A Companion to the Global Renaissance by Singh Jyotsna G.;

Author:Singh, Jyotsna G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2013-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

III Conclusion

This study has analyzed the significance of the English East India Company’s failure in Hirado through the well-known antagonistic relationship between two Englishmen, William Adams and John Saris, in the context of identity politics in seventeenth-century Japan. The findings of this analysis, however, should not be hastily translated into an overdetermined postmodern reading that the notion of Englishness was a site of indeterminacy fraught with tension and anxiety. The instability of English identity delineated in this study is not of theoretical speculation or philosophical meditation on the nation’s self-perception. Rather, it is an effect manifested by the marginal role England played in Japan, which was connected to the vibrant China-centered economic system, the veritable engine behind the world economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Both Adams and the other English factors, however differently they mobilized their notions of Englishness during their stay in Japan, had to respond to a power beyond their control; namely, the Japanese shogunal government that had its own interests to promote and protect.

Such findings of this study, moreover, should not be taken merely as a basis for making localized modifications to the hegemonic configuration of the relation between England and Japan or, by extension, between the West and East. Merely to assert, for instance, that England held a weak and marginal position in the global economy of the early seventeenth century, or that Japan was superior to England, or that there already existed a vibrant form of proto-capitalism in Asia does not ultimately collapse the existing epistemological framework that has supported “the Rise of the West” as the meta-narrative for the history of all human civilization. These assertions, however indispensable they are to destabilizing hegemonic Eurocentric critical discourses, are still implicitly predicated on the prevailing notion that England overcame its initial weakness to be a dominant player, or that the status of Japan needs to be assessed in relation to that of England, or that the economic system of Asia can be analyzed via a Western model of capitalism.

Equally undesirable would be to use the findings of this study on the East India Company’s venture in Japan as a marker of the exteriority of England’s global expansion, without problematizing the very notion of “the era of expansion.” This notion is, in fact, conceptually tied to the conventional understanding of the Renaissance as the originary moment of what we have come to identify as the emergence of modernity in the West, which has been, in turn, employed to buttress the idea of the West’s supremacy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Rather, this study on the English East India Company’s failed venture in Japan is an attempt to throw into higher relief a significant historical moment in the Global Renaissance, a moment that points to the urgent need to freshly conceptualize an episteme of the twenty-first century, a new era of globalization with which to rewrite history from the multi-perspectives generated by interactions among various peoples, both locally and globally.21

Notes

1 To date, the most

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