2023 DeLamar Jensen Lecture
Urban History as Global History: A View from Edo, Japan
Edo (now Tokyo) was once the greatest city in the world. In 1800, the era of Napoleon and revolution and declarations of independence, it boasted a population of 1.2 million. In comparison, London had a population of 1 million, Paris had 550,000, and New York was a tiny outpost of 60,000. Yet Edo is strangely invisible in global history. In part, this is because the city is difficult to integrate into the narratives of imperialism and trade that dominate global history scholarship. It was neither a colonial city nor a metropole, it was not a hub of foreign trade, and it was not even an ancient imperial capital. So what do we do with this strange, enormous, anomalous city? This talk explores the social history of early nineteenth century Edo in the context of global history, focusing on gender, violence, and consumption. Stanley argues that global history does look different from the perspective of Japan, and that turning our attention to social history and the urban poor illuminates how and why mundane experiences of urban life were shared across many parts of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Amy Stanley
Wayne V. Jones Research Professor in History at Northwestern University, Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies
Amy Stanley is primarily a social historian of early modern and modern Japan and she has special interests in global history, and women's and gender history and narrative. She is the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (UC Press 2012), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Biography and PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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