Uses of the Past

This special issue argues for a "history from between" as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. "Between" refers both to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, and also to the global circulations of ideas in that space; and it captures also the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts from which many of our historical protagonists wrote. Those protagonists were scholars from China and Japan, broadly defined, who tried to make sense of their own past(s) by bringing them into dialogue with "European" histories. But whereas older studies in intellectual history focused on unidirectional translations and the reception of ideas from "Europe" to "Asia", our essays argue for an understanding of pasts co-produced across East Asian and European traditions.

To make these arguments, each essay examines an individual scholar or group of scholars engaged in the writing of East Asian histories between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Their topics, and therefore ours, range from the history of indigenous Taiwanese people to the problem of "multiple renaissances", via Japanese readings of Carthage, the problem of Qing empire frontier control, interpretations of Utopia, the articulation of a Japanese "Pacific Age", and not least the early-twentieth century study of "Japan's Columbus".

This special issue is the culmination of the three-year HERA-funded "East Asian Uses of the European Past: Tracing Braided Chronotypes" project (2016-19) between Heidelberg University, the London School of Economics, Autonomous Madrid, and the University of Zurich. The special is fully open access and the essays can be downloaded here

• The Historical Journal, Volume 64, Issue 1 (2021)