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Empire Ascendant
Empire Ascendant
The British World, Race, and
the Rise of Japan, 1894–1914
CEES HEERE
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Cees Heere 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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ISBN 978–0–19–883739–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198837398.001.0001
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Acknowledgements
A great number of people and institutions contributed to the conception,

preparation, and writing of this book. Much of the original research was made
possible through the generous financial support of the British Association for
Canadian Studies, the Dr Hendrik Muller Fund, the Fundatie Vrijvrouwe van
Renswoude, the London School of Economics, the Royal Historical Society, the
Japanese Studies programme at the Suntory and Toyota Centre for Economic
Research and Development, and the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies,
which also offset the costs of image reproductions. I have incurred debts of a dif
ferent kind to the archivists and librarians without whom little historical research
of any kind would be possible, least of all a project such as this, which builds on
archival materials spread out across three continents. Full acknowledgements are
given in the bibliography, but special thanks are due to Jennifer Toews at the Fisher
Library in Toronto and to Paul Horsler, my subject librarian at the London School
of Economics. I am also grateful to those institutions that have made historical
materials freely accessible to distant researchers in digital format. Australia’s Trove
and New Zealand’s Papers Past were indispensable resources, as were the various
iterations of Hansard cited in the bibliography. I also made extensive use of the
digital repositories of Cornell University Library, the Library and Archives of
Canada, and the Australian National Archives. I am grateful to my fellow travel
lers, Benjamin Mountford, Jesse Tumblin, John Mitcham, and Graeme Thompson,
whose insights sharpened my own throughout the writing of this book.
Many colleagues and friends offered advice on the book or commented on the
manuscript in its various incarnations. The greatest thanks are due to my doctoral
supervisor, Antony Best, who saw potential in this project and helped nurture it
to fruition. I have benefited from his support and insight in more ways than I can
acknowledge. I am especially grateful to Tom Doherty, Justin Hart, Joanna Lewis,
Graeme Thompson, Naoko Shimazu, Takahiro Yamamoto, and the three anonym
ous reviewers for Oxford University Press for their comments and ideas. My doc
toral examiners, Carl Bridge and John Darwin, brought a kind but discerning eye
to the book in an earlier stage. Jesse Tumblin and John Mitcham advised on its
completion. I remain, as ever, grateful to Chai Lieven for his wisdom and support.
My colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute, Dario Fazzi, Leontien Joosse, Damian
Pargas, Giles Scott-Smith, Paul Brennan, Celia Nijdam, Nanka de Vries, Debby
Esmée de Vlugt, and the interns who have presided over its magnificent library
all provided moral and intellectual support during the final stages of writing.
vi Acknowledgements
Finally, I am indebted to the staff of Oxford University Press and its partners, and
especially to Cathryn Steele for her patience and encouragement.
Writing can be a lonely process, and it would have been still more so but for the
company and forbearance of friends in London, the Netherlands, and further
afield. I am especially grateful to Ece Aygün, Bastiaan Bouwman, Alexandre Dab,
Elif Durmus, Oliver Eliot, Marianna Ferro, Dominika Gamalczyk, Scott Gilfillan,
Jonas Fossli Gjersø, Anne Irfan, Jin Lim, Tommaso Milani, Anika Mashru, Arne
Muis, Eline van Ommen, Nilofar Sarwar and Morten Fausbøll, Simon Toner, Max
Skjönsberg, Wesley Stuurman, Yu Suzuki, and Takahiro Yamamoto. Above all,
I have relied on the love and support of my family, Thijs, Albert, and Sophia Heere.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Elze Heere-Bijlsma,
who fostered my love for history in more ways than she ever knew.
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Note on Names and Style xiii
Introduction1
1. ‘The Englands of East and West’: Britain and Japan, Empire
and Race, 1894–1904 8
2. A War for Civilization: The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5 46
3. ‘The Inalienable Right of the White Man’: Contact and
Competition in China 78
4. Empire and Exclusion: The Japanese ‘Immigration Crisis’ 100
5. The Pacific Problem: Race, Nationalism, and Imperial Defence 130
6. Alliance and Empire: British Policy and the
‘Japanese Question’, 1911–14 158
Conclusion194
Bibliography 199
Index 217
List of Figures
1.1. ‘Those Links of Kinship’, The Bulletin, 5 October 1901 40

1.2. ‘The Motherland’s Misalliance’, The Bulletin, 1 March 1902 44
2.1. ‘Regained!’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 11 January 1905 47
2.2. ‘Vote for the Conservatives, Who Gave You the Alliance’, 1905,
BLPES, Coll Misc 0519-22 65
5.1. ‘The Audience on the Japanese Night at the Princess’ Theatre’, Punch
[Melbourne], 24 May 1906 131
6.1. ‘That Alliance’, Punch [Melbourne], 20 July 1911. NLA Newspaper Collection 176
List of Abbreviations
AWM Australian War Memorial, Canberra

BL British Library, London
BLO Bodleian Library, Oxford
BLPES British Library of Political and Economic Science
CAPD Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates
CCAC Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge
CGEM The Correspondence of G. E. Morrison, Vol. I: 1895–1912, ed.
Lo H.-M. (Cambridge, 1976)
CID Committee of Imperial Defence
CL/WDS W. D. Straight Papers, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY
CPD Canadian Parliamentary Debates
CRL Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham
CUL Cambridge University Library
DUL/AG Albert Grey, 4th Earl Grey Papers, Durham University Library
FRBL/JOPB J. O. P. Bland Papers, Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto
ICS Institute for Commonwealth Studies
LAC Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
LAC/WL Wilfrid Laurier Papers, Library and Archives Canada
LAC/WLMK William Lyon Mackenzie King Papers, Library and Archives Canada
LHC Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, London
LTR The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols, ed. E. E. Morison (Cambridge,
MA, 1951–4)
ML Mitchell Library, Sydney
NAA National Archives of Australia, Canberra
NCH North China Herald
NI News International Archive, London
NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra
NMM National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
NSWPD New South Wales Parliamentary Debates
NZH New Zealand Herald
NZPD New Zealand Parliamentary Debates
PA Parliamentary Archives
SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies
SMH Sydney Morning Herald
SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
TNA The National Archives, Kew
Note on Names and Style
I have tried to render terms, names, and places from non-European languages into
English using the transliteration systems most commonly in use today. Chinese
names are given in Pinyin throughout, with the exception of Manchurian place
names that feature in the original sources, and whose modern rendering often
differs significantly. Here I use the contemporary name, followed by the modern
one in brackets, e.g. Mukden [Shenyang], Port Arthur [Lüshun], and Newchwang
[Yinkou]. Japanese names and terms have been rendered with macrons (e.g. ō, ū)
retained as a pronunciation aide, except in case of well-known place names such as
Tokyo (not Tōkyō). In keeping with regional custom, Japanese and Chinese names
are given with the family name followed by the given name.
This book deals extensively with late nineteenth and early twentieth century
perceptions of Japanese ‘race’, and thus it reproduces terminology from its source
material that may strike modern audiences as coarse or offensive. A work such as
this, which highlights the centrality of racial ideology to British perspectives on
their imperial system and the world it inhabited, must use the terms in which
these ideas were expressed. For this, I ask the reader’s understanding.
The late nineteenth century saw a shift in the mental geography of the British
Empire, as India declined and the settler colonies rose to prominence in imperial
ist discourse. As the English radical J. A. Hobson famously observed in 1902, a
‘curious blindness’ had descended on ‘the average educated Briton when asked to
picture to himself our colonial Empire. Almost instinctively he visualises Canada,
Australia, and only quite recently South Africa—the rest he virtually ignores’.1 It is
with this caveat in mind that the book often uses the terms ‘colonies’ and ‘colonial’
to refer to the larger settler colonies, until 1907, when the more appropriate term
‘dominions’ becomes available. Similarly, it should be noted that contemporary
phrases such as ‘white Australia’, ‘the white colonies’, or even the ‘white empire’,
denoted an aspirational self-identification rather than a material reality: all five of
the post-1907 dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and
Newfoundland) contained large indigenous and immigrant populations that were
to varying degrees excluded from membership of the colonial nation.
1 Hobson, Imperialism, p. 124.

RUSSIA
Sakhalin
Harbin
Newchwang Mukden Vladivostok
Peking
Port Arthur KOREA
JAPAN
Tokyo
Osaka
CHINA
Shanghai
Taiwan
Hong Kong
Philippines
0 500 miles
East Asia, 1895–1914
0 500 kilometres
Introduction
Hurrah the day! hurrah the day!

The East and West stand side by side.
The land where shines the rising sun,
And the land that knows no setting sun,
In alliance their hands have joined.
The alliance this day we celebrate,
’Tis a flag of peace raised for the world.
‘The Students’ Song’, Japan Times, 16 February 1902
On the evening of 14 February 1902, the staff of the British legation in Tokyo
witnessed a great movement of lights coming towards them through the winter
darkness. There were over a thousand of them: small oil-lanterns, carried by
students of the Keio Gijuku, the capital’s oldest and most prestigious school of
‘Western learning’, who held them aloft in celebration of the Anglo-Japanese
alliance that had been announced two days before. The parade had started at
dusk, and proceeded through the streets of Tokyo to the applause of a growing
crowd of spectators. First came a man-sized lantern, emblazoned with large kanji
proclaiming eternal Anglo-Japanese friendship. Then followed the headmaster,
Fukuzawa Ichitarō, whose father, Fukuzawa Yukichi, had founded the school in
1858 as an incubator for a modern Japanese elite. He rode on horseback and in
uniform, ‘as commander-in-chief of the procession’, leading the student band as it
played ‘Rule Britannia’ and a specially composed ‘Song of the Anglo-Japanese
alliance’. Then followed the school’s ‘rank and file’: fifteen hundred boys, each
carrying a lantern on a stick, marching and singing. ‘As they passed along the
streets, the sky was fairly illuminated’, noted a correspondent for the Japan Times.
‘The effect was splendid.’1 At the entrance to the legation, the band launched into
‘God Save the King’, and the students let up a chorus of ‘banzai’ (or ‘ten thousand
years’), while the British minister, Sir Claude Macdonald, looked down from the
balcony with a look of ‘great satisfaction’. In the weeks that followed, further cele-
brations were staged all across the empire, from the southern port of Nagasaki
(long Japan’s sole window on the West), to Shimonoseki, Osaka, Nagoya, and
Kyoto, where thousands attended a ceremony in honour of the alliance at the
1 ‘Torchlight Procession of the Keio-Gijuku Students’, Japan Times, 16 February 1902.
Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894–1914. Cees Heere, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Cees Heere.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198837398.001.0001
2 Empire Ascendant
Heian shrine. ‘The Japanese can hardly contain their delight at the new alliance’,
one foreign observer noted. ‘It is unquestionably a triumph for them that the one
power which on principle has abstained from alliances should now enter into
an alliance, on terms of perfect equality, with the Japanese, who are of an utterly
different race.’2
Japan could celebrate its alliance with Great Britain, the world’s leading
imperial power, as a moment of initiation—a sign that four decades after the
country’s forceful ‘opening’ to foreign trade it had at last been admitted to the
society of ‘civilized’ states. But for the British, the formation of the alliance repre-
sented an altogether more ambiguous reckoning with the altered circumstances
of their ‘world-system’.3 The British nineteenth century had been an era of
optimism, bolstered by imperial expansion, economic growth, and a borderline
utopian belief in the transformative power of industrial modernity. The twentieth,
by contrast, seemed poised to bring with it rivalry, conflict, and decline. The war
in South Africa (1899–1902) had shaken confidence in Britain’s ability to compete
in a worldwide struggle for ‘efficiency’ against an expanding cast of imperial
rivals.4 Economically, Britain had ceded its manufacturing edge to the United
States and Germany. In the Middle East, India, and China, its strategic position
was under pressure from an expanding Russia. The ‘imperial union’ with the
settler colonies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a unified South Africa—
on which British imperialists had pinned their hopes for geopolitical survival,
had failed to materialize. The Empire and the Century, a collection of essays pub-
lished to mark the centenary of Trafalgar in 1905, struck a recessional note. ‘Will
the empire last?’, one writer wondered. ‘Does it rest on permanent foundations, or
is it only a political organism in a certain stage of decomposition?’5
Set against this gloomy picture, the rise of Japan offered a striking contrast. The
speed and efficacy with which the Meiji state had adopted the hallmarks of
modernity, ranging from telegraphs and railways to a centralized administration,
a parliamentary constitution (1889), an industrializing economy, and a Western-
style army, was without parallel in nineteenth-century Asia, though many sought
to emulate its example.6 Following its successive military triumphs over China
(1894–5) and Russia (1904–5), Japan became the first Asian state to re-join the
society of ‘civilized nations’, whose membership had been practically confined to
2 Baelz, Awakening Japan, p. 154.

