Nam Center Colloquium Series | “The Act was Oriental between Orientals:” The Persistence of Late Victorian Translations of the Twilight of Qing-Joseon Tributary Practice

For more than one-hundred twenty-five years historiographies of nineteenth-century Qing tributary practice have posited a tradition-bound system that channeled and constrained possible forms of interstate relations. This tributary system construct has most recently re-emerged in international relations scholarship (IR) as a consideration and occasional anxiety associated with the so-called “rise of China.” This lecture traces the origins of the reanimated tributary system model in twenty-first century IR to Anglophone commentaries on Qing-Joseon tribute that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in the wake of the Qing condolence mission to Joseon on the event of the death of Queen Dowager Jo in 1890. While this recent embrace of the tributary system model in IR circles comes to us swathed as a critical intervention in a larger movement to bring theoretical plurality to a field dominated by the occidentalist norms of Westphalian practice, it is in actuality a return to orientalist form. It is an elision of historical ontology, an erasure of the politics of knowledge at the very foundations of Anglophone literatures of tribute. It is, in short, a return to a late-Victorian knowledge of East Asian interstate practice.

Joshua Van Lieu is a historian of early modern and modern East Asian politics, thought, and critical international relations. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Washington in the histories of Joseon Korea and Late Imperial China. Van Lieu has served as assistant editor and book review editor for The Journal of Korean Studies and has published on nineteenth-century Qing-Joseon tribute politics, the historiography of reform movements in late Joseon Korea, the roles of state Guanti cults in Ming, Qing, and Joseon narratives of state legitimacy, and on critical approaches to historical international relations. His current projects include a paper on the transnational politics of translation in late nineteenth-century Korea and China and monographs on pre-colonial historiographies of Joseon factionalism and on the transformation of Qing-Joseon tributary practice in the context of the global modern of the long nineteenth century.

Please note that in the text above Korean words are written following the Revised Romanization system.