(This event is organised by MEI’s Arabia-Asia Research Cluster, as part of its quarterly public speakers series.)

Abstract: What can comparative history bring us? When I was writing a comparative cultural history of Japan and Egypt, interlocutors in both places were often skeptical of its value. More than just useless, comparative history was often considered dangerous. For Egyptians, a comparison with Japan’s rapid modernization could only highlight the failure of their own modernization, while for Japanese the comparison, if any, should have been with the developed West or with Asian neighbors, not with Egypt. For many Japanese and Egyptians, the comparison was haunted by the specter of economic unevenness. This presentation asks what happens if we bracket this concern with global economic hierarchy. By paralleling the experiences of societies on the receiving end of Western expansion, it argues that we can acquire a fresh perspective on surprisingly similar and revealingly divergent ways in which the history of non-Western societies unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.