ARTICLES
The Company’s Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621–1662
Tonio Andrade
pp. 415–444
Abstract: When the Dutch arrived in East Asia in the early seventeenth century, they had trouble persuading Chinese officials to grant them trade privileges. Yet these same officials gave official titles to Chinese pirates as part of a “summon and appease” (zhaofu) policy in the hope that the pirates would abandon crime for more civilized pursuits. After a decade of frustrations, the Dutch decided to take a page from the pirates’ playbook and tried to unite the pirates to attack China. The pirate war against China did not go well for the Dutch, who failed to unite the pirates under their leadership. Nonetheless, they did eventually reach a modus vivendi with Chinese officials and began trading regularly with China. Yet after the collapse of the Ming Empire in 1644, the Dutch increasingly suffered competition from an expirate organization: the powerful Zheng family. Its leader, Zheng Chenggong, created a loyalist state with maritime pretensions. So long as the company was competing against private Chinese seamen who lacked state support, it was able to hold its own. But once these seamen were united in the framework of a maritime Chinese state, the company could not prevail.
International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire during the Nineteenth Century
Richard S. Horowitz
pp. 445–486
Abstract: With the expansion of European political power in the nineteenth century, international law became a global phenomenon. Britain and other European states insisted that their Asian counterparts accept international legal practices. Through systems of unequal treaties, international law became an important element in the semicolonial systems established in Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, and Siam, and it shaped the transformation of each of these states. Faced with intense pressure to uphold treaty agreements, Ottoman, Qing, and Siamese leaders initiated similar reforms to legal and administrative institutions. Furthermore, each adapted in different ways to the territorial construction of sovereignty enshrined in international law, and to related assumptions about national identity, as they sought to fit the European nation-state model.
Beyond Moscow-Centric Interpretation: An Examination of the China Connection in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam during the Era of De-Stalinization
Yinghong Cheng
pp. 487–518
Abstract: The de-Stalinization process and the subsequent liberalization in the mid-1950s was a phenomenon of global communism. While acknowledging that Moscow was the most important source of this political change, this article challenges the Moscow-centric interpretation of de-Stalinization, which often ignores or underestimates sources of political change other than those initiated in Moscow. It examines China’s role in the liberalization process in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam by revealing direct Chinese influence in these lands and by discussing parallels between these countries and China. The Eastern European and Vietnamese cases indicate that the China connection played an important role independent from Moscow in de-Stalinization. The article also suggests an Asian pattern of de-Stalinization represented by Chinese and Vietnamese intellectuals’ dissent, as opposed to mass protest and even revolt represented by the Polish-Hungarian incident.
BOOK REVIEWS
Noel Cowen. Global History: A Short Overview
Robert Marks. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative
Reviewed by David Ringrose
pp. 519–522
Louis Crompton. Homosexuality and Civilization
Reviewed by Gary P. Leupp
pp. 522–525
Kenneth Chase. Firearms: A Global History to 1700
John Lynn. Battle: A History of Combat and Culture
Reviewed by Stephen Morillo
pp. 525–530
Ranajit Guha. History at the Limit of World-History
Reviewed by Bernardo A. Michael
pp. 530–532
Thomas Borstelmann. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
Reviewed by Naoko Shibusawa
pp. 532–535
Brian Axel, ed. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures
Reviewed by Theodore Jun Yoo
pp. 535–539
Index to Volume 15, p. 541–546
