, and the input of talents of different nationalities to literature, science and philosophy.Footnote 107 Founded on such a rich variety of interconnecting cultural tropes, the making of civilization, Gooch insisted, was a “co-operative achievement”—albeit an exclusively European one.Footnote 108
As is evident from his discussions of Asia, Gooch's conception of the civilizing process for the non-European world took on a more universalistic perspective based on the idea of European civilization as a normative export. But even in this context, there was scope for plurality. In fact, Gooch wrote readily in his discussion of the Eastern awakening that despite Asia's adoption of Western ideas and methods, the “most enduring result is the affirmation of its own personality.”Footnote 109 Whilst such a remark may seem at odds with his Eurocentric universalism, what is significant here is the perceived origin of this non-European particularity. Gooch identified in the East a “deep-seated determination to retain and even to emphasise traditional ideals and characteristics”; thus his account of Japan stressed its culture of “romantic self-sacrifice,” as displayed during the Russo-Japanese War.Footnote 110 This stress on “tradition,” with hints of nostalgia, was arguably inevitable. Gooch's simultaneous endorsement of the universal and the particular, or the one and the many, in a global context is underpinned by a distinction between European “progress” and non-European “tradition,” a dichotomy clearly necessary for upholding the singularity of the civilizing process on which his “unity” of history depended, without making demands for a total homogenization of global culture that would have been contradictory to his self-professed liberal tenet of “respectful toleration of variety.”Footnote 111 Gooch's particular reconciliation of diversity with unity thus reinforces rather than undermines his Eurocentrism. By inventing a “tradition” (rather than acknowledging a contemporaneous “Eastern civilization”), non-European cultural difference is reduced to a temporal distance—as being “premodern”—such that “modernity,” as entailed in “civilization” and as typified by a transition towards the “national,” always becomes European in origin, singular and uncontested, and history thus reducible to a single evolutionary process.
Rethinking “Europe”
Such Eurocentric universalism did not find unanimous support in Britain, even amongst those concerned specifically with internationalist education. For Cecil Delisle Burns, a notable internationalist and lecturer in citizenship at Glasgow University, internationalism was primarily about “contact” and “co-operation.”Footnote 112 Devoid of any reference to “unity” or “world citizenship,” Burns maintained that the “modern conception” of civilization involved the recognition that “national cultures are distinct, but that each nation can develop higher stages in its own national or racial culture” in a process that could be enhanced by “contact between nations.”Footnote 113 Whilst similar to Gooch's conception of the civilizing process within Europe, for Burns this conception was apparently applicable to the non-European world too. When later discussing Japan in his own survey of modern civilization, Burns identified its significance less in terms of its convergence than of its uniqueness as a nation that aimed at “modernization,” and “proved it possible without Western control.”Footnote 114
For others, the universalizability of European civilization was not in question, but it was rather the implications of non-European nationalisms that induced greater ambivalence. For Gilbert Murray (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and chairman of the League of Nations Union, 1928–40), the liberal position on the “general hegemony of white races” was to be defined as a “temporary hierarchy” of races whereby (in the words of the league Covenant) the development of “those not yet able to stand by themselves” ought to be entrusted to more civilized nations.Footnote 115 From such a social-evolutionary perspective, he was able to write, “Japan is … entirely free, and we are all glad that she should be,” and he hoped that China, now “struggling,” should be “as free as Japan.”Footnote 116 But Murray also expressed anxiety about the ensuing political disorder in China, hinting at a possible need for British intervention in order to prevent a descent into anarchy.Footnote 117 And on the growing political consciousness in other parts of the non-West, he was more decisively negative, identifying the growing consciousness of racial solidarity in Africa and anti-Christian sentiments in the Muslim world as a threat to white hegemony and a source of difficulties for Liberals.Footnote 118 Murray saw the First World War as the main trigger of these developments, for having “taught the coloured peoples to fight, and … that white men could be defeated,” and he effectively regarded the resultant growth of political consciousness as premature.Footnote 119 Compared to the more straightforward acceptance of non-European political progress by Gooch and Wells, Murray's attitudes thus suggest both a greater caution about non-Europeans’ readiness and a more acute anxiety to maintain white Christian hegemony.
