Significant Soil (Harvard East Asian Monographs): Settler Colonialism and Japan's Urban Empire in Manchuria: 377 - Hardcover

Emer O'dwyer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067450433X ISBN 13: 9780674504332

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Like all empires, Japan s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold s political status vis-a-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation. In this study, Emer O Dwyer traces the history of Japan s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria and especially its principal city, Dairen was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil" demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire."

About this title

About the Author:

Emer O'Dwyer is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 067450433X
• ISBN 13: 9780674504332
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 520