Articulating the Sinosphere

These are a series of three Harvard lectures Fogel gave that have been published. The first of them is an excellent overview of Sino-Japanese relations from the Han dynasty to the late 19th century.

I very much like Fogel's conception of the “Sinosphere” as a replacement for the old “Chinese world order” and the more flexible order it suggests. I suspect the term will take off and get used in other scholarship.

The second essay feels a bit out of place but this often happens in the case of these lectures-turned-book projects. It is more of a report on Fogel's progress on his research into the 1862 voyage of the Senzaimaru, and spends most of its time discussing the Dutch side of his archival research.

The third essay, on the Japanese community in Shanghai from the 1860s until the 1890s will be of great interest to anyone studying Sino-Japanese relations in the second half of the century or interested in the many domains of Japanese activity in Shanghai life in the late-19th century.