3 I borrow the term from John Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 1–12; see also Howe, ‘British Worlds,
Settler Worlds’, pp. 697–9.
4 For a contemporary example, see Anon., Decline and Fall of the British Empire; on the Edwardian
‘cult’ of ‘National Efficiency’, see Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency; Tonooka, ‘Reverse Emulation
and the Cult of Japanese Efficiency’.
5 Moneypenny, ‘The Imperial Ideal’, p. 23; on ‘declinism’ see also Darwin, ‘The Fear of Falling’.
6 On Japan’s ‘Meiji revolution’, see Jansen, Making of Modern Japan; Ravina, To Stand with the
Nations of the World; Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan; for a global contextualization see
Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 219–94.
Introduction 3
white Europeans. Even after 1900, Japan’s racial identity made it an international
outlier. Thus as one observer wrote of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, London had
been bold ‘to disregard all social, political and religious prejudice to the point of
allying themselves with the youngest nation, really only half-civilised, heathen,
and of the Yellow race’.7 Across much of the empire, the conclusion of the Anglo-
Japanese alliance ‘had come as an immense surprise’, noted the British governor-
general in Australia, ‘as there has always been a feeling that the electors would
look upon a “yellow alliance” as something unnatural and distasteful’.8 The impli-
cations for global race relations, first signalled by the alliance, would be further
clarified with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War two years later. Japan’s
ascendancy, as one British commentator put it in 1904, heralded the end of the
‘era of inequality of the races’, and the coming of a world where ‘white and yellow
man must meet on an equal footing’.9 But there was the rub: would that world still
accommodate British rule in India, the economic exploitation of China, or the
exclusion of Asian immigrants from the self-declared ‘white men’s countries’ of
the Pacific?
Empire Ascendant explores the British encounter with Meiji Japan from the
Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) until the outbreak of the First World War. In particular,
it attempts to understand how contemporary perceptions of Japan’s Asian identity
structured and complicated its integration into an international order under-
girded by cultural and racial hierarchies. It is thus, in part, a history of the role of
race in international relations. But it is also an imperial history, which explores
how Japan’s rapid rise to ‘great power’ status resonated across a British imperial
system that was itself in a state of profound flux. Historians have typically treated
the metropolitan and colonial dimensions of the Anglo-Japanese relationship in
separate compartments. By contrast, this book brings both together to reveal an
interconnected story, in which settler-colonial dynamics in Australasia, Canada,
or the China coast, where racial visions of Japan were formed and mobilized in
their sharpest form, could interact, challenge, and conflict with diplomatic and
strategic decision-making processes in London. In the process, it portrays an
imperial system struggling to redefine its organization and purpose as it negotiated
the geopolitical upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In this book, I explore the story of British engagement with Japan along the
twinned arcs of race and empire to develop two distinct (though related) argu-
ments. The first concerns the ambiguity of Japan’s international status as an Asian
power in a world order dominated by white Europeans and their transatlantic
progeny. Studies of Anglo-Japanese diplomacy have typically started from the
assumption that both powers engaged one another on the basis of rational
7 Hippisley to Morrison, 9 March 1902, ML, Morrison Papers, 312/160.

8 Hopetoun to Barton, 14 February 1902, NLA, Barton Papers, MS 51/9/918.
9 Wilson, ‘Japan’s Trafalgar’, pp. 782–3.
4 Empire Ascendant
geopolitical calculations, insulated from racial discourse: here, Japan and Britain
are presented as equivalent strategic actors, enclosed within the universe of
realpolitik.10 Yet such an analysis sits uncomfortably alongside the work of his-
torians of Japanese foreign relations, who have long drawn attention to the Meiji
elite’s growing disillusionment with the racial standards of the supposedly universal
‘civilization’ it was attempting to join.11 Recent studies on transnational formation
of ‘whiteness’, moreover, have placed the Japanese experience in a broader setting
by demonstrating how American, Australian, and South African politicians
employed the spectre of Asian nationalism to construct an alternative vision of
global order, structured by the imperatives of white supremacy.12 This book, by
contrast, seeks to integrate these apparently conflicting perspectives by drawing
attention to the ways in which Japan’s inclusion in the diplomatic world of the
early twentieth century was complicated by perceptions of racial difference.
British officials and commentators were acutely aware that their partnership with
Japan crossed the international ‘colour line’. They understood (and often shared)
the concerns voiced in foreign, domestic, and colonial quarters over entering into
what its detractors called a ‘yellow alliance’. But they also came to appreciate their
Japanese diplomacy as a means to manage these tensions, and ultimately, to keep
the world’s leading Asian power safely tethered to the colonial order.13
Second, I argue that these tensions need to be understood in an imperial as
opposed to a strictly bilateral frame. Here, the present work draws on an expan-
sive literature that has highlighted the cultural, economic, and political intercon-
nectedness of the so-called ‘British world’ that united Britain with its imperial
diaspora. After a long period of neglect, historians have now begun to reintegrate
the histories of the British settler colonies (notably Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa) with the history of the British Empire.14 But what
often remains missing from these accounts is an exploration of how these varie-
gated connections could themselves act as independent channels for interaction
10 See here Nish’s two volume-study The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and Alliance in Decline; but also
Lowe, Great Britain and Japan. Subsequent works have also highlighted the relationship’s cultural
dynamics, see e.g. Best, ‘Race, Monarchy’; Iikura, ‘The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Question of
Race’; Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910; Otte, ‘ “A Very Great Gulf ” ’.
11 See, for instance, Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia; Hirobe, Japanese Pride,
American Prejudice; Klotz, ‘Racial Inequality’; Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality; Suzuki, ‘Japan’s
Socialization’.
12 A pivotal study here has been Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, but see also
Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy; Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa; Schwarz, White Man’s
World.
13 I draw inspiration here from the extensive literature on race in American foreign relations: see,
for instance, Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line; Dower, War Without Mercy; Krenn, The
Color of Empire; Vitalis, White World Order.
14 For the original rallying cry, see Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’. Key studies
in the ‘new’ imperial history include Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Bell, Greater Britain; Darwin, The
Empire Project; Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation; Mitcham, Race and Imperial Defence;
Potter, News and the British World; Thompson, Imperial Britain.
Introduction 5
between the British imperial system and the world beyond it.15 Significantly, the
scholarly field that explicitly devotes itself to the study of Britain in a global
context—diplomatic history—has been notably reluctant to take the ‘new’
imperial history in its stride. And the need for a broader conceptualization of
British international relations is especially pressing in the case of Japan. Britain’s
new ally stood apart from the European arena of ‘great-power’ politics—the
traditional focus for diplomatic historians of the pre-First World War era. But it
enjoyed direct and dense connections to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for
whom the expansion of Japanese trade, shipping, and emigration heightened
awareness of Asia’s sudden proximity, while clarifying their own sense of them-
selves as international actors in ‘the main current of world politics’.16 The effects
resonated throughout the imperial politics of the Edwardian era, as anxieties over
a rising Japan inspired a surge of new demands for national self-assertion, from the
creation of a ‘white Australia’ to the parallel debates over the future political and
economic orientation of a Canadian nation.17
Historians have typically narrated this process as a clash between the demands
of the imperial connection on the one hand, and of white colonial nationalism on
the other. It was certainly true that colonial anxieties over ‘Asiatic’ encroachment
could generate a great deal of friction with the imperial bureaucracy in Whitehall.
But at the same time, the growth of Japanese power underlined the colonies’ need
for external protection—their ‘position of dependence on the strong arm of
Great Britain’, as a future Canadian prime minister put it in the aftermath of the
anti-Asian riots that convulsed Vancouver in September 1907.18 This awareness
decisively shaped the evolution of imperial politics during the long Edwardian
decade that separated the South African War from the First World War. It height-
ened the urgency of dominion demands for a role in ‘imperial’ decision-making
processes, particularly in the realms of immigration, defence, and foreign relations.
More fundamentally, it moved colonial leaders to insist that their racial security
be recognized as a legitimate imperial interest. Empire, they argued, had to be
pressed into the service of whiteness. An analogous dynamic emerged among the
British expatriate communities in China, where Japan’s rise similarly generated
new claims on the deployment of imperial power. Taken together, these develop-
ments placed Japan at the centre of a set of wide-ranging debates on the prospects
and purpose of an evolving imperial system.
15 An important exception is Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia, which posits
Australia as a site of interaction between the British and Chinese empires.
16 Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 162; ‘The Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, SMH,
14 February 1902.
17 On Australasia, see inter alia McGibbon, Path to Gallipoli; Meaney, Search for Security; Yarwood,
Asian Migration to Australia; Walker, Anxious Nation. On Canada’s repeated ‘discoveries’ of the
Pacific, see Chang, Pacific Connections; Price, Orienting Canada; Thompson, ‘Ontario’s Empire’.
18 King Diary, 18 March 1908, LAC/WLMK, MG26-J13, mf. 98.
6 Empire Ascendant
The Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), which opens Chapter 1, redefined the

Anglo-Japanese relationship in three key ways. First, victory over China decisively
reframed contemporary British estimations of Japan’s ‘civilization’, and high-
lighted its growing importance as a geopolitical actor. Second, the political
instability that the war left in its wake (and which Britain’s European rivals quickly
moved to exploit) greatly amplified the significance of Japan’s position, and
lent further urgency to its incorporation into ‘international society’ on terms
favourable to London. Third, the war also witnessed Japan’s coming-of-age as a
maritime power, exemplified by the growth of trade and emigration after 1895,
generating new connections to Britain’s colonies in the Pacific. These more inten-
sive interactions between the two ‘island empires’ framed the context in which
Britons began to reassess Japan’s capacity for modernity, a process out of which
several rival discursive strategies emerged. At their most optimistic, British com-
mentators reinvented Japan as the ‘England of the East’: a conduit for the spread
of Western-style modernity in Asia and a natural partner in the defence of the
regional order. But others came to emphasize its racial difference, evoking the
spectre of a ‘yellow peril’ looming over European rule in Asia. In the British
Pacific, in particular, the rise of Japan came to lend new urgency to the formation
of a federated ‘white Australia’.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) threw these contrasts into sharper relief.
Japan’s spectacular victory over a European great power catapulted it into the
upper tiers of the international system. The war was celebrated in much of the
British Empire as a blow against its Russian rival. But it also aroused reinforced
anxieties over the future of Europe’s collective hegemony in Asia. Chapter 2
explores these complications along three main vectors. First, it conducts a close
study into the war’s portrayal in British public opinion, focusing on the efforts of
pro-Japanese journalists to manage Japan’s public image and contain the spread of
‘yellow peril’ rhetoric. Second, it considers the conflicted perspective of the British
government: while London was keen to display its willingness to acknowledge
Japan as an equal, officials were nonetheless anxious that the war was undermining
Britain’s own racial prestige in Asia. Finally, the chapter again widens its scope to
the wider British world, by showing how the war forced a recasting of the issue of
Japanese immigration to Australia and Canada in light of Japan’s arrival on the
main stage of global politics.
The chapters that follow trace out the political and ideological ramifications of
Japan’s rise across three distinct imperial settings. Chapter 3 focuses on China,
where the impact of Japan’s growing military and economic heft was most imme-
diately felt. For the British residents of the treaty ports along the China coast,
Japan came to represent both an existential challenge to Britain’s regional hegemony
and, in a more intimate sense, to the privileges of their own position. But it was
the question of immigration that brought out the most glaring contrasts between
Japan’s international status and the racial identity projected onto it. Chapter 4
Introduction 7
hones in on the nativist backlash against Japanese immigration on the Pacific

coast of North America in 1906–8. Its central focus is on the Vancouver race riots
of September 1907, when a white mob attempted to expel Japanese and Chinese
residents from the city. These clamours for a ‘white Canada’ forced the Canadian
government into a careful balancing act as it attempted to reconcile the demands
of the exclusion movement with its diplomatic and imperial obligations to Tokyo
and London. In a broader sense, the chapter explores how the ensuing ‘immigra-
tion crisis’ forced the British and Canadian governments to confront the implica-
tions of a world divided by race. Chapter 5 shows how these ideas in turn came to
inflect thinking on imperial defence in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. It
explores how fears of a rising Japan were invoked and mobilized to reshape
Australasian ideas of nationhood and empire. In particular, it examines several
key episodes in which these efforts intersected with Britain’s own strategic priorities:
the visit of the American ‘Great White Fleet’ to New Zealand and Australia; the
‘dreadnought scare’; and the subsequent Imperial Defence Conference of 1909.
In the final chapter, these strands come together to form the imperial context
for the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance at the 1911 Imperial Conference. By
this point, friction over China, immigration, and naval security had cast significant
doubts over the future of Britain’s partnership with Japan, while also revealing
the challenges of maintaining a unified foreign policy across a decentralizing
imperial system. The result was a subtle but important shift in the alliance’s strategic
rationale: in an effort to win over the dominions, London now presented the treaty
as a diplomatic guarantee for their racial security. Yet hopes that this would settle
the ‘Japanese question’ as an imperial issue quickly proved elusive. In the years
that followed, Canada further tightened its restrictions on Japanese immigration,
while Australia and New Zealand confronted London over the insufficiency of
the imperial naval presence in the Pacific. Once again, British ties to Japan became
the subject of a broader conflict between metropolitan and colonial perspectives
on empire, race, and the future of global politics.
1
‘The Englands of East and West’
Britain and Japan, Empire and Race, 1894–1904
George Nathaniel Curzon began his Problems of the Far East (1894), the book that
would establish him as an authority on foreign affairs, with a stern warning.
‘There will be found nothing in these pages’, he wrote, ‘of the Japan of temples, of
tea-houses, and bric-à-brac—that infinitesimal segment of the national existence
which the traveller is so prone to mistake for the whole.’ His would be a serious
work of political analysis, undiluted by ‘aesthetic impressions’: a sober assessment
of Japan’s industrial modernization, its constitutional development, its relations
with foreign powers, ‘and the future that awaits her immense ambitions’.1 Already,
Curzon noted, these were matters of vital concern to a British Empire whose
prospects were intimately tied to the ‘prestige and wealth arising from her Asiatic
position’.2 And they were bound to become more so in the century to come, as
politics and technology drew ‘West’ and ‘East’ still closer together. Across the
United States, Canada, and soon Russia, great transcontinental railways were
reducing the travel distances between the Atlantic and the Pacific from weeks to
days. The impending construction of an interoceanic canal across either Panama
or Nicaragua would shrink the world still further. As the axis of world politics
tilted towards the Pacific, Japan’s geopolitical role would expand accordingly.
Its ‘supreme ambition’, Curzon informed his readers, was nothing less than to
become ‘on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East’.3
Curzon was not the first commentator to pair Britain and Japan together: as
early as 1851, the writer Henry Morley had described the country—at that point,
still closed off to most Europeans—as an ‘England in the Pacific Ocean’.4
Geography invited the comparison. Looking to Japan, Britons saw another archi-
pelagic state, similar in size and population, that sat at roughly the same latitude
on the other end of the Eurasian landmass. But by the early 1900s, they had come
to see something else as well: a fellow ‘island empire’, industrious and progressive,
whose rivalry with Russia mirrored their own struggles against Europe’s Continental
monarchies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While Curzon might not
have taken the analogy quite so far, many others did. The Times effusively wel-
comed the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in February 1902 as the
1 Curzon, Problems, p. ix. 2 Curzon, Problems, p. 387.

3 Curzon, Problems, pp. 396–7. 4 Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind, p. 15.
Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894–1914. Cees Heere, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Cees Heere.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198837398.001.0001
‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 9
combination of ‘the two Island Empires of East and West’ in a common cause.5 The
North China Herald, the principal voice of the British trading communities on the
China coast, listed the traits that bound the new allies together:
Island empires both; born, bred, and nurtured within sound and sight of the
ocean wave; blessed with a long and glorious history on each side; tenacious of
right, and impatient of wrong; threatened by the same aggressor, and in many
ways complementary to one another, was it not in the nature of things that these
two should easily come to an understanding based on mutual need and mutual
admiration?6
It was a remarkable reinvention. As Curzon’s own disavowal of ‘temples and tea-

houses’ attested, for much of the nineteenth century British images of Japan had
tended towards the picturesque rather than the heroic.7 Visiting Japan at the
height of the Meiji reforms in 1876, the Victorian writer-politician Charles Dilke
had bracketed his approval for the spread of modern ‘English’ influences’ with an
orientalist paean to the ‘elf-land’ that awaited him in the Japanese countryside.8
Dilke, at least, had taken an interest in Japan’s modernization—he already foresaw
a day when the country would ‘be a useful ally. . . in the North Pacific’.9 But other
visitors regarded Japan’s ‘imported’ civilization with barely veiled disdain. To the
poet Rudyard Kipling, Japan was a ‘babu country’, ‘drunk on Western liquor’, that
had ‘swapped its soul for a constitution’.10 It might be best, he half-jokingly pro-
posed, to declare an ‘international suzerainty over Japan’, so as to remove the
‘fear of invasion’ and ensure that it ‘simply sat still and went on making beautiful
things’.11 If modern Japan horrified Kipling, others (perhaps taking their cue from
Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1882 operetta The Mikado) found it merely ridiculous. ‘The
idea that Japan would ever be a factor in world politics was too absurd to contem-
plate’, one writer reflected in 1904. ‘Their role was to be absurd, and supply the
suburbs with cheap decorations.’12
The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1894 marked a sharp departure
in British policy as well as attitudes. Japan’s successive victories over its larger
Chinese neighbour decisively altered contemporary estimations of its capacity for
modernity. ‘[A]s if by magic’, wrote the president of London’s Japan Society, the
war had revealed ‘a nation no longer in leading-strings’, but a rising world power,
5 [Editorial], The Times, 12 February 1902.

6 ‘Sympathy as Political Power’, NCH, 13 January 1905.
7 On Western images of Japan in the nineteenth century, see Lehmann, The Image of Japan;
Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind; Henning, Outposts of Civilization; Pham, ‘On the Edge of the
Orient’.
8 Dilke, ‘English Influence in Japan’, p. 443. 9 Dilke, ‘English Influence in Japan’, p. 432.
10 Cortazzi and Webb (eds), Kipling’s Japan, p. 179.
11 Cortazzi and Webb (eds), Kipling’s Japan, p. 56.
12 Sladen, Queer Things about Japan, p. xiii.
10 Empire Ascendant
confident in its claim to ‘civilization’.13 Curzon, who issued an updated edition of

Problems of the Far East in 1896, agreed that that the war had been ‘seismic in its
character and conclusions’. Defeat had exposed the ‘utter rottenness of the Chinese
administration’.14 It had invited Britain’s Continental rivals—France, Germany,
Russia— to challenge London’s political and commercial primacy by staking
out their own spheres of influence in China. Throughout the next decade, the
instability of the Qing empire would overshadow ‘all other international issues’.15 In
this volatile geopolitical context, the cultural condescension that had been so
marked a feature of British commentary on Japan in an earlier era seemed
increasingly out of place, and Curzon’s call for a more serious assessment of things
Japanese was soon taken up by a range of other imperialist commentators.
The patterns of engagement between the ‘two island empires’ grew wider as
well as denser. The late 1890s saw a marked expansion of Japanese trade, shipping,
migration, and diplomatic activity, bringing Japan in much closer contact with
the British settler colonies in the Pacific. In western Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, Japan’s rise reinforced a growing sense of geopolitical exposure, coalescing
with broader debates about the meaning and purpose of colonial nationalism in
an age of imperial competition. But it also raised particular questions of diplomacy
and race that sharply divided British as well as colonial commentators. Tested in
war, Japan could now plausibly claim to be a ‘civilized’ state; but its racial difference
remained to many an insurmountable obstacle to its inclusion in international
society. It would be ‘wise and right’, one critic declared, for Europe to preserve its
collective imperial project against the ambitions of the ‘Yellow races’.16 In the
British Pacific, such anxieties came to cluster around older fears of Chinese immi-
gration to organize a new racial geography of world politics, with at its centre, the
perceived need to protect the white colonial nation from an encroaching Asia.
This chapter traces how these civilizational and racial discourses intersected with
political debate across two parallel but connected contexts: the conduct of British
foreign relations in East Asia, and the construction of a federated ‘white Australia’
in the South Pacific.
Britain, Japan, and the ‘Far Eastern Question’
If Japan fascinated the Victorians for its aesthetic attractions, it was China that
remained the focus of their commercial and political attentions. At the outset of
the Sino-Japanese War, as Curzon later reflected, conventional wisdom had still
favoured the Qing empire, whose ‘mighty millions’ were expected to ‘roll back
13 Diósy, New Far East, pp. 1–4. 14 Curzon, Problems (2nd edn), pp. vii–viii.
15 Otte, China Question, p. 2.
16 F. Greenwood, ‘The Immediate Future for Japan’, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 January 1898.
[Japan’s] small island population into the sea’.17 To be sure, Britain had itself
defeated the Qing with relative ease in 1839–42, and again (with French support)
in 1856–60. But by the 1880s China had regained its footing to enter what appeared
to be an era of national revival. Citing the urgent need for ‘self-strengthening’ in
the face of foreign pressure, reform-minded officials had begun to overhaul the
imperial bureaucracy, modernize the army, and reassert the Qing’s claim to
regional pre-eminence. Under the stewardship of Li Hongzhang, the viceroy of
Zhili and de facto foreign minister, China was able to outflank Japanese intrigues
in Korea, hold off the Russian advance in the north, and resist French encroach-
ments in Vietnam with a tenacity that surprised many European observers. These
events seemed to confirm that, notwithstanding the internal problems of the Qing
state, the axis of East Asian politics would continue to turn on Beijing. China’s
sheer size and population, meanwhile, continued to invite speculation over its
future role in global affairs. Writing in 1890, Dilke envisioned China as one of
four potential ‘world-powers’ alongside Russia, the United States, and ‘Greater
Britain’.18 Sir Robert Hart, the Ulsterman who had headed the Chinese maritime
customs (a hybrid Qing institution entirely staffed by foreigners) was similarly
preoccupied. ‘China will soon be a very powerful state’, he wrote to Lord Salisbury
in 1885, and ‘the safety of England’s Indian Empire will eventually hinge upon
England’s relationship with China’.19
The Sino-Japanese War ‘violently shattered’ these assumptions.20 Riven by
problems of organization, discipline, and supply, China’s military power proved
evanescent.21 Japan, by contrast, surprised Western onlookers by winning a series
of striking victories. In the war’s first major battle on 15 September 1894, it routed
a Chinese expeditionary force near Pyongyang. Two days later, in what Arthur
Diósy later termed ‘the most significant naval action since Trafalgar’, it all but
destroyed China’s Western-style navy near the mouth of the Yalu river.22 In the
span of a week, one commentator declared, the Japanese military had burst
China’s ‘reputation bubble’, laying bare what Curzon derided as the ‘stupendous
and unimaginable ineptitude’ of Qing officialdom.23 Japan, by contrast, had
revealed itself as a power capable of conducting an efficient, ‘civilised war’. At the
war’s outset, the London Spectator had still professed itself unimpressed by Japan’s
claim to represent the forces of progress against Chinese ‘barbarism’, noting that it
would be a ‘mistake’ to ‘exaggerate the civilisation of the Japanese’ simply because
they ‘wore top-hats’ and made ‘pretty fire-screens’.24 But following the victories at
17 Curzon, Problems (2nd edn), pp. 397–8; [Editorial], The Times, 24 July 1894. See also Paine, Sino-
Japanese War, pp. 138–9.
18 Bell, Greater Britain, p. 241. 19 Scott, China and the International System, p. 107.
20 Chirol, Far Eastern Question, p. 3. 21 Paine, Sino-Japanese War, pp. 165–96.
22 Diósy, New Far East, p. 1; see also Paine, Sino-Japanese War, pp. 192–5.
23 Knollys, ‘China’s Reputation-Bubble’, pp. 714–26; Curzon, Problems (2nd edn), p. 366.
24 ‘The War in the East’, Spectator, 4 August 1894.
12 Empire Ascendant
Pyongyang and the Yalu, it quickly changed its stance, now writing that Japan had
‘completely overturned’ all conventional ideas about the ‘immobility’ of the ‘yel-
low races’, demonstrating that it possessed ‘not only all the strength, but all the
energy of a European Power’. Henceforth, ‘it must be reckoned with as if its people
were white men’.25 Japan’s martial prowess, then, did not merely help to establish
its status as a ‘civilized’ nation. For many observers, it also severed an oft-pre-
sumed connection between modernity and racial capacity. Its ascent ‘out of the
dark ages to the forefront of civilisation’, wrote Reginald Brett (soon to become
Lord Esher) had been a rendered all the more ‘marvellous’ by the fact ‘that the
people of Japan are Asiatics, and closely allied by blood to some of the most back-
ward races on the earth’s surface’.26
The revelation of the ‘new’ Japan unsettled geopolitical as well as cultural
certainties. By the spring of 1895, its victories had cleared the way for a major
reordering of East Asian politics. The peace terms that it submitted to the Chinese
negotiators at Shimonoseki (where the Meiji emperor resided for the duration of
the war) showed just how well the Meiji elite had imbibed the lessons of imperial
diplomacy. The treaty specified that China would agree to recognize the inde-
pendence of Korea (the war’s nominal casus belli), compensate Japan for its
expenses, and admit it to the trading privileges enjoyed by the European ‘treaty
powers’. But it would also cede Taiwan, the Pescadores, and the Liaotung penin-
sula in southern Manchuria, along with its naval base at Port Arthur, to Japan in
perpetuity.27 Such a drastic reorganization of East Asia’s political map would have
unnerved European diplomats even if still more drastic changes had not loomed
on the horizon. China might well decide it had no choice but to reject the terms,
warned Britain’s envoy at Beijing, at which point Japan would likely attempt to
force the question by marching on the Chinese capital.28 ‘What seems to me we
have most to dread is the rapid & unimpeded success of the Japanese followed by
the capture of Peking. The overthrow of the Dynasty, revolt in Manchuria &
Mongolia & civil war in the Central Provinces . . . might well ensue.’29 In the event,
it was Russia, supported by France and Germany, that moved first. On 23 April
1895, the three powers deposited an ultimatum to Tokyo: Japan was to relinquish
some of its territorial claims, or risk war.30
25 ‘The War in the East’, Spectator, 29 September 1894.

26 Brett, ‘Far Eastern Question’, pp. 818–19.
27 See Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 55–68, for the formulation of Japanese war aims. ‘Port
Arthur’ [Lüshun], was named after a British naval officer, Lt. William Arthur, who occupied the town
in 1860 during the Second Anglo-Chinese War.
28 A course advocated by Yamagata Aritomo, Japan’s field commander. See Paine, Sino-Japanese
War, pp. 247–9.
29 O’Conor to Kimberley, 22 November 1894, BLO, Kimberley Papers, MS Eng. c. 4396.
30 For the afterlife of the Triple Intervention in Japanese politics, see Shimazu, Japan, Race, and
Equality, pp. 97–9.
What passed into diplomatic history as the ‘Triple Intervention’ sounded the
starting-gun for an escalating scramble over Chinese trading rights, naval bases,
and railway concessions, as each of the major European powers staked its claim to
the inheritance of the ‘sick man of Asia’. By 1898, all three of the intervening
powers had laid out zones of commercial primacy: Russia in Manchuria, France
in the south, and Germany in Shandong. Britain, meanwhile, expanded its lease on
Hong Kong (into the ‘New Territories’), acquired the northern port of Weihaiwei,
and declared its own sphere of influence in the Yangzi valley, the hinterland of
Shanghai. Internal weakness and external rivalry had, practically overnight, made
China’s future into a pressing international issue. Here were the makings of a new
and ‘infinitely larger Eastern Question’, brooded Lord Rosebery, the Liberal prime
minister (1894–5), ‘pregnant with possibilities of a disastrous kind’ that ‘might
result in an Armageddon between the European Powers struggling for the ruins
of the Chinese Empire’.31 In Beijing, Robert Hart saw his vision of an Anglo-
Chinese alliance disintegrate before his eyes. ‘China is paralysed’, he now lamented,
‘the Western powers are watching each other, half-afraid to move lest motion
should bring on a general scrimmage . . . and Japan is developing her might and
pushing on with growing plans, increasing ambition, and wonderful vigour’.32
Against the background of the ‘China question’, British policymakers also
turned to reconsider their relations with Japan. Already before the war, a growing
body of officials had argued that Japan’s achievements in the arts of commerce,
industry, and government merited its recognition as a ‘civilized’ state.33 After
stalling throughout the 1880s, Britain had, by 1892, agreed to consider Japan’s
appeals to end the humiliating extraterritorial privileges imposed under the
‘unequal’ treaty of 1858. By any objective measure, noted the long-serving Belgian
envoy in Tokyo to his British colleague, Japan had clearly met the ‘standard of
civilization’ as the term held meaning in international law. ‘Can one deny, that
[Japan has] progressed since thirty years as no other country has done in so
short a period?’ Its army was a match for most European nations. Its trade and
industry were flourishing. It had adopted a parliamentary constitution, abolished
torture, and it guaranteed freedom of the press and of religion. ‘Japan’s position is
unique in Asia’, Albert d’Anethan concluded, ‘and many states in Europe, such as
Spain, Portugal, les Balkaniks, Greece, and poor Turkey may justly envy it’.34
While many officials continued to have reservations about Japan’s claim to
‘civilization’, Whitehall recognized that British interests were better served by
facilitating Japan’s entry into the ‘comity of nations’ than opposing it.35 Britain
now had to take account of the fact that Japan was now ‘the rising Power in the
31 Otte, China Question, p. 1. 32 Otte, China Question p. 49.

33 On the evolving definition of the term, see Gong, Standard of Civilization, pp. 14–15.
34 D’Anethan to Haggard, 9 February 1894, TNA, FO 46/445.
35 Gubbins to Bertie, 26 February 1894, TNA, FO 46/445. On the process of treaty revision, see
Perez, Japan Comes of Age.
14 Empire Ascendant
East’, noted the prime minister, Lord Rosebery.36 Lord Kimberley, his foreign
secretary, was prepared to go further: Japan would soon likely possess a ‘power-
ful fleet’ that would allow it to act as ‘a counterpoint to Russia’. A partnership
with Tokyo, Kimberley concluded, was the logical way to counterbalance the
Franco-Russo-German bid for influence in China. ‘Our policy must be to make
her our ally.’37
Not all were equally sanguine about the prospects for Anglo-Japanese cooper
ation. One notable sceptic was Ernest Satow, the British minister plenipotentiary
in Tokyo. Satow cut a rare figure among the Victorian diplomatic corps: the son of
a Swedish-German immigrant, he was originally recruited to the consular service
as an interpreter, serving as a junior official in Tokyo for thirteen years and
eventually becoming a noted Japanologist in his own right. Around 1870, unbe-
knownst to his superiors in London, he entered into a ‘common-law marriage’
with the then seventeen-year old Takeda Kane, with whom he fathered two sons,
neither of whom he acknowledged publicly.38 If Satow’s personal relationship to
Japan was complex and ambivalent, much the same was true of his views of the
country’s international role. He was a sincere advocate of Anglo-Japanese friendship.
But he entertained major reservations as to whether Japan’s politics (or indeed, its
racial character) were suited to the role of a diplomatic ally. It was an open ques-
tion, he wrote to a fellow orientalist, whether the country possessed ‘sufficient
stock of physical strength’ to elevate it ‘beyond a third or fourth rate position’. The
Sino-Japanese War, fought between two ‘Asiatic races’, could hardly be taken as its
true measure, since defeating China was like ‘cutting through a mouldy cheese’.39
As for the notion of an Anglo-Japanese partnership, Satow plainly thought that
‘the days of alliances of European powers with the yellow race had gone by’.40
These views chimed with those of the new Conservative prime minister, Lord
Salisbury, who during an earlier stint at the Foreign Office had derided Japan as a
‘mushroom civilization’, likely to ‘decay as rapidly as it has grown’.41 As Salisbury
once again acceded to the premiership in June 1895, his views appeared to have
changed little. Under his new instructions, Satow was told not to pursue a diplo-
matic arrangement with Tokyo (‘our strategic or military interests in Japan can
easily be over-estimated’, Salisbury noted), and to concentrate on expanding
British trade instead.42 Such remarks offered a testy reminder of the residual
ambiguities that surrounded Japan’s international status. Many within the Foreign
36 Otte, China Question, p. 58.

37 Kimberley to Cavendish, 30 May 1895, BLO, Kimberley Papers, MS. Eng. c. 4396.
38 On Satow’s career, see Brailey, ‘Sir Ernest Satow’, pp. 115–19; Otte, ‘ “Not Proficient in Table-
Thumping” ’, pp. 189–92.
39 Satow to Dickins, 18 April 1895, TNA, Satow Papers, PRO 30/33/11/6.
40 Satow Diary, 6 January 1898, in Ruxton (ed.), Diaries, p. 227.
41 Otte, ‘ “A Very Great Gulf ” ’, p. 130.
42 Salisbury to Satow, 3 October 1895, TNA, Satow Papers. PRO 30/33/5/2.
Office still baulked at the notion that British policy might have to reckon with the
whims on an ‘Asiatic’ power, however ‘civilized’ it might think itself.43
But in the suddenly febrile atmosphere of East Asian diplomacy, other consid-
erations loomed larger. The threat of Russian expansion in Asia had been con-
stant factor in British imperial strategy throughout the nineteenth century. By the
1890s, the imminent completion of the trans-Siberian railway and its southern
branch through Manchuria (the price Russia exacted for its diplomatic intervention
in 1895) added new urgency to the new ‘Great Game’ in East Asia. Once the lines
were completed, the Foreign Office warned, Beijing would ‘lie at the mercy of a
trainful of soldiers’, and St Petersburg would be in a position to back up its Chinese
diplomacy by ‘overwhelming military force’.44 Russia entrenched in northern
China, its French ally in the south, and the Qing a virtual protectorate, poised on
the flanks of India—this was the nightmare scenario that London was determined
to avert. It was in this context that members of the Salisbury government began,
tentatively, to entertain the idea of incorporating a partnership with Tokyo into a
broader strategy of containment. When the German occupation of Qingdao in 1898,
and the subsequent Russian seizure of Port Arthur, spurred Britain to acquire
its own lease on the nearby port of Weihaiwei, it took care to coordinate its
move with Japan, which had occupied the port since the end of the Sino-Japanese
War. Faced with the prospect that Russia might seize the pretext of the Boxer
Rising in 1900 to occupy Beijing, London repeatedly pressed Japan to send its
own expeditionary force to China, pledging up to a million pounds to cover the
costs.45 In the spring of 1901, following the revelation that Russia had pressed
China into further concessions in Manchuria, Salisbury himself contemplated an
Anglo-Japanese naval pact to cover the northern Chinese littoral.46
London’s eventual decision to pursue an alliance with Japan emerged out of a
constellation of strategic, financial, and political factors: the need to contain
Russian expansion in northern China; the fiscal burdens of the South African
War; the escalating naval competition with France and Russia; and the reluctance
of the Salisbury government to commit itself to a European alternative (Arthur
Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and his anointed successor, had advocated joining the
Triple Alliance instead).47 Yet it also reflected a subtler shift in British attitudes
towards Japan’s place in the international system. Foreign Office mandarins still
waxed sceptical about whether an ‘Oriental’ power could be regarded as a reliable
partner.48 But on the whole, the Far Eastern crises had accustomed London to the
43 Best, ‘Race, Monarchy’, pp. 172–4; Otte, ‘ “A Very Great Gulf ” ’, pp. 130–42.
44 ‘Note on Affairs in China’, H. Bower, 18 July 1898, TNA, FO 405/341. See also Otte, China
Question, pp. 74–132; Darwin, Empire Project, pp. 80–3;
45 Nish, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, p. 91. 46 Otte, China Question, p. 243.
47 On the British rationale, see Nish, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, pp. 143–62; Otte, China Question,
pp. 286–310.
48 Bertie to Lansdowne, 21 July 1901, BL, Lansdowne Papers, Add. MS 88906/22/24.
16 Empire Ascendant
habit of thinking about Japan as a sovereign actor in the concert of powers.

Curzon’s disavowal of ‘temples, tea-houses, and bric-á-brac’ echoed throughout
the growing body of commentary on East Asian affairs after 1895. Thus in his
Peoples and Politics of the Far East (1895), the journalist and Liberal MP Henry
Norman scorned previous writers for failing to take Japan seriously, and drew his
own readers’ attention to how the Meiji state had established itself as ‘a nation
whose army and navy may meet those of contemporary Europe on equal terms’, and
‘whose colonising strength suggests more than one alteration to the map of Asia’.49
The writer Archibald Colquhoun similarly predicted Japan would be a ‘mediating
factor of great influence’ in what he foresaw would be the climactic struggle between
‘Slav’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ for supremacy over China.50 And whereas before the
Sino-Japanese War, the editor of The Times had doubted whether Japan was ‘suf-
ficiently civilised to deserve our correspondents’, by 1897 the paper established a
network of permanent East Asian correspondents in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai,
and Beijing.51 Its new foreign editor, Valentine Chirol, was especially determined
to expand the paper’s coverage of East Asian affairs. Journalism, he wrote to George
Morrison, who would become his star correspondent, would render the ‘Far Eastern
Question’ to the public in a ‘concrete shape’, and force the country to realize ‘it is
one which we may have to fight for and is worth fighting for’.52
The emergence of East Asia as a new fulcrum for imperialist commentary
stimulated a new appreciation for Japan’s potential as a proxy for British policy.
‘I believe that, so far as the interests of various countries can be the same, those
of Great Britain, the United States, and Japan are, and must be, for many years to
come, identical . . . for those three Powers are alone in disapproving of the dis-
memberment of China, and in respecting international law in that part of the
world’, argued the Morning Post correspondent Stafford Ransome in his Japan in
Transition (1899), a systematic deconstruction of various ‘popular misconceptions’
of things Japanese.53 In his own Far Eastern Question (1896) Chirol noted that the
‘Island Empires of East and West’ had a common interest in resisting Russia’s
advance in north-east Asia, and would ‘travel along a parallel paths’ in their for-
eign affairs.54 Norman agreed that Japan’s ‘commercial’ (as opposed to territorial)
interests in China made it a natural partner for Britain. ‘As an ally, Japan would
be faithful, brave, and powerful; and the Anglo-Japanese alliance would impose
peace and offer freedom of trade.’55 The Japanese, wrote the sailor-politician
Admiral Charles Beresford, who conducted a tour of East Asia on behalf of the
49 Norman, Peoples and Politics, pp. 375–6.

50 Colquhoun, China in Transformation, pp. vii–viii. 51 Best, ‘Alliance in Parallel’, pp. 1–2.
52 Chirol to Morrison, 24 February 1898, CGEM, p. 72; see also Pearl, Morrison of Peking.
53 Ransome, Japan in Transition, pp. xiv–xv, 238–49; for a parallel reappreciation unfolding in the
United States, see Henning, Outposts of Civilization, pp. 137–64.
54 Chirol, Far Eastern Question, p. 151. 55 Norman, Peoples and Politics, p. 400.
London chambers of commerce, were a ‘plucky and progressive race’, ‘the British
of the Far East’, who ‘deserve all our sympathy and respect’.56
If the Japanese could be reinvented as ‘honourary Britons’, it was even possible
to imagine the alliance as a link in a broader progressive coalition that also
included the United States. British commentators had widely hailed the American
annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898 as a welcome reinforcement of
‘Anglo-Saxon’ power in the Asia-Pacific.57 Many hoped that the ‘China question’,
in which British and American interests were deemed to be similar, might now
serve as forcing-house for further cooperation. China, Colquhoun wrote, was the
‘great undeveloped estate’ that the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ would ‘leave to their ever-
increasing offspring’.58 Charles Dilke similarly hoped to see great ‘Anglo-American
interests . . . entwined together in the heart of China’.59 These hopes drew deeply
from a racialized moralism that portrayed Britain and the United States as the
natural guardians of liberty, modernity, and international order. In East Asia, this
implied a joint commitment to the ‘territorial integrity’ of China and Korea, and
the preservation of an ‘open door’ for commerce, Christianity, and civilization.60
Japan could be tentatively incorporated into this discourse, both as a product of
Anglo-Saxon modernity (it had been an American squadron, after all, which had
‘opened’ the country in 1853) and its converted missionary in Asia. ‘Implicit in
the reception given by the people of this country to the Anglo-Japanese alliance’,
the journalist Sydney Brooks perceptively observed in 1902, ‘there has lain the
assumption that the United States is, in some sort, a third party to it’.61 As he
introduced the treaty in the House of Commons, Lord Cranborne, the undersec-
retary for foreign affairs, pointedly noted that the alliance embodied ‘the two
elements of English policy in the East’ that most aligned with American interests:
‘the maintenance of the open door and the territorial integrity of China’. It enjoyed
the ‘full approval’ and the support of the United States.62 To be sure, reimagining
the alliance as an ‘Anglo-Japanese-American entente’ (as the New York Times put
it) far outstripped the true extent of Washington’s cooperation.63 Official hopes that
the United States might ‘attach’ itself to the treaty as a ‘sleeping partner’ proved
elusive.64 But these furtive glances across the Atlantic also served another purpose.
By presenting the treaty as an expression of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ policies in East Asia,
56 Cited in Otte, ‘ “A Very Great Gulf ” ’, p. 140.

