The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
Cambridge University Press, 7/25/2019
EAN 9781108482424, ISBN10: 1108482422
Hardcover, 308 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm
Language: English
This innovative study demonstrates how Japanese empire-builders invented and appropriated the discourse of overpopulation to justify Japanese settler colonialism across the Pacific. Lu defines this overpopulation discourse as 'Malthusian expansionism'. This was a set of ideas that demanded additional land abroad to accommodate the supposed surplus people in domestic society on the one hand and emphasized the necessity of national population growth on the other. Lu delineates ideological ties, human connections and institutional continuities between Japanese colonial migration in Asia and Japanese migration to Hawaii and North and South America from 1868 to 1961. He further places Malthusian expansionism at the center of the logic of modern settler colonialism, challenging the conceptual division between migration and settler colonialism in global history. This title is also available as Open Access.
Introduction
Malthusian expansion and settler colonialism
Part I. Emergence, 1868–1894
1. From Hokkaido to California
the birth of Malthusian expansionism in modern Japan
2. Population and racial struggle
the South Seas, Hawaiʻi, and Latin America
Part II. Transformation, 1894–1924
3. Commoners of empire
labor migration to the United States
4. Farming rice in Texas
the paradigm shift
5. 'Carrying the white man's burden'
the rise of farmer migration to Brazil
Part III. Culmination, 1924–1945
6. Making the migration state
Malthusian expansionism and agrarianism
7. The illusion of coexistence and coprosperity
settler colonialism in Brazil and Manchuria
Part IV. Resurgence, 1945–1961
8. The birth of a 'small' Japan
postwar migration to South America
Conclusion
rethinking migration and settler colonialism in the modern world.