Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2017 HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941 Nathaniel Alexander Davis Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Davis, Nathaniel Alexander, "HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941" (2017). Dissertations. 1351. http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1351 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941 by Nathaniel Alexander Davis B.A., Excelsior College, 2006 M.A., American Military University, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Historical Studies Degree Department of History in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale May 2017 Copyright by NATHANIEL ALEXANDER DAVIS, 2017 All Rights Reserved DISSERTATION APPROVAL HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941 By Nathaniel Alexander Davis A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of Historical Studies Approved by: Dr. Jonathan Bean, Chair Dr. David Wilson Dr. Jonathan Wiesen Dr. Hale Yılmaz Dr. Stephen Shulman Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale March 03, 2017 AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF NATHANIEL ALEXANDER DAVIS, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in HISTORICAL STUDIES, presented on MARCH 3, 2017, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE: THE STUDENT INTERPRETERS CORPS AND IMAGINED AMERICAN ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM IN CHINA, 1902-1941 MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Jonathan Bean The project of American economic imperialism in China during the first half of the twentieth century was first and foremost an imagined enterprise. This dissertation examines the role of the Student Interpreters Corps (SIC) in this endeavor. Studying language-trained intermediaries, this treatment is a first step towards studying history with an approach that is neither top-down nor bottom-up but rather middle-outward. Examining hitherto neglected personnel records and State Department correspondence, this study reveals the SIC as part of an imagined but unsuccessful program of economic imperialism. Although effective in garnering American business interest and support for Foreign Service reform and expansion, efforts to entice American merchants and companies to enter Asian markets (particularly in China) failed to yield a coherent, successful trade empire. However, the largely unstated goal of increased American power was achieved as the result of a bureaucratic imperative for specialization, professionalization, and institutional expansion set in motion during the establishment of the SIC. Examining the evolving roles and views of SIC-trained intermediaries, this dissertation finds that while the imagined trade empire failed to materialize, the SIC contributed to a developing American perception of China that envisioned increasingly greater American intervention in East Asia. In this millieu, a “Peking” order emerged by the mid-1920s that became influential in American East Asia policy towards the eve of Word War II that saw China as vital to American interests. Established as precursor of American economic empire in China, i the SIC was instrumental in shifting discourse away from economic empire towards an interventionist American Orientalism. Trade expansion rhetoric waned and Orientalist language solidified as Japanese aggression became more blatant and the ascendance of Communism in China ever more certain. Highlighting the bureaucratic intermediaries as new method of studying history, this study indicates that the project of American economic imperialism was largely imagined, but one that transformed to accommodate evolving visions of expanding American power in East Asia. These conclusions offer new challenges to and opportunities for scholars of American foreign relations. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I am humbled to acknowledge the gracious and loving support and personal sacrifice of my wife, Rebecca Davis, and my family throughout the process of applying to the Ph.D. program, my coursework. Their support during the research and writing process goes beyond the call of duty: having moved five times in four years to and from four different countries on three different continents, I am grateful for their patient endurance. I am grateful to Dr. Holly Hurlburt for encouraging me to apply to the Ph.D. program, for the support of the Delyte and Dorothy Morris Doctoral Fellowhip, which supported me through the first four years of study, and to the History Department faculty who taught, mentored, challenged and supported me. It was my advisor, Dr. Jonathan Bean who first encouraged me to consider “imperial translators” as a topic for the dissertation and who has given tireless—even relentless—guidance and assistance throughout the writing process. It was Dr. David Wilson who first introduced me to the Student Interpreters Corps and whose guidance through the archival sources has been of immense assistance. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Hale Yilmaz, Dr. David Wilson, and Dr. Jonathan Bean for their active support and encouragement of my continued language study during the second half of the program. Just as for the Student Interpreters examined in this dissertation, that language training has opened new doors for me. Walking through them has changed my life in countless profound ways. iii PREFACE The roots of this dissertation lie in the six years spent as Cryptologic Linguist in the United States Army between 2003 and 2009. As part of my military training, I learned Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, achieving a high degree of fluency and gaining enormous appreciation for the labor that acquiring such fluency requires. While stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany, between 2005 and 2009, I also acquired a conversational level of German. It was between 2007 and 2008, as I both designed and participated in a year-long intensive Afghan Pashto language training course that I came across study materials and dictionaries produced by British Orientalists serving with the East India Company army and (after 1857) the British Army during the Anglo-Afghan Wars. During this time I developed a passion for history and began a Masters program in history (which I completed in May, 2009). I felt particular affinity with the history of interpreters and translators, of which I felt an active part. As a member of a unit variously deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during the age of “Imperial Presidency,”1 I also felt a reluctant part of American imperial history, and was fascinated by the role of language training, interpreters, and translators in that history. Learning a foreign language entails the devotion of no small part of one’s life and energy to attain functional fluency, and necessarily involves at least partial appropriation of some cultural attitudes and modes of thinking. Accepted in the History Ph.D. program at Southern Illinois University in August 2009, I began studying American Business History, with Dr. Jonathan Bean, Middle Eastern History, with Dr. Hale Yılmaz, and the History of American Foreign Relations, with Dr. David Wilson. During the first year of my studies I became interested in the Student Interpreters Corps (SIC), the first formal language training program of the United States government for Foreign Service 1 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), x. iv officers in China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. This topic proved the ideal intersection of my three fields of study, bringing together my interests in business history, American involvement in the Middle East, and the role of interpreters in the history of imperialism. Following the presentation of my prospectus, I planned to expand my study of the SIC to a comparative study of the SIC and the Ottoman Translators Bureau (Tercüme Odası). From 2011 to 2012, I studied modern Turkish intensively at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, funded by the Illinois Veterans Grant and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, funded by a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship (FLAS). In the summer of 2012, I was awarded a Boren Fellowship to study modern and Ottoman Turkish at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and conduct research in the Ottoman archives, a development that was truly life-altering. On completing my studies with a Turkish Ministry of Education exam demonstrating fluency, I conducted several months of research in the Ottoman Archives, examining the lives and careers of Ottoman Occidentalists who learned French, English, and other Europeans during their service to the Ottoman state during the Tanzimat period. In August 2014, I moved to Izmir, Turkey to establish an educational advising center at the request of the US Embassy in Ankara, in partial fulfillment of the stipulations