About the Book
In the heyday of empire, most of the world was ruled, directly or indirectly, by the European powers. Unconquered States explores the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states in the imperial age. It examines the ways in which countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam managed to keep European imperialism at bay, whereas others, such as Hawai'i, Korea, Madagascar, Morocco, and Tonga,
long struggled, but ultimately failed, to maintain their sovereignty.
The chapters in this book address four major aspects of the relations these countries had with the Western imperial
powers: armed conflict and military reform, unequal treaties and capitulations, diplomatic encounters, and royal diplomacy. Bringing together scholars from five continents, this book provides the first comprehensive global history of the engagement of the independent non-European states with the European empires, reshaping our understanding of sovereignty, territoriality, and hierarchy in the modern world order.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Note on the Language List of Contributors H. E. Chehabi and David Motadel: Struggles for Sovereignty in the Age of Empire Part I. Military Reform 1: Erik Jan Zürcher: Army Reform in the Ottoman Empire 2: Michael W. Charney: Military Reform in Siam 3: Fantahun Ayele: Ethiopia's Military Conflicts and Reforms 4: Chika Tonooka: Meiji Military Reforms 5: Ali M. Ansari: Military Reform in Imperial Iran Part II. Capitulations and Unequal Treaties 6: Ronald C. Po: China in the Age of Unequal Treaties 7: H. E. Chehabi and Ali Gheissari: Extraterritoriality and Capitulations in Qajar Iran 8: Hailegabriel G. Feyissa: Extraterritoriality in Imperial Ethiopia Part III. Diplomatic Encounters 9: Wensheng Wang: Diplomatic Encounters between Qing China and the West 10: Andrew Cobbing: Meiji Diplomacy and the Pursuit of Sovereignty 11: H. E. Chehabi: Qajar Iran's Global Diplomacy 12: Cemil Aydin: Caliphate Diplomacy and Late Ottoman Inclusion into the Imperial World Order 13: Andreu Martínez d'Alòs-Moner: Global Diplomacy and Ethiopia's Struggle for Sovereignty 14: Sven Trakulhun: Siam's Diplomacy and Imperial Europe Part IV. Royalty and Courts 15: Edhem Eldem: Ottoman Royal Uses of Western Symbolism and Pageantry in the Imperial Age 16: Takashi Fujitani: Imperialism and Japan's Monarchy 17: Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar: European Imperialism and the Qajar Court 18: Izabela Orlowska: Abyssinia's Monarchy and European Imperial Domination 19: Patrick Jory: Siam's Monarchy and European Imperialism Part V. Defeats 20: James Roslington: Closing the Moroccan Question 21: David Keanu Sai: Hawai'i's Sovereignty and Survival in the Age of Empire 22: Kirk W. Larsen: Korea's Fall 23: Gwyn Campbell: Primary and Secondary Imperialisms in Madagascar 24: Lorenz Gonschor: Survival and State Building in the Kingdom of Tonga Glenda Sluga: Afterword Index
About the Author :
H. E. Chehabi is Professor of International Relations and History Emeritus, Boston University, and Honorary Professor, School of History, University of St. Andrews. He studied geography and history at the University of Caen and international relations at Science Po before going to Yale University, where he received his PhD in political science. He has taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and Boston University. He has held a Humboldt Fellowship as well as fellowships
at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science
(LSE). A graduate of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, and the editor of a volume on Islam and the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.
Review :
This is an ingenious collection, a book on international history in the 19th and 20th centuries that really does, for once, "fill a gap". By countering our simple assumption that the West's imperial and colonial drives swallowed up all of Africa and Asia in the post-1850 period, Chehabi and Motadel's fine collection of case-studies of nations that managed to stay free—from Abyssinia to Siam, Japan to Persia—gives us a more rounded and complex view of the international Great-Power scene in those decades. This is really fine revisionist history.
This is an excellent collection of scholars writing on an important set of states, which deserve to be considered together.
Carefully curated and with an excellent introduction that provides an analytical frame, this book offers a global history of "unconquered" countries in the imperial age that is original in its perspective and composition.
The book offers an insightful comparative analysis of political forms and relationships in non-European countries from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. The "non-conquered states" of Asia and Africa are show as sometimes resisting and but often accommodating in innovative ways European political forms and military and diplomatic techniques. The particular appeal of the essays lies in their effort to bring to the surface and critically assess the indigenous histories and struggles that enabled these political formations, each in their own way, to respond to the challenges of modernization. This is global history at its kaleidoscopic best.
This is an ingenious collection, a book on international history in the 19th and 20th centuries that really does, for once, 'fill a gap'. By countering our simple assumption that the West's imperial and colonial drives swallowed up all of Africa and Asia in the post-1850 period, Chehabi and Motadel's fine collection of case-studies of nations that managed to stay free-from Abyssinia to Siam, Japan to Persia-gives us a more rounded and complex view of the international Great-Power scene in those decades. This is really fine revisionist history.
This is an excellent collection of scholars writing on an important set of states, which deserve to be considered together.
Carefully curated and with an excellent introduction that provides an analytical frame, this book offers a global history of 'unconquered' countries in the imperial age that is original in its perspective and composition.
The book offers an insightful comparative analysis of political forms and relationships in non-European countries from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. The 'non-conquered states' of Asia and Africa are show as sometimes resisting and but often accommodating in innovative ways European political forms and military and diplomatic techniques. The particular appeal of the essays lies in their effort to bring to the surface and critically assess the indigenous histories and struggles that enabled these political formations, each in their own way, to respond to the challenges of modernization. This is global history at its kaleidoscopic best.
