The Soya Bean Of Manchuria

Author : Richard Evan Wells
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (18 download)

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Download or read book The Manchurian Bean written by Richard Evan Wells and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the role the global market for soybeans and soybean products played in the history of modern Manchuria (northeastern China). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Manchuria underwent drastic political, social, and economic transformation, experiencing mass immigration, war, industrialization, and imperialism. Scholars of the region have focused extensively on how the construction of railway networks precipitated and intensified these historical phenomena, invoking the concept of "railway imperialism" as a central explanatory device. This dissertation contributes a new perspective to this existing historiography by reframing the early-twentieth-century history of Manchuria as a narrative of the soybean trade. It argues that, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, changes in how people living outside of Manchuria consumed soybeans and soybean-products radically transformed how governments, businesses, and individuals within the region interacted with one another and conceptualized the space of Manchuria. During the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Manchuria and the soybean were inextricably linked to one another. The region and the commodity were so inseparable that the soybean was widely known throughout the world as the "Manchurian Bean," and Manchuria, the "Land of the Soybean." In the early-nineteenth century, Qing officials, merchants, and farmers viewed Manchuria as a vital source of the soybean-based fertilizers that fueled a spectacular increase in cotton production in the fertile agricultural lands of the lower Yangtze River Valley. In the mid-nineteenth century, British merchants discovered that participation in the soybean trade was a prerequisite for establishing a commercial presence in Manchuria. Towards the end of the century, Manchuria's status as a source of soybean-based fertilizers sparked Japan's initial interest in the region, an interest that would culminate decades later in invasion and colonization. In the early twentieth century, scientists, manufacturers, and agronomists in Europe and the Americas discovered the soybean's remarkable potential as an industrial material, foodstuff, and fertilizer. The subsequent surge in global demand for the commodity sent traders from throughout the world streaming into Manchuria, and people around the world came to identify Manchuria as the world's leading producer and exporter of soybeans. With the outbreak of war in the 1930s, the soybean's versatility as a protein-rich foodstuff, fertilizer, and source of industrial raw material led Japanese policymakers to see Manchuria as an indispensable part of the Japanese Empire and one of the central pegs of Japan's wartime economy