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Events

The Asia-Pacific Maritime World: Connected Histories in the Age of Empire

Conference at Heidelberg University

06-08 July 2012

The aim of this conference is to question the ways in which we tend to divide the maritime world into spatial blocs such as the ‘Atlantic World’, the concept of ‘Mediterranean’ blocs, the ‘Indian Ocean’ and so on. Instead, we wish to focus on the nature of maritime connections between two such maritime spheres, namely the ‘Pacific’ world and a space that is often characterized by scholars of the pre-modern period as the ‘East Asian Mediterranean’.

Our starting point is East Asia in the nineteenth century, when maritime history is often framed by scholarly interest in the establishment and workings of the treaty port system. By placing East Asia in a wider Pacific context, one that reflects the reality of steamships beginning to cross greater distances with relative ease, we hope to broaden our understanding of the ways in which maritime space was both imagined and lived during the long nineteenth century. Thus, instead of focusing on land-based issues such as extraterritoriality, we want to examine the relationship between ports and new maritime networks, so as to develop a more fluid, comparative sense of shifting East Asian-Pacific sovereignties in this period. Drawing on the new maritime history of the British empire (in particular, elastic concepts of a ‘British Sea’, of ‘home’ on the water and of the naval ‘theatre’) we want to consider the relationship between ships, the sea and the East Asian/Western imperial imagination. To complement our focus on sovereignty and imagination, we plan also to examine the significance of the increasing numbers of goods, peoples and even diseases crossing between and within East Asia and the Pacific. In short, how (if at all) does the categorization of ‘Asian’ and ‘Pacific’ maritime blocs in this period change when we attempt to write connected histories ‘on’ as well as ‘of’ the sea?

SESSION ONE: The State and the Sea (Friday 6th July, 14.30-16.00)

Commentator: Joachim KURTZ (Heidelberg)
Ronald Chung-yam PO (Heidelberg University, Germany):
The Architecture of Sea Space: Modelling the Maritime World in the High Qing and Beyond

Chi Kong LAI (University of Queensland, Australia):
The State and the Rise of China’s new Maritime Networks, 1872-1911

Rotem KOWNER (University of Haifa, Israel):
Naval Power and the Struggle for the Western Pacific since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

SESSION TWO: Sea Voyages and New Identities (Friday 6th July, 16.30-18.00)

Commentator: Roland WENZLHUEMER (Heidelberg)
Joshua FOGEL (York University, Canada):
The Japanese Venture Back to China: The Senzaimaru and its 1862 Mission to Shanghai

Gavin James CAMPBELL (Doshisha University, Japan):
‘A Mighty Object Lesson’: American Ships and the ‘Opening’ of Japan

Cindy McCREERY (University of Sydney, Australia):
Promoting Maritime Empires: loyal addresses from East Asian and Pacific Port communities to Prince Alfred, 1867-1871

SESSION THREE: Port Cities as Transcultural Spaces (Saturday 7th July, 09.30-11.00)

Commentator: Frank GRUENER (Heidelberg)
Lisa HELLMAN (Stockholm University, Sweden):
A place for Sweden? A spatial analysis of Canton from a non-Anglo-Saxon perspective

Mio WAKITA (Heidelberg):
Photographic Reflections: Port City Yokohama and the Tourist Photography Industry

Harald FUESS (Heidelberg):
Containing Imperialism through Cosmopolitan Yokohama

Wayne PATTERSON (St. Norbert College, USA):
Pusan at the Crossroads in the 1880s: Trade, Steamers, Maritime Customs, and Empire

SESSION FOUR: Steamships and Asymmetrical Imperialisms (Saturday 7th July, 11.30-13.00)

Commentator: Luke FRANKS (North Central College, USA / Heidelberg)
Robert ANTONY (University of Macao, China):
Pirates, Dragon Ladies, and Steamships: An Unconventional View of the China Seas in Modern Times

Martin DUSINBERRE (Newcastle University, UK / Heidelberg):
Traversing Pacific Imperialisms: Hawai’i, Australia, and a ‘pioneer’ Japanese steamship

Ruth Mandujano LÓPEZ (University of British Columbia, Canada):
Transpacific Steam: Disputes over Chinese Labour in the Mexican Port of Salina Cruz (1907-1914).

SESSION FIVE: Pacific Crossings (Saturday 7th July, 14.30-16.30)

Commentator: Madeleine HERREN-OESCH (Heidelberg)
Katrina GULLIVER (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany):
The Pacific World, c. 1820-1870

Rudolph NG (Heidelberg):
The Spanish Coolie Network in Asia in the 19th century

Robert HELLYER (Wake Forest University, USA):
Japanese Tea for American Oil: The 1870s as a Pacific Commercial Watershed.

Lars SCHLADITZ (Erfurt University, Germany):
Whaling, Science, and Transmaritime Networks, 1910-1914

PLENARY SESSION: Sunday 8th July, 10.15-12.15

Discussant: Jan RÜGER (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)