Monday, July 29, 2019

Desperately seeking an early manuscript version of Formosa Betrayed

I have written before on this blog and in my intro. to the Camphor Press edition of Formosa Betrayed about the book's pre-publication history. It's a complex affair that I have not come to the end to. Right now I'm trying to figure out where to track down a manuscript from the late 1940s or early 1950s, titled, variously, The Development of Modern Formosa, Formosa--Yesterday and Today, Formosa: The Five Fateful Years, 1945-1950, and The Formosa Question, 1945-1951. (There are probably other titles I haven't come across.)

I have come across (through Google) two books that cite Development in their bibliographies: It was evidently seen by Jan Erik Romein because he cited it in his 1956 book, De Eeuw Van Azië. It's cited as "Kerr, G. H. The development of modern Formosa, 1950." Romein was a Dutch Marxist historian. His book, whose English title is The Asian Century: A History of Modern Nationalism in Asia, was also published in Japanese in 1961 as アジアの世紀 : 近代アジア民族主義史. Anyway, I wonder if there was a connection between Romein and the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Kerr's book is also cited in The Statesman's Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the Year 1952, and listed as being published in NY. Wonder if the editor of this book also got a copy of the manuscript. If both this book and Romein cite it as 1950, that means that they had an earlier version of the ms that Kerr eventually withdrew from the IPR.

No manuscript shows up, that I've seen, in any of the IPR archives at Columbia University, U of Hawai'i, or U of British Columbia. Guess I'll keep looking. I'm open to suggestions...

[Update, 3/22/20: I found another reference to The Development of Modern Formosa and also to Kerr's MS Japan in Formosa, 1895-1945 on p. 20 of an unclassified External Research Report by the Office of Intelligence Research of the Department of State. This is from August, 1952. The report is basically a selectively annotated bibliography of non-governmental research on China. Kerr's two books are listed:
5. Kerr, George H., The Development of Modern Formosa, (IPR).
6. Kerr, George H., Japan in Formosa, 1895-1945, (Stanford, 1952). 
It's interesting that Development isn't given a year of publication but Japan in Formosa is. It's not clear I'm assuming that the lack of a date for Development means that a manuscript was circulating at the time.

A later External Research Report from April 1958 also lists Japan in Formosa as "Book, ECD-Indef."--suggesting that the earlier reference to 1952 was perhaps Kerr's idea of when he'd be finishing the manuscript and that by 1958, he wasn't sure. (ECD means the scholar's own "Estimated Completion Date.")

Evidently the Department of State didn't receive manuscripts; according to the preface to the 1958 report, the information about works in progress was "furnished by private scholars throughout the United States." I'll have to look more into these lists in the future...]

No comments: