Special Guest Lecture:
Transformative Spaces of 19th Century East Asia:
A Japanese Merchant’s Experience of Treaty Port Yokohama
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
5 pm (c.t.), VG 3.102
Prof. Simon C. Partner
Duke University, Department of History

Following the experiences of one merchant, a farmer from Kōshū province (present-day Yamanashi prefecture) who left his village to open a trading venture in Yokohama in 1859, the presentation will examine the merchant communities of Yokohama during roughly the first decade of its existence, 1859-1873. Through this lens, the role of the Yokohama treaty port in the political, social, and economic transformations of the 1860s and beyond will be explored. More broadly, the presentation will consider the transformative agency of the East Asian treaty ports as new spaces of global exchange.