المستخلص: |
Empire’ in the traditional sense was present throughout most of human history arguably until the emergence of the ‘nation-state’ structure in the past century and ‘Imperialism’ persists even to this day. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were characterized by the breakdown of one kind of imperial authority almost all over the world and the advent of a new kind of one. Such was the case in the Qing empire (1644-1911 AD) of China and the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868 AD) of Japan, both of which experienced the downfall of the existing power structure. The imperial crises that these two states went through were similar in some ways and distinctly different in other ways. This paper attempts to present a brief sketch of the two narratives and then compare them in order to form a better understanding of the circumstances and processes which led to and accompanied these unique experiences of the nineteenth-century Far East.
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