Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies ISSN: 0874-8438
[email protected] Universidade Nova de Lisboa Portugal Kornicki, P. F. Collecting japanese books in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies, núm. 8, june, 2004, pp. 21-38 Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=36100802 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative BPJS , 2004, 8, 21-38 Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 21 COLLECTING JAPANESE BOOKS IN EUROPE FROM THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES P. F. Kornicki University of Cambridge Most of the great collections of Japanese books in European libraries had their origins in the private collections of nineteenth-century scholars, diplomats, missionaries and travellers. Their collecting activities are of more than antiquarian interest, for they reveal the process by which Japan began to impress itself on the intellectual awareness of Europeans. This process undoubtedly reached its peak during the high tide of European imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this is no coincidence, for the expansion of book-collecting activities to embrace the whole world is but a reflection of the expansion of European trading and diplomatic interests to cover most of the world. So at the same time as the opportunities to collect books in Asia increased so too did engagement with Asian countries, stimu- lated by geopolitical as well as by intellectual interests.