American Frontier Activities In Asia

Frontiers are "wild." The frontier is a zone of interaction between distinct polities, peoples, languages, ecosystems and economies, but how do these frontier spaces develop? If the frontier is shaped by the policing of borders by the modern-nation state, then what kind of zones, regions or cultural areas are created around borders? This book provides 16 different case studies of frontiers in Asia and Latin America by interdisciplinary scholars, charting the first steps toward a transnational and transcontinental history of social development in the borderlands of two continents. Transnationalism provides a shared focus for the contributions, drawing upon diverse theoretical perspectives to examine the place-making projects of nation states. Through the lenses of different scales and time frames, the contributors examine the social processes of frontier life, and how the frontiers have been created through the exertions of nation-states to control marginal or borderland peoples. The most significant cases of industrialization, resource extraction and colonization projects in Asia and Latin America are examined in this book reveal the incompleteness of frontiers as modernist spatial projects, but also their creativity - as sources of new social patterns, new human adaptations, and new cultural outlooks and ways of confronting power and privilege. The incompleteness of frontiers does not detract from their power to move ideas, peoples and practices across borders both territorial and conceptual. In bringing together Asian and Latin American cases of frontier-making, this book points toward a comparativist and cosmopolitan approach in the study of statecraft and modernity. For scholars of Latin America and/or Asia, it brings together historical themes and geographic foci, providing studies accessible to researchers in anthropology, geography, history, politics, cultural studies and other fields of the human sciences.

In 1871-1882 fifty Americans, along with other foreign experts, were employed by the Japanese government to develop Japan's northern frontier, Hokkaido. Their work covered a wide scope of activities, from introducing Western agriculture and industry, constructing roads and a railroad, and surveying topography and mines, to establishing an agricultural college. While examining the overall undertaking, Professor Fujita specifically focuses on the prominent members who left copious private and public records. She thoroughly examines their ideas as well as their attitudes toward an alien culture. At the same time, she shows the Japanese responses to these experts and their alien culture. This is the first booklength examination of a development project that, in many ways, approaches some of the twentieth century undertakings in scope and complexity. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of inter-cultural relations, and Japanese and American nineteenth-century history.

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