For Leonard Woolf, characterized variably as a liberal and socialist internationalist and a self-identified anti-imperialist,Footnote 120 the significance of the non-European developments of the last few decades was so paramount that he wrote, “the little eddy in European history caused by the Great War is insignificant compared with the vast upheaval to be observed in China, Japan, Persia, India, Turkey, Egypt.”Footnote 121 But compared to Gooch, Wells or Muir, there is little self-eulogizing in Woolf's observation of the spread of European civilization. As he acknowledged, the growing movements of anticolonial nationalism—the “revolt against Europe”—were only being accomplished because, in drawing on ideas from liberty to government, the East had taken “Europe's weapons and methods to use against European imperialism.”Footnote 122 The East's westernization, in other words, represented a conscious form of anti-Westernism and a struggle against European domination. For Woolf, Asia's capacity for self-government was now unquestionable in light of their political consciousness. The important question that remained was whether “the nationalism of self-governing Asiatics [was] going to prove as great a curse to the world as the nationalism of self-governing Europeans.”Footnote 123
Amongst the key figures in interwar British liberal internationalism, there were also those who travelled to the East and made firsthand observations of its civilizations. The philosopher and political scientist, and founding member of the League of Nations Society (the LNU's predecessor body), Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson visited Japan, India and China during 1912–13,Footnote 124 and Arnold Toynbee, director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1925–55), who became famous for his multivolume work on world history, made a visit to China and Japan in 1929 at the time of the Kyoto conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations.Footnote 125 Although varied both in content and in context, what the two men's accounts have in common is the experience of undergoing a significant revision of their views of the East as a result of their visits.
In his account, Dickinson set up a familiar contrast between the West's superiority in science and material life and the East's “finer sense” for culture (including religion, literature and art), but observed that the East would “lose what remains of its achievements in these directions.”Footnote 126 His visit to Japan, for one thing, impressed on him the disappearance of the old: “the extension of industrialism means the substitution of industrial for feudal psychology and ethics … and a dislocation of all social relations.”Footnote 127 Whereas he had previously thought it beneficial for the East and West to take what they required from each other,Footnote 128 his journey to the East had “somewhat shaken [his] belief in this possibility.”Footnote 129 In clear contrast to Gooch, who envisaged a neat coexistence in Asia of Western lessons and Eastern traditions, the visit made Dickinson conscious that “civilisation is a whole. Its art, its religion, its way of life, all hang together with its economic and technical development. I doubt whether a nation can pick and choose.”Footnote 130 This was a vision of a total but despondent universalism: the East, now that it had set itself on a westernizing course, was to “follow us, whether it like it or no, into all these excesses” of Western civilization.Footnote 131 The West, in turn, could not simply appropriate ideals from the East—the “renewal of art, of contemplation, of religion” had to arise in the West of “its own impulse.”Footnote 132
Almost two decades on, for Arnold Toynbee, it was his understanding of the differences within Asia that demanded revision in light of his visit to China and Japan. His previous image of the Far East as a “civilisation one and indivisible,” differing only in the timing of westernization, was revealed to have been a “crude … à priori picture.”Footnote 133 Whist noting with interest the effect of industrialization on Japan (“Pandora's Box” opened by “we English”) and the absence in Japan of the “cultural fruits” of industrialization such as football matches and gambling found in England, Toynbee appears to have been equally struck by the differences between China and Japan in national character, on matters such as the relatively high confidence of Chinese women and the Japanese state's greater sensitivity to preserving historical monuments.Footnote 134 Such preoccupation with “difference” are congruent with his idiosyncratic historical view later propounded in his twelve-volume magnum opus, A Study of History (1934–61), whose foremost objective was to deny any “unity of history” and to eschew universalist metanarratives that reduced the world's past into a “single continuous process.”Footnote 135
Even for those who never ventured to the East, the difficulties of “unity” were glaringly apparent by the 1930s. The fragility of the nationalism–internationalism dualism was brought to light not least by the Japanese aggression against Manchuria in 1931 that marked the first of the decade's international crises. Identified by self and others as a “have-not” nation, together with two other disgruntled latecomers, Germany and Italy (in contrast to the “haves,” such as Britain, with their vast empires), Japan's actions revealed the thorny geopolitical implications of “universal” progress: competitive imperial expansion in pursuit of resources. Japan's rapid population growth, exacerbated by Western restrictions on international migration, implied a greater demand for living space and raw materials to sustain industrial expansion in order to satisfy rising expectations. The invasion of Manchuria in violation of the league Covenant as the culmination of such pressures thus spelt a form of “disunity” that marked the ironic flipside of Japan's much-celebrated convergence, or “unification,” towards a Western modernity.Footnote 136 The “unity of history” and the “unity of humanity” were perhaps antithetical rather than complementary.