57 On ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, see Anderson, Race and Rapprochement; Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions,
and Anglo-Saxons’; Bell, ‘Project for a New Anglo Century’.
58 Colquhoun, ‘The Far Eastern Crisis’, p. 524.
59 Dilke, ‘America and England in the Far East’, p. 562.
60 The phrase itself, though commonly associated with American policy, was coined by Salisbury’s
chancellor, Michael Hicks-Beach. See Cullinane and Goodall, The Open Door Era, pp. 18–19.
61 Brooks, ‘America and the Alliance’, p. 555.
62 Cranborne, 13 February 1902, Hansard, 4th Series, HC, vol. 102, c. 1287.
63 ‘Russia’s Defiance’, New York Times, 9 May 1903.
64 Memorandum by Bertie, 27 December 1900, TNA, FO 405/346.
18 Empire Ascendant
the alliance’s advocates could turn racial ideology to their own advantage. Even in
Australia, one party leader could memorably welcome the alliance as ‘another
great advance and an important stride towards . . . the ultimate fusion of the
Anglo-Saxon race’.65
‘Outside the White Comity’: Race

and Anglo-Japanese Relations
International relationships can acquire their own mythologies, giving them a

sense of historical rootedness amid the flux of political events. The Anglo-
Japanese alliance was no different. Once created, it needed a history, and British
commentators readily supplied one by presenting the union of the ‘two Island
Empires’ as the ‘natural fruit’ of decades of engagement and tutelage.66 In this
interpretation, Britain appeared as the stern but benevolent teacher that had
‘opened’ Japan to the blessings of commerce and civilization, shepherding it into
the ‘comity of civilized states’.67 But this reinterpretation, designed to smooth over
the cultural and racial differences in the alliance, did not go uncontested. Many
still remembered the mutual distrust that had marred Britain’s relationship to the
Tokugawa bakufu in the 1850s, or the anti-foreign outbursts (the so-called sonnō
jōi, or ‘revere the emperor, expel the foreigner’, movement) that had preceded the
fall of the shogunate in 1868. British merchants in the Japanese treaty-ports
continued to argue well into the 1890s that their extraterritorial rights were a
necessary protection against a potentail relapse into ‘Asiatic barbarism’. Japan’s
‘Oriental’ qualities continued to fascinate British writers, many of whom encour-
aged their readers to think of its modernity as transplanted and alien: a ‘mask’ or
‘veneer’ of civilization that overlay an ‘Asiatic’ essence.68 The Sino-Japanese War
imposed a new political logic on these ideas: whereas to some, Japan’s military
efficiency proved its civilized status, an equally vocal body of opinion argued for
the durability of racial and cultural barriers, and stressed the dangers that a rising
Japan might pose to European supremacy in Asia.
One event in particular served to focus European minds. On 21 November
1894, Japanese forces had captured Port Arthur, the Chinese naval fortress on the
Liaotung peninsula, after a siege of less than a day. As the Japanese entered to
obtain the surrender of the estimated 12,000 Chinese soldiers remaining in the
fort, they came upon the sight of the mutilated bodies of Japanese prisoners-
of-war. They retaliated by setting on the Chinese soldiers, as well as the town’s
civilian population, with rifles and bayonets. ‘The massacre at Port Arthur’ went
65 Meaney, Search for Security, p. 117. 66 [Editorial], The Times, 13 February 1902.
67 Note, for example, ‘The Situation’, NCH, 15 January 1904.
68 Pham, ‘On the Edge of the Orient’.
on for four days, in full view of several British and American war correspondents,
who relayed the ‘epidemic of brutality’ in graphic detail. ‘I saw scores of Chinese
hunted out of cover, shot down, and hacked to pieces’, Thomas Cowen, the war
correspondent for The Times, testified after leaving the city.69 Cowen, who had
been was hitherto impressed by the Japanese army’s regard for the mores of
‘civilized’ warfare, was shocked to his core:
I could hardly believe my eyes, for, as my letters have shown, the indisputable
evidence of previous proceedings had filled me with admiration of the gentle
Japanese. So I watched intensely for the slightest sign of cause, confident that
there must be some, but I saw none whatever. If my eyes deceived me, others
were in the same plight; the military attaches of England and America . . . were
equally amazed and horrified. It was a gratuitous ebullition of barbarism, they
declared, a revolting repudiation of pretended humanity.70
Cowen was uncertain of the total death toll, but convinced it ran well into thou-
sands.71 The Japanese foreign ministry hurried to contain the reputational dam-
age: on his return to Japan, Cowen was received by the foreign minister, Mutsu
Munemitsu, who ascribed the events at Port Arthur to a breakdown in military
discipline, and assured him that the army would conduct a full inquiry. The inter-
vention appeared to have had its desired effect: two weeks later, after ‘mature
reflection’, Cowen made allowances for the psychological strains of the war, and
concluded the Japanese troops could ‘hardly be blamed very much if they do allow
revenge to reach extreme lengths’.72 Other papers omitted the episode altogether:
The Speaker hailed the capture of Port Arthur as a victory, ‘carried out in fine
style’, and even wrote that the Japanese army had ‘most judiciously’ allowed the
bulk of the Chinese army to escape, so as not to be ‘encumbered’ by prisoners.73
To have the killing of unarmed civilians excused as a momentary lapse of
discipline was a privilege usually reserved for white troops fighting in a colonial
setting. Japan’s diplomats, noted one American commentator, ‘had read up on
Andersonville, Libby Prison, Fort Pillow, Wounded Knee, the British cruelties
in India and Africa, the Russian record, and they were ready to compare notes
with civilized armies on the subject of cruelty in war’.74 But Japan’s critics would
remember ‘Port Arthur’ as a violent manifestation of racial essence. One eyewit-
ness, the British naval commander Sir Edmund Fremantle, found his ‘profound
distrust of the Japanese’ confirmed in this act of ‘simple butchery’.75 Japan, he
69 White, War in the East, pp. 597–601. 70 White, War in the East, pp. 597–601.
71 See Lone, Japan’s First Modern War, pp. 142–63.
72 ‘The Port Arthur Atrocities’, The Times, 1 February 1895.
73 ‘Port Arthur’, The Speaker, 1 December 1894. 74 White, War in the East, p. 607.
75 Trench to Kimberley, 20 December 1894, TNA, FO 46/438.
20 Empire Ascendant
wrote to his superiors at the Admiralty, had revealed itself to be an inherently

aggressive nation, which had brought on the war with China to try its ‘new toys of
Army and Navy . . . They make use of their knowledge of Western ways & habits of
thought to take us in, and laugh in their sleeve at the way in which their Oriental
cunning an astuteness has humbugged us’.76 Fremantle insisted that the Japanese
were ‘quite unscrupulous’ and ‘emphatically not to be trusted’.77 This sentiment
resonated widely in British diplomatic and military circles in East Asia, affecting,
among others, Satow’s predecessor as minister in Tokyo, the Anglo-Dutch aristocrat
Power Henry le Poer Trench. Having seen his brief tenure (1893–5) overshadowed
by the Sino-Japanese War, Trench left Tokyo disgusted with Japan’s ‘jingoism’, its
‘national vanity’, and its ‘insatiable craving to pose conspicuously, and assert
[itself] in the face of the world’.78 As Trench ominously noted in one despatch, the
tone of the Japanese press presented a very different picture of its expansionist
ambitions than the moderate noises made by its diplomats abroad. ‘Nothing less
than the conquest and absorption by Japan of the entire Chinese Empire is now
freely spoken of . . . Why, it is often said, should Japan not conquer and retain
China as part of her dominions precisely as England has done India?’79
At its most extreme, this vision of racial antagonism took on the form of what
became known as the ‘yellow peril’. The phrase was coined in Germany shortly
before the Sino-Japanese War, but seared into Europe’s public consciousness when
it was taken up by the German emperor, Wilhelm II, for whom the ‘peril’ would
remain a lifelong obsession. The need for pan-European solidarity in the face of a
rising Asia would famously inspire the Kaiser, in 1895, to commission a painting
that showed the nations of Europe standing behind the archangel Michael as the
latter pointed towards a menacing thundercloud containing a dragon and an image
of the Buddha.80 He subsequently presented copies of the painting to his fellow
monarchs, ordered its display on German warships, and even conducted some of
his personal correspondence on postcards bearing its image. It was enough to
give the ‘yellow peril’ a whiff of the ridiculous. But the racial fears that had
inspired Wilhelm’s idée fixe were widely shared in European political and intel-
lectual circles. Beginning with the Sino-Japanese War, British writers, too, began to
allude pointedly to a Japanese ‘danger’, often in terms that echoed the Kaiser in his
more bombastic moods. Thus the conservative journalist Frederick Greenwood
took to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895 to denounce the idea of an alliance with
a ‘yellow race’ as ‘intolerable’, ‘appalling’, and ‘unspeakably barbarous’. Any
European nation that concluded such a treaty, Greenwood fulminated, would
76 Fremantle to Spencer, 4 September 1894, BL, Spencer Papers, Add. MS 77393.

77 Fremantle to Spencer, 21 August 1894, BL, Spencer Papers, Add. MS 77393.
78 Trench to Kimberley, 7 September 1894, TNA, FO 405/60.
79 Trench to Kimberley, 16 November 1894, TNA, FO 46/438.
80 On the ‘peril’ in Germany, see Hollwitzer, Die Gelbe Gefahr, pp. 42–6; Iikura, ‘The “Yellow Peril” ’,
pp. 80–97.
make itself a ‘traitor to the welfare of the whole of the human race’—indeed, the
rise of ‘these exterminating peoples’ represented such a danger to European
supremacy that Britain would have to join with the Continental powers ‘to repress
the adventure of the yellow races and keep it down’.81 Greenwood’s views might
have languished at the edges of political discourse, but his claim that partnership
with Japan betrayed an unspoken rule of white racial solidarity was to surface
repeatedly before (and after) the formation of the alliance.
Events in East Asia brought these fears into clearer focus. In the summer of
1900, a popular insurgency against foreign commercial and missionary interests
in China (commonly referred to in the West as the Boxer Rising) swept into
Beijing, demanded the backing of the Qing court, and laid siege to the capital’s
foreign legation quarter. The crisis presented London with an acute dilemma.
Seized with rumours of a massacre—The Times fanned the flames by publishing
speculative obituaries of prominent Britons in the Chinese capital—popular
opinion demanded a response. Britain could ill afford to allow another power
(least of all Russia) to use the crisis as a pretext for a march on Beijing. But with
most of the British army tied up in South Africa, and imperial resources stretched
thin, London preferred to let Tokyo take the lead. ‘Surely we must run [the]
Japanese as a counterpoise to Russia’, noted one cabinet minister, ‘if we are to
boss the show.’82 Japan eventually supplied nearly half of the troops that made up
the eight-power coalition force that took Beijing in September. The spectacle of
Japanese soldiers (‘looking very dapper in their white uniforms’) leading the
forces of ‘civilization’ against the Boxers made for potent symbolism, and went a
long way to dispel fears that Japan would set itself against European interests in
Asia.83 The Times welcomed Japan as ‘a young and vigorous recruit to the Concert
of Civilisation’.84 Two years later, when presenting the alliance to parliament,
Cranborne would recall how Japan’s actions during the Boxer emergency had
‘earned [it] the gratitude of all of Europe’, and demonstrated ‘the remarkable
progress which Japan has made in the ways of civilisation and in its ascent to the
rights and responsibilities of a Western Power’.85
But if for many the Boxer crisis confirmed Japan’s ascent to ‘civilized’ status, it
also underlined the tensions brought out by the inclusion of an Asian state in an
international order predicated on colonial rule and racial hierarchy. In July 1900,
when the prospect of a Japanese expedition to China was first aired in the London
press, a series of commentators sounded the alarm over what they perceived to be
a troubling betrayal of racial solidarities. Another old Japan hand, the former dip-
lomat Algernon Freeman-Mitford, acidly remarked in The Times that, but a few
decades ago, Japan had been ‘murdering foreigners with as wild a fanaticism and
81 Greenwood, ‘Wilful Isolation of England’, pp. 847–52. 82 Otte, China Question, p. 185
83 Lynch, War of the Civilisations, p. 64. 84 [Editorial], The Times, 7 July 1900.
85 Lord Cranborne, 13 February 1902, Hansard, 4th series, HC, vol. 102, cc. 1287–8.
22 Empire Ascendant
as unreasoning a cruelty as China’. Beneath their ‘veneer’ of civilization, Mitford

insisted, the Japanese still shared ‘the dream of every Asiatic’: to ‘drive the hated
white man out of Asia’.86 London might find Japan a useful catspaw in China, but
its reliance on Japanese troops risked doing irreparable damage to European
racial prestige. ‘[G]ive Japan a foothold on the Asian continent’, Mitford warned,
‘and you will have given shape and substance to that yellow terror . . . of the German
emperor’s too prophetic nightmare’. Commentaries in the Pall Mall Gazette and
the Spectator similarly agonized that the Boxer emergency might hasten Japan’s
‘mastery’ over China:
Do our contemporaries understand what that means? It means that a pagan

Power of the highest efficiency in utilising modern science, and capable of a
massacre like that of Port Arthur, [would obtain] the control of the whole yellow
race—that is, of at least four hundred millions of men, all capable of discipline,
all penetrated with hatred of the insolent white, with resources probably as great as
those of Europe, and with an ambition as limitless as that of any previous Great
Power. What is to stop their rolling over Asia as Jenghiz Khan [sic] did, rending
India . . . from our grasp, or planting themselves in Constantinople, thence to
threaten the European world.87
These same critics were still around to denounce the Anglo-Japanese alliance two
years later. To be sure, not all those who criticized the treaty did so on racial
grounds: some Liberal organs, such as the Daily News and the Speaker, pleaded
a general opposition to military alliances, and warned that the treaty would
heighten friction with Russia.88 Yet others explicitly challenged the wisdom of
tying Britain’s imperial fortunes to an ‘Asiatic’ power. ‘[W]e cannot forget that the
Japanese are an Oriental nation’, the Spectator noted in its editorial on the alliance.
‘Their ways are not our ways, nor their hopes and aspirations ours’. Japan was
‘too recently civilised’ to be trusted as an ally.89 In an echo of the debate over
the deployment of Indian troops during the South African War, there was much
agonizing, too, over the prospect that the alliance would see ‘Asiatic’ soldiers
fighting on Britain’s behalf against fellow Europeans.90 Abandoning its usual
editorial restraint, even The Economist sounded a note of racial alarm. By allying
itself with a power outside the ‘white comity’, it warned,
Great Britain quits decidedly and finally that unwritten alliance of all white
Powers against all coloured races, which has been maintained for so many years,
86 A. B. Freeman-Mitford, ‘Japan and the Chinese Crisis’, The Times, 12 July 1900.
87 ‘The Danger from Japan’, Spectator, 14 July 1900; see also E. A. Brayley Hodgetts, ‘The Yellow
Menace’, Pall Mall Gazette, 14 July 1900.
88 Daniels, ‘The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the British Press’, pp. 4–13.
89 ‘The Alliance with Japan’, Spectator, 15 February 1902.
90 S.H.R., ‘The Alliance Between England and Japan’, Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1902.
and through which alone the supremacy of Europe over Asia and Africa can
finally be established.91
The notion that the alliance threatened to subvert the racial order of world polit
ics was thus present at the creation. But its strategic imperatives—the growth of
Russian power in north-east Asia; the danger of a further ‘scramble’ for Chinese
territory; and the need to curtail Britain’s runaway naval expenditure—amply jus-
tified, for most commentators, a break with diplomatic precedent. The ‘British
people’, one author declared, ‘must be prepared to turn a deaf ear to the anti-
patriots and Russophiles, who will declare that the Japanese are not white men,
are not Europeans . . . Sentiment will be worked for all that is worth: it must be
disregarded’.92 ‘Racial difference is forgotten’, noted the Conservative MP and
naval writer John Colomb, ‘in our appreciation of the obvious practical advan-
tages we obtain.’93 Diplomacy could be an inclusionary mechanism in and of
itself. Once the surprise at the treaty had ebbed, further criticism was quickly
muffled by the convention that matters of foreign policy were held to be above
partisan politics. Even the Spectator, one of the treaty’s fiercest critics, now
relented. Yet the reprieve would be temporary: two years later, the outbreak of the
Russo-Japanese War would see speculative fears of a ‘yellow menace’ surge to the
fore once again.
Imperial Entanglements: Japanese Expansion

and the ‘Pacific Question’
Viewed from London, Japan’s rise derived its geopolitical importance from the
‘Far Eastern question’ and the European rivalries that encircled it. But already in
the 1860s, the writer and globetrotter Charles Dilke offered an alternative per-
spective. Gazing west from the shores of California, Dilke had envisioned Japan
as part of an emerging Anglo-imperial world, forged by British and American
expansion in the Pacific. With its large population and temperate climate, Japan
was one of ‘three countries of the Pacific’ (alongside British Columbia and
New South Wales) which were ‘destined to rise to manufacturing greatness’.94
Dilke foresaw a future of economic interdependence, in which cotton from
Queensland and wool from California would be processed in Japanese factories
to be re-exported to America, Europe, and Asia. Deepening connections of trade,
Dilke speculated, would turn Japan into a ‘American colony’, and a salient for
‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization in East Asia.95 By the turn of the twentieth century,
91 ‘The Treaty with Japan’, The Economist, 15 February 1902.

