Table of Contents for Birth of the Geopolitical Age
Introduction: Why Empires Matter in the Age of the Nation-State
This introductory chapter discusses how disciplines like geography and agricultural science, which straddle both premodern forms of knowledge and the rise of modern science, played essential roles in changing how states viewed frontiers. The adoption and adaption of these areas of knowledge, along with the need to adjust to an international order based on national sovereignty and fixed borders, ushered China and the rest of the world into geo-modernity.
1.1852 and the Afterlife of Revolutions
In the mid-nineteenth century vast changes were clearly underway that would transform the world in the years to come. The book begins with 1852 as a temporal hub and the starting point for multiple protagonists who raced to deal with the fallout from the widespread social and environmental disruptions around the world created by the twin forces of industrialization and capitalism.
2.The Experimental Grounds of New Imperialism
Hokkaido and Japan served as a hub from the 1870s for agricultural science and developmental ideas. People like Nitobe Inazo and Takaoka Kumao became the human vehicles in the knowledge network for important ideas about agricultural development, technology, and science. Through the process of imperial expansion, the knowledge they carried took root in other parts of the world.
3.In Search of New Frontiers
Beneath seemingly considerable differences, up-and-coming nations around the world like the United States, Japan, and Germany, and Eurasian empires like the Russian and the Qing, shared certain common concerns as the rhetoric of the frontier assumed growing importance around the world. Ideas about territory, natural resources, and development took shape in the context of the tightening connections of a globalizing world. This chapter focuses on the development of modern geography.
4.Versailles and the Birth of the Geopolitical Age
This chapter examines the influence and fate of one offshoot from geography: geopolitics. World War I created unprecedented logistical demands on the combatants, bolstering interest in achieving national autarky and further emphasizing the advantages of possessing empires or extensive territories, preferably endowed with the natural resources essential for industries.
5.Rural Development and Its Discontents
Geography and mapping became an essential part of the ideological formation of the Chinese Republic. The territorial imaginary created during this period survived the Chinese civil war and the Communist victory in 1949. Global influences clearly helped to shape twentieth-century Chinese territoriality, even as historians and social scientists of the era self-consciously mined the Chinese past for relevant models. During this period of political and cultural transition, the frontier came to be seen as a laboratory for the accumulation of new knowledge about agricultural modernization and the exploitation of natural resources.
6.The Devil's Handwriting
For Nazi Germany and Nationalist China, two regimes on opposite sides during World War II, frontier development plans grew out of unresolved tensions in the transition from empire to the nation-state, between the nationalism and internationalism underlying the sciences both countries adopted to aid in their efforts in securing the borderlands.
7.Cold War New Empires
This chapter examines the divergent paths the United States and China took toward empire building during the Cold War period. While the two countries diverged on political ideology and what constituted territorial sovereignty, they agreed on the primacy of science in achieving their respective goals in their metaphorical and physical frontiers.