Rival Civilisations

How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian power

Most 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”; whether non-Christians could be moral; and whether a world converging along Western lines was likely and even desirable. Even at the Empire’s peak, British thinkers began to grasp that Britain could no longer take its civilisational preeminence for granted. But Tonooka also considers what these debates on Japan missed, arguing that British civilisational discourse consistently overlooked what she demonstrates to be the paradoxical nature of global modernity. As a result, these British blind spots repeatedly foreclosed anticipations of critical world political challenges that lay ahead. Her original and rigorous analysis will enable readers to identify analogous blind spots over the rise of China and its consequences for the global order.