New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) 2016
Hosted by Utica College | September 23-24, 2016
LECTURES
AAS Regional Keynote
Asian International Relations before “International Relations”
Timothy Brook
The premise of this talk is that the misfit between the operating assumptions of modern International Relations and what Asian states did in the past (or the present) represents not a failure of Asian states, but a failure of IR theory. The proposal being put forward is that what happened when Asian states interacted before the 19th century can more usefully be conceived as an evolving "law of nations," to use a 17th-century term no longer in fashion, rather than as a faulty form of IR. This perspective may—or may not—help us better understand how Asian polities relate today.
Shaping the World’s First Structural Adjustment Program: Influences on the Matsukata Financial Reform of 1881-1885
Steven Ericson
In 1880-1881 the Japanese government embarked on a pivotal program of financial stabilization that Matsukata Masayoshi brought to fruition after he became finance minister in October 1881. What led Matsukata to embrace the policies of orthodox finance that made up this program, which amounted to a self-imposed, nineteenth-century precursor of modern structural adjustment programs? In this talk, I discuss the multiple influences, both Asian and Western, on Matsukata’s thinking and conclude that he and his brain trust participated in a global circulation of ideas and practices regarding public finance.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Timothy Brook is professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he holds the Republic of China Chair in the Institute for Asian Research. He has published one museum catalogue and eleven books (nine of which have been translated into multiple languages), and has edited another seven, in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press’ six-volume History of Imperial China. His research ranges from economic history to human rights and spans the Ming dynasty to the present. Among his more popular books are Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age and Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2013.
Steven Ericson teaches Japanese history at Dartmouth College. He focuses his research on the economic, financial, and business history of modern Japan. He is the author of The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (Harvard, 1996) and co-editor with Allen Hockley of The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies (University Press of New England, 2008). He has published several articles on the Matsukata financial reform and is completing a book on the topic. In the meantime, he has begun a new research project on the dissolution of business combines during the U.S. occupation of Japan.