92 ‘Ignotus’, ‘Great Britain’s Debt to Japan’, p. 388.
93 J. C. R. Colomb, ‘The Treaty with Japan’, The Times, 20 February 1902.
94 Dilke, Greater Britain, p. 281. 95 Dilke, Greater Britain , p. 91.
24 Empire Ascendant
with Europe entangled in the ‘China Question’, and the United States expanding
westwards to Hawaii and the Philippines, Dilke’s account seemed to be coming to
fruition. ‘Remoteness and isolation’, noted Archibald Colquhoun in his Mastery of
the Pacific (1902), had long prevented the shores of the world’s largest ocean from
‘mutual entanglement’. But now, as distance was ‘annihilated by modern science’,
the Pacific had at last become ‘a highway for international commerce’ and an ‘an
arena for the ambitions of the nations’.96
The emergence of the Asia-Pacific as a future centre for great-power rivalry
also implied a reorientation of imperial policy. Hitherto conceived as the oceanic
hinterland of a Europe-facing Britain, the settler colonies would take on a new
role as local anchors of British power in the Pacific.97 The development of Australia,
New Zealand, and Canada noted one contributor to the National Review, would
be a ‘full offset’ to the expansion of Russian and American influence. And in due
course, the ‘growth of Australia and Canada’ would ‘react upon British policy’ by
demanding a fuller recognition of the empire’s deepening interests in the Pacific—
including a closer association with Japan. Australia might have experienced
‘certain difficulties’ with Japanese immigration, but ultimately, its distrust of Russia
made it ‘naturally the friend of Japan’, while Canada, ‘with a rising commerce on
the Pacific’ was ‘thoroughly friendly’ to the idea of a Japanese alliance.98
The Sino-Japanese War also awakened British policymakers to the prospect of
deepening and widening connections between the British settler colonies and Japan.
Writing from Tokyo in December 1894, Le Poer Trench had urged the Foreign
Office to consider ‘how the Colonies might be affected’ by the power shifts in the
Far East. Already, he noted, the growth of Japan’s overseas trade and migration
had begun make inroads in the British Pacific, where economic growth and high
wages offered a ‘strong inducement’ for the migration of Japanese labourers and
artisans. The current trickle of migration was bound to grow once the war was
over, as the shipping appropriated for the war would ‘be thrown out of employ-
ment’, and redeployed towards ‘the establishment of new lines of steamers to the
Australian ports and elsewhere’. Emigration companies stood ready to meet a
growing overseas demand for Japanese contract labour. Given the colonists’
well-established hostility to Chinese immigrants, there was a serious possibility
of a new ‘labour difficulty’ with Japan—except that this time, the colonies would
be dealing with a rising great power determined to uphold the interests of its
overseas subjects. Before long, Trench warned, the Japanese navy might well
96 Colquhoun, Mastery of the Pacific, pp. vii–ix; on the ‘death of distance’ as an intellectual phe-
nomenon, see Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance’, and Greater Britain, pp. 63–91; Kern, Culture of Time and
Space, pp. 211–40
97 Colquhoun, Mastery of the Pacific, pp. 426–7. For the intellectual background to these ideas, see
Bell, Greater Britain.
98 ‘Ignotus’, ‘Great Britain’s Debt to Japan’, p. 387.
constitute ‘a menace not only to Hong Kong and Singapore, but also to the
Australian colonies and Canada’.99
In his revised Problems of the Far East, Curzon dismissed such a prospect:
Japan, he thought, had neither the ‘requisite numbers’ nor the ‘hereditary instinct
for expansion’ necessary for large-scale colonization.100 Japan’s maritime hori-
zons had long been constrained by the restrictions that the Tokugawa state had
imposed on overseas trade and travel.101 Under the sakoku (‘seclusion’) edicts
promulgated in the 1630s, the Tokugawa bakufu forbade all forms of external
contact other than those explicitly sanctioned by the state. Japanese subjects were
banned from engaging in overseas trade, sailing on foreign ships, and, in 1635,
from leaving the country altogether. And with the noted exception of the Dutch
East India Company (which was permitted to retain a small trading post on an
artificial island in Nagasaki) the Tokugawa forbade the entry of European mer-
chants. But Japan’s ‘opening’ in the 1850s, the revocation of the sakoku edicts in
1866, and the social changes wrought by the Meiji reforms drastically loosened
these restraints on mobility. Almost immediately after the repeal of the travel ban,
Japanese returned to the seas in growing numbers, as communities of merchants
and labourers established themselves in Korea and the China coast.102 More
itinerant types, such as sailors, sealers, and travelling acrobats, could soon be
found in far-flung corners of the Pacific: as early as 1867, a troupe of Japanese
jugglers toured the distant cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Auckland.103
Starting in 1885, when the Meiji state first authorized the departure of labourers
for the sugar plantations of Hawaii, Japanese seasonal workers began to join their
Chinese predecessors on the colonial frontiers of North America, Australasia,
and the islands of the Pacific. Hawaii would remain their most important destin
ation: on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, its Japanese community had grown to
over 30,000 settlers.104
The war against China further catalysed Japan’s expansion into the Pacific.
Trench been right to predict that that much of the shipping constructed for the
war effort was subsequently turned over to Japan’s commercial shipping agents.
The Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), Japan’s largest, used the windfall to enter the
field against British, American, and Canadian lines on long-distance routes.
Before the war, NYK had run a single transoceanic service, linking Kobe (Osaka’s
entrepôt) to the Indian cotton port of Bombay. By 1896, the firm had established a
southern route to Manila, Brisbane, and Sydney, and a western one to Honolulu
99 Le Poer Trench to Kimberley, 26 December 1894, TNA, FO 46/436, f. 206.

100 Curzon, Problems (2nd edn), p. 412.
101 Laver, Sakoku Edicts, pp. 25–52; Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance, pp. 9–18.
102 Yamamoto, ‘Japan’s Passport System’, pp. 1000–3.
103 Sissons, ‘Australian–Japanese Relations’, pp. 48–9.
104 Nordyke and Matsumoto, ‘The Japanese in Hawaii’, p. 165.
26 Empire Ascendant
and Seattle.105 Expanding shipping connections in turn stimulated the growth of

the broader logistic, financial, and informational infrastructure to serve Japanese
trade and migration. The result was a settlement boom. Hawaii’s Japanese popula-
tion doubled to 60,000 between 1895 and 1900. The islands also became a staging
post for further travel to North America: by the turn of the twentieth century, over
30,000 Japanese had made their way to the continental United States and Canada.
Next came Queensland, home to some 3,500 Japanese settlers in 1901. Smaller
communities of Japanese could be found as far afield as Singapore, the Dutch East
Indies, and Polynesia.106 Together with the Japanese settlers in Taiwan, China,
and Korea, these communities constituted a rapidly expanding ‘greater Japan’,
whose total population had grown to a total of 180,000 people by 1904.107
By the 1890s, this quickening of ‘overseas activity’ had become closely
associated—in Japanese as well as in British or American eyes—with the modern-
izing aspirations of the Meiji state. The abolition of the travel ban in 1866 had been
paired with the introduction of a passport system, leaving the Japanese government
with a measure of control over the flow and direction of emigration.108 In
Hokkaido, as later in Taiwan and Korea, state-directed settlement became a key
feature of the Japanese colonial project. Eastward migration to Hawaii and North
America, too, worked to widen Japan’s political horizons. Tokyo established its
first trans-Pacific consulate (in San Francisco), as early as 1870, a year before the
opening of the Japanese legation in London. The shipping and emigration boom
unleashed by the Sino-Japanese War brought another wave of consulate openings,
as Japan established formal representation at Bombay (1894), Townsville (1896),
Sydney (1897), Wellington (1897), Adelaide (1898), Colombo (1898), Ottawa (1899),
Montreal (1901), and Tacoma, Washington (1896).109 If diplomacy lent institutional
shape to the Japanese world emerging in the Pacific, so too, in a rather d ifferent
sense, did the growth of the Japanese navy. Rattled by the Triple Intervention, the
Japanese government drastically increased its naval spending after 1895: over two-
thirds of the Chinese war indemnity, or a sum of ¥213 million (ca. £21 million)
would be directed to the navy.110 Over the next ten years, Japan would build more
battleships than any other power except Great Britain.111 Sea power remained,
first and foremost, an instrument to preserve Japan’s independence and support
its diplomacy in China. But it also afforded a means to guard its expanding
maritime and diasporic interests in the Pacific. Thus when in early 1897, Hawaii’s
105 Chida and Davies, Japanese Shipping, pp. 21–3.

106 See Azuma, ‘Remapping’, pp. 419–23 for an overview.
107 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 100. 108 Yamamoto, ‘Japan’s Passport System’, pp. 1005–12.
109 Macdonald to Lansdowne, 2 December 1902, TNA, FO 46/553.
110 On Japanese naval expansion after the Sino-Japanese War, see Evans and Peattie, Kaigun,
pp. 57–65; Schenking, Making Waves, pp. 84–90.
111 Cramp, ‘Coming Sea Power’, pp. 445–51. Japan’s naval plan called for the acquisition of six
battleships (all ordered from British shipyards), eight cruisers, twenty-three destroyers, the expansion
of shipyards and training facilities, and a new naval base at the Pescadores.
white-settler-dominated government refused the Shinshū Maru, a freighter

