Symbiotic Empires: Britain and East Asia in the Long Nineteenth Century

This special issue explores the complex entanglements between the British Empire and East Asian powers across the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the multiple and often asymmetrical modes of interaction that unfolded through diplomacy, trade, visual, and literary culture. Encompassing China, Japan, and Korea, the volume extends traditional periodizations to consider developments reaching into the early twentieth century. Five contributors, namely, Di Cotofan Wu, Anne Anderson, Jess Jiyun Son, Aaron Eames, and Caitlin Vandertop, examine the overlapping worlds of colonial expansion, cultural adaptation, and mediated perception, focusing on the lived and aesthetic consequences of these inter-imperial encounters. Their work attends to the uneven dynamics of power without reducing the East to passive victimhood or the West to a unified agent of change. Instead, each article offers a situated and historically grounded account of how individuals, texts, and objects circulated within and across imperial networks.