Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Visions of World Order in Britain

How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian powerMost historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe point to the persistence of racialised and hierarchical views of non-Europeans as “uncivilised.” Yet these accounts overlook the profound intellectual impact of what contemporaries called the “awakening of Asia.” In Rival Civilisations, Chika Tonooka shows how the rise of Japan after 1905 compelled British intellectuals to rethink fundamental questions about world order and human difference.Juxtaposing Japanese and British sources, Tonooka offers an innovative history of British Eurocentrism-its ebbs and flows and emergent pluralist alternatives-through the lens of British debates on Japan. Tonooka describes how British intellectuals and commentators grappled with such issues as whether civilisation was singular or plural; whether the civilising mission in Asia might be more successfully undertaken as the “yellow man’s burden”; wheth