carrying Japanese labourers, permission to land, Tokyo sent a warship into
Honolulu harbour. Fear of Japanese intervention would prove a decisive factor in
the United States’ decision to annex the archipelago the following year.112
Japan’s expansion in the 1890s, then, unfolded across several dimensions at
once. As it negotiated its ascent through the hierarchies of the international sys-
tem, the Meiji state also extended its reach outwards across the Pacific. As Akira
Iriye demonstrated in his classic study on Japanese expansionism, Meiji intellec-
tuals came to embrace emigration both as a patriotic duty and an expression of
Japan’s status as a ‘civilized’ state. A discourse on ‘overseas development’ (kaigai
hatten) blurred the distinction between migration and colonization: labour emi-
gration to Hawaii and California was acclaimed alongside the settlement of
Hokkaido and Taiwan as an expression of Japan’s manifest destiny in the Pacific.113
Organizations like the Colonisation Society (Shokumin Kyōkai), founded in
Tokyo in 1893, vocally called for the creation of ‘new Japans’ overseas. Many
migrants internalized these ideas: in the United States, as Eiichiro Azuma has
shown, middle-class Japanese insisted they joined Anglo-Americans as co-equal
settlers, not immigrant labour.114 In fact, what emerged in Japan in the late nine-
teenth century closely mirrored the ‘emigration ideology’ that emerged in
Victorian Britain in the 1840s. Here too, migration was reinvented from an outlet
for social undesirables into ‘a road to self-betterment’ and, eventually, a ‘provi-
dential duty’.115 Japanese expansionist ideology betrayed an obvious kinship with
that of contemporary British and American colonial propagandists such as
Frederick Jackson Turner, Alfred Mahan, Charles Dilke, and J. R. Seeley. Indeed,
one advocate of ‘peaceful expansion’, the aspiring historian Iganaki Manjirō, had
studied under Seeley at Cambridge and dedicated his Japan and the Pacific (1890)
to him.116 For many Japanese, treading the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ road to modernity
included retracing their expansionist trajectories. ‘When examining the example
of Englishmen’, noted Fukuzawa Yukichi in 1884, ‘no one would fail to see [that
emigration] shall lead to the enrichment of Japan as well.’117
Yet herein lay a cruel irony. To the Meiji elite, the acceleration of ‘overseas
activity’ may have signalled that Japan was becoming more like Britain or the
United States; that, in Fukuzawa’s famous phrase, it was ‘leaving Asia’ both in a
literal and a metaphorical sense. But as Japanese migrants moved into Queensland,
British Columbia, or California, they entered the rigid racial order of the settler
frontier—not, as many had hoped, as partners in a common imperial enterprise,
112 On US–Japanese rivalry over Hawaii, see Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, pp. 50–6; Morgan, Pacific
Gibraltar.
113 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, pp. 35–62; Uchida, ‘Island Nation’, pp. 57–90.
114 Azuma, Between Two Empires, pp. 17–34.
115 On ‘settlerism’, see Darwin, Empire Project, pp. 41–5; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 153–65.
116 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 35. 117 Cited in Azuma, Between Two Empires, p. 21.
28 Empire Ascendant
but stereotyped into the role of ‘Asiatic’ interlopers. This was, in part, a question
of timing. Japanese emigration reached its decisive momentum just as Tokyo
began to assert its great-power position in Asia after 1895. But it also followed
closely on the heels of a nativist wave against Chinese immigration that swept
across much of the ‘white Pacific’ in the 1880s. Beginning in the late 1870s, labour
unrest in California, tinged with the threat of violence, had forced Washington
into renegotiating the ‘open door’ clauses of its commercial treaty with China. A
federal Chinese Exclusion Act followed in 1882. Canada imposed a $ 50 head-tax
on Chinese migrants in 1885. Emboldened by these statutes, white agitators in San
Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver went on to stage pogrom-like expul-
sion campaigns in the latter half of the 1880s.118 The ‘Afghan affair’ of 1888, in
which a ship carrying several hundred Chinese passengers was barred from docking
at Sydney and Melbourne, saw the Australian colonies rally behind the cry of a
‘white Australia’.119
It was no coincidence that Japanese migration expanded just as the anti-Chinese
backlash reached its apogee. Chinese exclusion created shortages in industries
dependent on immigrant labour, like logging, mining, railroads (in British
Columbia), and agriculture (in California), that recruiters turned to Japan to fill.120
By the same token, Japanese migrants were quickly targeted by the same racial
discourses honed in opposition to the Chinese. California’s anti-Japanese movement
took off in the 1890s, as one of its leading historians put it, as ‘a tail to the Chinese
kite’.121 In the Pacific northwest, white labour activists might have even welcomed
the arrival of the Japanese ‘as an opportunity to reinvigorate a radicalised class
consciousness against a new indispensable enemy’.122 White vigilantes drove
Japanese off mining sites in the state of Washington (1900) and in neighbouring
British Columbia (1902). In Queensland, Sinophobic tropes were similarly repur-
posed: the Japanese might be ‘healthier in their morals and their way of life’, one
Labor legislator declared, yet they possessed ‘the same dogged persistence’ that
made them ‘even more formidable opponents than the Chinese’.123 Even in dis-
tant New Zealand, the mere prospect of ‘any influx of Japanese at all’ prompted
calls for pre-emptive legislation.124
The fact that Japanese migrants were being subjected to the same prejudices
and restrictions levelled at the ‘backward’ Chinese turned the migration question
into a crucial testing-ground for Japan’s campaign for international recognition.
118 On the expulsion campaigns, see Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, pp. 1–16; Chang, Pacific
Connections, pp. 44–53.
119 Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia, pp. 116–42.
120 Chang, Pacific Connections, pp. 54–88.
121 Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, p. 21; on the ‘Sinification’ of the Japanese, see also Azuma, Between
Two Empires, pp. 36–46.
122 Chang, Pacific Connections, p. 67.
123 Murakami, ‘Australia’s Immigration Legislation’, p. 51.
124 J. W. Kelly, 24 July 1896, NZPD, vol. 93, p. 468; Atkinson, Burdens of White Supremacy, pp. 23–9.
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Title: Baharia Oasis

Its topography and geology
Author: John Ball

H. J. L. Beadnell
Release date: April 10, 2024 [eBook #73366]
Language: English
Original publication: Cairo: National Printing Department, 1903
Credits: Galo Flordelis (This file was produced from images

generously made available by the HathiTrust Digital
Library/Cornell University)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BAHARIA

OASIS ***
SURVEY DEPARTMENT, PUBLIC WORKS MINISTRY
EGYPT.
BAHARIA OASIS:
ITS TOPOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY
BY
JOHN BALL, Ph. D., A.R.S.M., Assoc. M. Inst. C.E.

AND
HUGH J. L. BEADNELL, F.G.S., F.R.G.S.
CAIRO
National Printing Department
1903
CONTENTS.
Pages.
PREFACE 5
CHAPTER I. — Introduction 7
„ II. — Surveying Methods and General Results 11
„ III. — The Roads connecting the Oasis of Baharia
with the Nile Valley and with other Oases 17
„ IV. — Topography, with Notes on the Water-Supply,
Inhabitants, etc. 37
„ V. — Geology 47
„ VI. — Antiquities 73
Plates.
Plate I. — Map of the Oasis geologically coloured at end
„ II. — Sketch Map showing Position of the Oasis „
„ III. — Villages and Principal Sources of Water „
„ IV. — Section through Western Escarpment, 11
kilometres north of south end of Depression „
„ V. — Diagrammatic Section from hill 15 kilometres north-
east of Ain el Haiss to the Eocene-Cretaceous
junction on desert to west „
„ VI. — Section from Mandisha through Jebel Mayesra and
Conical Hill to Western Plateau „
„ VII. — Map of the Synclinal fold from Jebel Hefhuf to its
termination in the Western Plateau, 13
kilometres north-west of Ain el Haiss „
„ VIII. — Sketch sections of Eastern Scarp „
Illustrations in the Text.

Fig. 1. — Section across Syncline, 12½ kilometres north- 66
west of Ain el Haiss
„ 2. — Sketch shewing probable relations of Eocene and
Cretaceous in Anticline on Western Desert
Plateau, 11½ kilometres north-west of El Qasr 69
P R E FA C E
The geological examination of the Oases of the Libyan Desert

was commenced in 1897, when two parties were sent out to Baharia
Oasis, one under the charge of Dr. Ball, who, with Mr. G. Vuta as
topographer, started from Minia and explored the eastern half of the
area, while Mr. Beadnell with Mr. L. Gorringe as his topographer
started from Maghagha and examined the western side of the oasis.
The expeditions commenced work in October, and mapping on the
scale of ¹⁄₅₀₀₀₀ the whole area was surveyed before the end of the
year. The return traverses were made to Minia by the first party via
Farafra to Assiut by the second. The following chapters and maps
set forth the results of this joint exploration, certain gaps being filled
from the data of Ascherson.
BAHARIA OASIS
CHAPTER I.
I ntr oduc ti on.
The Oasis of Baharia (or Northern Oasis), also known as the

Little Oasis, lies between the parallels 27° 48′ and 28° 30′ of north
latitude, and between the meridians 28° 35′ and 29° 10′ east of
Greenwich, being thus situated in the Libyan Desert about 180
kilometres, or four to five days’ march by camel, west of the Nile
Valley (Sketchmap, Plate II). Like the other oases of the Western
Desert (Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga) to the south, Baharia is a large
natural excavation in the great Libyan plateau; it differs, however,
from those oases, which are open on one or more sides, in being
entirely surrounded by escarpments, and the vast number of isolated
hills within the depression form an unique topographical feature. In
Baharia, as, with the exception of Dakhla, in the oases generally, the
cultivated area bears only a very small proportion to the total oasis-
area, the remainder of the floor of the natural excavation being
barren desert. The oasis contains four principal villages, all situated
in its northern portion, and it is in the neighbourhood of these that
water, and consequently vegetation, is most abundant.
The early history of Baharia is shrouded in an obscurity greater
even than that surrounding the history of Kharga. That it was
inhabited at a very early date is shown however by a stela of the
reign of Thothmes II (about B.C. 1600-1500) found there by
Ascherson, by a tomb of the 19th dynasty (B.C. 1300) and fragments
of two temples, one dating from the reign of King Apries (B.C. 588-
570) and the other from the reign of Amasis (B.C. 569-526),
discovered by Steindorff in 1900, and by the references to it in the
Ptolemaic inscriptions of the temple of Edfu. The oasis of Baharia is
referred to in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of its newly-discovered
temples as “the northern oasis of Amenhotep,” and as “the oasis
Huye”; by Strabo it is called δεύτερα “the second” and by Ptolemy
ὄασις μικρὰ “the small oasis.” The Romans have left traces of their
occupation of Baharia in an arch near the village of El Qasr[1] and
other ruins, as well as in numerous wells and underground
aqueducts, which latter are still used by the present inhabitants.
Fragmentary ruins of churches and a Coptic village attest the fact of
the occupation of the place during Christian times. At present
Baharia, along with the neighbouring oasis of Farafra to the south, is
administered as part of the Mudiria of Minia, and is fairly prosperous,
though lacking in enterprise to an even greater extent than is shown
by the two southern oases of Dakhla and Kharga.
The first European traveller to reach the oasis of Baharia appears
to have been Belzoni,[2] who reached it from Beni Suef on May 26th,
1819, and after spending some eleven days there returned by the
same route. Though his observations appear to have been correctly
made, the description of his travels is largely coloured by
imagination, and his map appears only to have been a rough sketch.
He erroneously confused Baharia with the oasis of Jupiter Ammon,
whose temple he imagined he had found in the remains of the
Roman arch near El Qasr, the chief village of the oasis. It is hardly
necessary to remark that the oasis of Jupiter Ammon is really that
now known as Siwa, situated some 340 kilometres west-north-west
of Baharia.
The earliest connected modern account of the oasis of any value
is that of Cailliaud,[3] who with Letorzec visited the place in 1820 on
his way from Siwa to Farafra, and during a stay of about six weeks
examined and mapped some of its principal features. He drew
attention to its antiquities and gave a careful description of the hot
springs and ancient aqueducts, besides taking a number of
observations of latitude and noting some of the topographical and
geological features, such as the occurrence of volcanic rocks in the
oasis. Cailliaud records his meeting in Baharia with Hyde, an English
traveller, who, however, does not appear to have published any
account of his wanderings.
In the winter of 1823-1824 Baharia was visited by Pacho in
company with F. Muller. In an account of Pacho’s travels[4] published
after his unhappy death, there is no reference to his observations in
this oasis beyond an indication of his route on the map.
Wilkinson[5] visited the oasis of Baharia in 1825.
The Rohlfs’ expedition of 1874,[6] with the distinguished scientists
K. von Zittel and W. Jordan as geologist and topographer
respectively, added very considerably to our knowledge of Baharia,
more especially in the way of fixing precisely the geographical
positions and levels of its principal points. Zittel, however, did not
visit this oasis, and in consequence its geological structure was not
studied, the few references to it made in the publications of the
Rohlfs’ expedition being based on an examination of specimens
collected by Ascherson.
Probably the most accurate map hitherto existing of Baharia
Oasis is that of Ascherson,[7] who spent nearly three months there in
1876. Ascherson, who entered the oasis by the road from the Fayum
and returned to Samalut, chiefly directed his attention to botanical
observations, but his memoir contains some valuable topographical
and geological information which supplements that of previous and
later observers in important measure; he has also the distinction of
finding the stela of the reign of Thothmes III already referred to, and
the remains of an Egyptian temple; the latter is probably identical
with one of those discovered by Steindorff in 1900.
The short memoir by Capt. H. G. Lyons, R.E.,[8] published in
1894, brought together a number of observations on the geology of
the Libyan Desert generally, and his discovery of fossils, referred to
Exogyra Overwegi, for the first time established the Upper
Cretaceous age of the clays and sandstones forming the floor and
lower part of the scarp in the northern end of the depression.
In 1897 the Geological Survey carried out its examination, the
results of which are set forth in the following chapters.
Since the survey expedition, Baharia has been visited by
Steindorff,[9] who during his five days’ stay in the oasis made
important additions to our knowledge of its antiquities. These will be
further referred to in the chapter on the topography of the oasis.
[1] This ruin was described by Cailliaud (Voyage à Méroé. etc., vol.
I, p. 183) who records that in his time (1820) only the central arcade
remained standing. Steindorff found in 1900 that even this last
fragment had fallen.
[2] Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the
Pyramids, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, and of a
Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in search of the Ancient
Berenice, and another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon.—London, 1820,
pp. 395-433.
[3] Voyage à Méroé, au Fleuve Blanc, an-delà de Fàzogl dans le midi
du Royaume de Sennàr, à Syouah et dans cinq autres Oasis. Paris,
1826. The work consists of four volumes, accompanied by numerous
maps and plates illustrating the antiquities.
[4] Relation d’un voyage dans la Marmarique, la Cyrénaique et les
Oasis d’Audjelah et de Maradèh. Paris, 1827. (This date is probably
wrong, as a reference is made in the work, (p. VII) to the suicide of
Pacho on Jan. 26th, 1829).
[5] Modern Egypt and Thebes. London, 1843, vol. II, p. 357-371.
[6] See G. Rohlfs, Drei Monate in der libyschen Wüste, Cassel,
1875; Jordan, Physische Geographie und Meteorologie der
libyschen Wüste, Cassel, 1876; and Zittel, Geologie der libyschen
Wüste. Cassel, 1883. Jordan appears to have been the only member
of the Rohlfs’ party to actually visit Baharia. He left the other members
at Lake Sittra (N. lat. 28° 42′ 40″, long. 27° 4′ 23″, E. of Green.) and
entered Baharia from the N.W. of El Qasr; after passing about 1½
days in Baharia Oasis he journeyed southwards via Farafra to rejoin
his colleagues in Dakhla.
[7] Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, Band 20, Heft
II, 1885. Also Dr. Schweinfurth’s summary of Ascherson’s results in
“Petermann’s Mittheilungen,” 22. Band, 1876, p. 264.
[8] On the Stratigraphy and Physiography of the Libyan Desert of
Egypt. Q. J. G. S. Nov, 1894, pp. 531-547.
[9] Vorlaüfiger Bericht über seine im Winter 1899-1900 nach der Oase
Siwa und nach Nubien unternommenen Reisen.—Königl. Sächs.
Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 1900, p. 226. Steindorff
entered the Oasis from Siwa, and returned from it via the Fayum. He
appears only to have visited the northern part of Baharia.
CHAPTER II.
Surveying Methods and General Results.
Crossing the Libyan Desert from Maghagha and Minia

respectively, the two parties of the Geological Survey met at a joint
camp close to Zubbo, one of the chief villages of the oasis. It was
desirable to fix this meeting-point as a primary station for the
subsequent plotting of the maps. Cailliaud[10] gave the latitude of
Zubbo as 28° 21′ 47″, and its longitude as 26° 43′ 46″ E. of Paris,
(equivalent to 29° 3′ 55″ E. of Greenwich). Jordan gave for Bawitti
the position N. lat. 28° 21′ 12″, long. E. of Greenwich 28° 56′ 45″.
Taking the difference of latitude and longitude between Bawitti and
Zubbo as found by the Survey, viz., lat. + 55″, long. + 4′ 16″, we have
as the equivalent of Jordan’s latitude for Zubbo 28° 22′ 7″, and for
his longitude 29° 1′ 1″ E. of Greenwich. Thus, while there is a fair
agreement between the two authors as regards latitude, there is a
difference of 2′ 54″ in the values of the longitude.
The longitude is of course always the difficult matter in the
geographical determination of places not easy of access. Cailliaud’s
value rests on the method of distance and azimuths, both roughly
determined only; Jordan, on the other hand, used the absolute
though not very precise method of lunar distances measured with a
sextant. The Survey parties depended entirely on direct
measurement by means of measuring-wheels from known points in
the Nile Valley; the values obtained in this way are tabulated
below[11].
I.—Traverse from Maghagha to Zubbo.