Under these changed conditions, the optimism of the previous decade was no longer sustainable. As Gooch admitted in 1934, whatever signs of promise there might have been, it had been a “false dawn”;Footnote 137 in the same year, H. G. Wells pressed home to an American audience that “civilization” was once again “on trial.”Footnote 138 Throughout the 1930s, the LNU and its associates did nonetheless sustain their efforts to foster world citizenship, including the promotion of history teaching that continued to propound the unity of humanity, in spite, or perhaps because, of the increasingly apparent difficulties of achieving such a harmonious “unity” in practice.Footnote 139
Conclusion: Historicizing “Europe”
As surveys of the world's past underpinned by internationalist agendas, the world-historical views examined in this article provide a record of ideas that particular British internationalists held about the past, but also provide a useful window into their ideals for the future. Abounding with the language of “humanity,” “unity” and “progress,” and founded on a resolute faith in education, read one way, they epitomize the idealism characteristic of what E. H. Carr and others have derided as “utopianism.”Footnote 140
But read more closely in their historical context, they reveal that far from representing a timeless utopianism, the visions of “unity” were empirically grounded in the world's very recent past that gave a new and definitive vigor to the idea of a single universal trajectory of progress. The awakenings of the non-West, beginning with Japan, and unexpectedly, but crucially, followed by others in the form of burgeoning demands for national self-government, pointed to the universalization of “nationalism”—seen at the time as the essential feature of modern European civilization—thus attesting to the “unity” of history. The universalism of the world histories thus points to the irony that the anti-European, anticolonial nationalisms invigorated after 1905 and culminating in the “Wilsonian moment” of 1919 could mark simultaneously, in the liberal imaginary, the pro-European, “Eurocentric”—or “Eurocentering”—moment of the world's apparent convergence towards a single Western modernity.
Yet if ideas of “civilization” could vary across time in a changing historical context, they could also vary across individuals. As outlined in the final section, even amongst those with a resolute commitment to internationalism, the newly reinvigorated universalisms never represented the sole standpoint. The language of “world citizenship” and “unity” did not find universal purchase, and once physically in Asia internationalists were to discover that the reality in front of their eyes was always more complex than expected. On one level, such diversity of perspectives points to the conceptual multivalence of internationalism. But more fundamentally, what the variations examined in this article, across time and individuals, collectively demonstrate is the contextually contingent nature of Eurocentrism. Dynamic and contested rather than static and axiomatic, the belief in the universality of European civilization was at times reinforced and at times weakened, but always modulated in context—in the form of individual intentions and ideological standpoints, personal experiences, and not least events—the particular happenings of history, as exemplified by the awakening of Asia.
The implications of such contingency go beyond studies of internationalism, and pertain to engaging historically with the very idea of “civilization,” and more specifically the now widespread postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism in this context. If history as a discipline has an urge towards Eurocentrism due to its inherent preoccupation with tracing development over time (reducing non-European histories to the role of “catch-up” with European modernity), it may be worth underlining that the notion of “historical uniqueness” is another constituent idea of the craft—one that stresses contextuality and contingency. It is this latter aspect that might require more concerted engagement from historians of Europe and the world in examining the intellectual history of “civilization” and its Eurocentric underpinnings into the twentieth century. As important and prevalent as it may be now for historians to “provincialize Europe” to undo the Eurocentrism produced by past European histories, it is clear that the dynamic trajectory of Europe's own engagement with European civilization, with the idea of “Europe,” must also receive due consideration. “Europe,” in other words, must also be historicized in Europe, lest Europeans be reduced to timeless Eurocentrists, and become the new “people without history.”Footnote 141
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Mandler, Duncan Bell, Daniel Gorman, Susan Pedersen, Tamson Pietsch, members of the New York–Cambridge Training Collaboration (NYCTC) group and the World History Workshop at the University of Cambridge, as well as Duncan Kelly and the three anonymous reviewers for Modern Intellectual History for their advice and comments on the article in its various stages of development. The research presented in the article forms part of my doctoral project on “Japanese ‘civilisation’ and ideas of progress in Britain, c.1880–1945,” supported by the Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust.
Chika Tonooka is the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2019, and is now working on her book, “British Eurocentrism and the Challenge of Japanese Civilisation, c.1880–1945.”
