New Frontiers

Edited by Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot, this comparative collection studies the foreign communities created by Western and Japanese imperial expansion in East Asia. Merchants, officials, missionaries, policemen and settlers built new urban institutions in treaty-port China and colonial Korea, often occupying spaces that were commercially open yet politically unequal.

The essays use newly available sources to compare communities usually examined within separate national histories. They consider law, race, class, migration and municipal power, while showing how local residents negotiated or resisted the institutions imposed around them. The chronological range extends from the opening of treaty ports to the collapse of foreign and Japanese empires after the Second World War.