ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Japan’s mid-nineteenth century coming to terms with the foundational British, Newtonian cosmology of an endless dynamism based in fixed, eternal laws. This convergence can be traced through thinkers of the Mito School, Sakuma Shōzan, Yoshida Shōin, and the first generation of Chōshū statesmen; it is encouraged by spectre of China after the First Opium War, and the British cultural-financial domination of the treaty ports (including the smuggling of early ryūgakusei or overseas students). In this way, Japan’s unification and modernisation are bound up with the foundational ‘origin myths’ of the British state, and Japan’s development in the universalist terms of liberal historiography would continue to be watched by British imperial writers up to World War I, who sometimes tellingly described the country as a ‘Britain of the East’.
