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THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT OCCURS IN THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL DEBATE IN ENGLAND IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, AND THAT ONE CASUALTY OF THAT SHIFT IS THE LANGUAGE OF REPUBLICANISM AND THE ASSOCIATED MODEL OF LIBERTY AND POLITICS WHICH HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED. IT CHARACTERIZES THE REPUBLICAN MODEL AND INDICATES VARIOUS WAYS IN WHICH IT DEVELOPED IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND SUGGESTS THAT MANY OF ITS COMPONENTS MIGHT BE MOTIVATED BY ENTIRELY DIFFERENT COMMITMENTS WHICH WERE ALSO AVAILABLE WITHIN THE ENGLISH POLITICAL CULTURE. THE ABANDONMENT OF CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM IN ENGLAND IS CONTRASTED WITH THE VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES OF FRANCE OR AMERICA WHICH ISSUED IN A VIBRANT EIGHTEENTH CENTURY REPUBLICANISM WHOSE LEGACY CAN STILL BE FELT TODAY.

This article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool- alongside the long-established Sinological erudition-for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to the medical and astronomical manuals of the occidentals but also to their histories. The translation-cum-commentary Miscellanea from the western seas by Yamamura Saisuke (1801) is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as the European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent, while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan now exposed to the dynamics of the global European presence. ; The collaborative research project whose outcome this article is has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement no. 649307. The financial support came from Spain's Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, through the HERA programme of the European Commission