Maghagha Railway Station, long. E. of Greenwich 30° 50′ 49″
Recorded west departure, Maghagha to Zubbo, 187·77
km. 1 56 46
Giving long. of Zubbo 28 54 3
II.—Traverse from Minia to Zubbo.

Minia Railway Station, long. E. of Greenwich 30° 45′ 39″
Recorded west departure, Minia to Zubbo, 176·32 km. 1 47 50
III.—Traverse from Zubbo to Minia, via the south end of the Oasis.
Recorded east departure, Zubbo-Minia, 174·87 km. 1° 46′ 45″
Minia Railway Station, long. E. of Greenwich 30 45 39
The arithmetic mean of these three determinations is 28° 56′ 55″;

owing, however, to the breakdown of the measuring-wheel during the
outward traverse from Maghagha, and the consequent necessity of
estimating a part of the distance traversed by the time taken in
marching, the different traverses are not equal in value, and the
longitude finally adopted by the survey, as the best approximation
after investigation of the various sources of error in the
measurements, was 28° 58′ 34″. It would thus appear that Jordan’s
position may be a little too far east, the difference amounting to 2′
27″, or about 3½ kilometres, while Cailliaud’s value would place the
position at a rather less distance west of that adopted.
The survey observations confirmed the accuracy of Jordan’s
latitude (28° 22′ 7″), from which the value found by Cailliaud differs,
as already remarked, only slightly.
The surveying operations within the oasis were based on a rapid
plane-table triangulation from a measured base line within it, details
being simultaneously sketched in, on a scale of ¹⁄₅₀₀₀₀. The site
chosen for the base was a level stretch of ground extending between
the camp at Zubbo and an isolated clump of date-palms to the north-
east; the length of this line was found by repeated wheel-
measurement to be 3·88 kilometres. The two parties ran off their
triangulations from this base to the surrounding hills, and carried on
the mapping southward by plane-table, taking stations chiefly on the
hills and prominent points of the scarps, and not meeting again till
Ain el Haiss, in the southern part of the oasis, was reached. Here a
test was made as to agreement of the two sets of maps, only a small
difference being found. The position of Ain el Haiss, as found by
taking the mean of the two determinations, is latitude 28° 2′ 11″ N.,
longitude 28° 39′ 19″ E. of Greenwich; this places the spring about 4′
18″ east of Jordan’s determination (lat. 28° 1′ 55″ N., long. 28° 13′
47″ E. of Green.).
The two parties made a third connection at the extreme south
end of the oasis-depression. Our observations for this point give its
latitude as 27° 48′ 13″ N., and its longitude as 28° 32′ 19″ E. of
Greenwich, placing it very near the position shown on Jordan’s map.
The plane-table method making use of the magnetic meridian, it
was imperative to determine the amount of declination of the
compass. This was done at one point only, viz., at the south end of
the oasis, the value found (by observation of the transit of Polaris)
being 4° 50′ W. The declination is fairly constant over the entire area,
except near the eruptive dolerite masses, the magnetite in which
causes a very sensible deflection of the needle; in the
neighbourhood of these, however, the surveying was carried on
independently of the compass. With regard to the yearly change of
declination, we have as data the previous observations of Cailliaud,
who found the declination at Zubbo in January, 1820, to be 12° 13′
W.; of Jordan, who obtained the value 6° 56′ W. in March, 1874; and
of Capt. Lyons,[12] whose observations with a Bamberg
declinatorium at Mandisha in April, 1894, gave the value 5° 8·9′ W.
Tabulating these:—
Observed Declination
Observer. Date. Yearly change.
W.
Cailliaud January 1820 12° 13′
Jordan March 1874 6° 33′·6 6′·3
Lyons April 1894 5° 8′·9 4′·2
Geological Survey December 1897 4° 50′ 5′·3
In view of the magnitude of the diurnal variation, which may
range up to 10′ of arc, and our present lack of knowledge of the
distribution of this diurnal variation during the twenty-four hours, a
comparison after so short an interval as that between the last two
observations is not to be trusted. It would seem proved from the
three foregoing observations that the yearly variation is at present
decreasing, the mean from 1820 to 1874 being 6′·3 as against 4′·2
for the period 1874-1894. This decrease is also noticeable in
comparisons of the declinations observed at different times in other
parts of Egypt.
The altitudes above sea-level of the principal points, more
especially in the eastern half of the oasis, were determined with a
Watkin aneroid barometer, which had been compared with the Cairo
standard mercurial barometer. A fairly long stay was made at the
Zubbo camp, and the altitude of this point may be regarded as fairly
accurately fixed by the observations tabulated below:—
Zubbo. Cairo.
Date and Time. Difference.
Bar. (corrected). Bar. (corrected).
mm. mm. mm.
October 12, 6 p.m. 753·54 761·10 7·56

„ 14, 8 a.m. 754·94 763·04 8·10
„ 6 p.m. 753·79 761·53 7·74
„ 15, 7.30 a.m. 754·55 762·60 8·05
„ 9 p.m. 754·30 762·64 8·34
„ 17, 7.15 a.m. 754·18 761·84 7·66
„ 18, 7 a.m. 753·79 761·64 7·85
noon 752·52 761·34 8·82
„ 19, 8.30 a.m. 752·65 762·31 9·66
Nov., 26, 3 p.m. 754·81 763·29 8·48
„ 27, 8 a.m. 754·81 764·12 9·31
Mean 8·32
Since 1 mm. of mercury corresponds at the mean temperature of
observation (20° C.) to 11·4 metres of height, we have height of
Zubbo camp above Cairo observatory = 8·32 × 11·4 = 94·7, or say
95 metres. Since the observatory is 33 metres above sea-level, the
camp at Zubbo is 128 metres above sea-level. Jordan’s altitude for
Bawitti, which probably lies at about the same level as Zubbo, is 113
metres, and when it is remembered that the point of the Survey’s
observation lay not in Zubbo itself, but at the camp on elevated
ground some 10 or 12 metres above it, the results show a very good
agreement.
At Ain el Haiss three barometric observations were taken on
different days; the comparison of these with the Cairo records would
place this point 156 metres above sea-level. Jordan’s value is 122
metres, the number of observations on which this figure is based not
being stated, it is difficult to say which of the two altitudes is the more
probable.
At the remaining camps within the oasis, and at the camps en
route between the oasis and Minia, corresponding observations were
taken, the number of comparisons with Cairo varying from two to
seven at an individual station. These observations being reduced
and corrected by comparison among themselves gave the levels of
the different camps with some degree of approximation to accuracy,
and the altitudes of intermediate points were found by interpolation
based on barometric readings. The resulting altitudes will be found
on the map (Plate I); where no altitudes have been taken by the
Survey, the values given by Ascherson on his map have been
inserted.
The statistics relating to the oasis, and the methods of cleaning
out wells, are based on information supplied by the Government
officials at Bawitti, and may be taken as fairly reliable. The
particulars regarding water-supply are of course based mainly on
direct observation during the survey of the villages.
The botany of the oasis having been fully studied by
Ascherson[13] no attempt was made by the Survey to collect or
describe the plants met with. The abundant growths of the beautiful
maiden-hair fern (Adiantum Capillus Veneris)[14] will not, however,
fail to strike even the casual visitor to the old Roman aqueducts,
which still serve as the principal water-channels of the oasis. Nor
were the animals of the oasis made the subject of any detailed
observations, although the existence of several of the species of
lizards and snakes common to the Nile Valley was recorded, and
specimens collected when easily obtainable.
Baharia is not rich in archæological remains, and, with few
exceptions, even those existing were not examined by the Survey,
though the positions of all ruins met with during the work were
mapped. In a later chapter will be found a connected though brief
account of all the antiquities noted, the publications of previous
authors being referred to wherever the descriptions cannot be given
from personal observations.
The principal point attended to in the topographical mapping by
the survey was the accurate delineation of the bounding scarps of
the oasis and of the large number of hills within it. These features, of
which an accurate map was essential for any proper consideration of
the geology, had been only rapidly sketched by previous travellers,
and the precise shape of the oasis was still unknown. In the
cultivated spots, on the other hand, much had been done by
Cailliaud, Jordan and Ascherson towards mapping the detail. Hence,
beyond re-determining the precise positions of the main points and
the general limits of the cultivated areas, no attempt at detailed
mapping in these areas was undertaken by the Survey parties, it
being felt that it would be preferable in the limited time available to
concentrate attention on the almost totally unknown features, so
essential to any geological consideration, rather than to devote
considerable time to the details of the inhabited spots.
Thus, while the field maps resulting from the survey represented
the oasis for the first time in its true shape, and the hills within it in
their true relative magnitudes and positions, they fell somewhat short
of the maps of Ascherson and Cailliaud in the number of springs,
ruins, etc., shown. The more important ruins overlooked by the
survey have, however, been inserted approximately from existing
maps, and the whole result (Plates I, III and VII), is an advance on
the existing representations.
The geology of the oasis was very carefully investigated, this
being a field in which comparatively little had been done, and a
number of very interesting results were obtained. The principal
points in this connection worthy of note resulting from the detailed
examination of the scarps and hills are—
(i) The existence of a marked unconformity between the Upper
Cretaceous and Eocene strata, thus confirming the unconformity
between these two great systems which had been noted[15] earlier at
Abu Roash; this unconformity has now been remarked in many parts
of Egypt.[16] The palæontological proofs of this unconformity were
obtained from the western scarp, the beds of the eastern side,
though they show the same thickening, being much poorer in fossils;
(ii) The occurrence of an extensive series of Upper Cretaceous
beds of Cenomanian to Danian age within the depression and
forming a large part of the desert to the west;
(iii) The precise extent and relations of the dolerite capping some
of the sandstone hills in the north of the depression;
(iv) The existence of well-marked folding having an important
bearing on the origin of the oasis;
(v) The presence of ferruginous sandstone deposits of later origin
than the primary formation of the oasis-hollow, though long anterior
to the date when the work of excavation, which gave the oasis its
present form, took place.
These points will be found discussed at some length in the
chapter on the geology of the oasis.
[10] Op. cit., vol. IV.

[11] The positions of the two points of connection in the valley were
determined by Capt. Lyons in 1896.

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Empire Ascendant: The British World,

Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894-1914

The Development of the British Army 1899-1914 John K

The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire Michael Bregnsbo

Tudor Empire: The Making of Early Modern Britain and

Conduit: Second Book of the Ascendant (Books of the

Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail

Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire

The Rise and Demise of World Communism George W

Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian

A great number of people and institutions contributed to the conception,

1.1. ‘Those Links of Kinship’, The Bulletin, 5 October 1901 40

AWM Australian War Memorial, Canberra

Note on Names and Style

1 Hobson, Imperialism, p. 124.

Newchwang Mukden Vladivostok

Hurrah the day! hurrah the day!

1 ‘Torchlight Procession of the Keio-Gijuku Students’, Japan Times, 16 February 1902.

2 Baelz, Awakening Japan, p. 154.

7 Hippisley to Morrison, 9 March 1902, ML, Morrison Papers, 312/160.

The Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), which opens Chapter 1, redefined the

hones in on the nativist backlash against Japanese immigration on the Pacific

1 Curzon, Problems, p. ix. 2 Curzon, Problems, p. 387.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 9

It was a remarkable reinvention. As Curzon’s own disavowal of ‘temples and tea-

5 [Editorial], The Times, 12 February 1902.

confident in its claim to ‘civilization’.13 Curzon, who issued an updated edition of

Britain, Japan, and the ‘Far Eastern Question’

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 11

25 ‘The War in the East’, Spectator, 29 September 1894.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 13

31 Otte, China Question, p. 1. 32 Otte, China Question p. 49.

36 Otte, China Question, p. 58.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 15

habit of thinking about Japan as a sovereign actor in the concert of powers.

49 Norman, Peoples and Politics, pp. 375–6.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 17

56 Cited in Otte, ‘ “A Very Great Gulf ” ’, p. 140.

‘Outside the White Comity’: Race

International relationships can acquire their own mythologies, giving them a

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 19

wrote to his superiors at the Admiralty, had revealed itself to be an inherently

76 Fremantle to Spencer, 4 September 1894, BL, Spencer Papers, Add. MS 77393.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 21

as unreasoning a cruelty as China’. Beneath their ‘veneer’ of civilization, Mitford

Do our contemporaries understand what that means? It means that a pagan

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 23

Imperial Entanglements: Japanese Expansion

91 ‘The Treaty with Japan’, The Economist, 15 February 1902.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 25

99 Le Poer Trench to Kimberley, 26 December 1894, TNA, FO 46/436, f. 206.

and Seattle.105 Expanding shipping connections in turn stimulated the growth of

105 Chida and Davies, Japanese Shipping, pp. 21–3.

‘ The Englands of East and West ’ 27

white-settler-dominated government refused the Shinshū Maru, a freighter

Title: Baharia Oasis

Author: John Ball

Release date: April 10, 2024 [eBook #73366]

1.1. ‘Those Links of Kinship’, The Bulletin, 5 October 1901 40