Thomas Blake Glover (1838–1911)
The Jardine, Matheson & Co. agent in Nagasaki and contraband arms trafficker, Thomas Glover (1838–1911), was known to have taken the law into his own hands by chaining and tarring disobedient servants.
[Driscoll (2020) p. 62]
Although Glover normally assaulted his own servants inside his huge Ipponmatsu mansion, one incident in 1863 caused a minor scandal.
[Driscoll (2020) p. 62]
On February 21 the Nagasaki governor charged Glover with punching a delivery boy “half to death” at Ipponmatsu. Glover first laughed off this rare Japanese intrusion into Euro-white affairs (extraterritoriality in East Asia made it extremely difficult for Japanese or Chinese to indict Euro-Americans) before agreeing to pay a small settlement to the victim’s family.
[Driscoll (2020) p. 62]
Glover’s reputation for personally assaulting his servants and workers was so widespread that the Foreign Ministry in London was forced to warn him that his trading license would be rescinded if he didn’t stop the abuse.
[Driscoll (2020) p. 62]
“I believe that I was the greatest rebel of them all against Tokugawa” -Thomas Blake Glover
Actual quote.
Fun Facts:
there’s evidence that Glover bet on a protracted civil war in Japan with large purchases by his trading company in Nagasaki of Enfield rifles and Armstrong cannons (McKay 1993, 85).
When Glover returned to Japan on January 27, 1868, after a short trip home to Scotland to deliver steamship orders, he knew his business was in trouble when he heard that the worst of the fighting concluded quickly (Gardiner 2007, 86). The price of the thousands of weapons lying unsold in his Nagasaki warehouse was plummeting by the hour, as it became clear that there would be no samurai slaughter. In Glover & Co.’s account books for the summer of 1870, there are references to “stocks” of rifles still unsold (Checkland and Checkland 1984, 153). His serious financial problems began when the bloodbath he speculated on didn’t happen.
[Driscoll (2020) p. 62]
“Merchant scum” would seek out other ways to make a killing
"If Glover couldn’t profit from the death of Japanese in the civil war, he was determined to profit from other kinds of death."
Other kinds of death = industrial coal mining
As a last-ditch attempt to recover his business from losses incurred from bad bets on mass killing, he managed to get financing and turned his extractiv-eye/I toward opening the first mechanized mining operation in Japan at Takashima, an island ten miles from Nagasaki harbor. The 1869 joint venture between the Hizen domain and Glover’s company unleashed climate-intervening violence previously unseen in East Asia: two-hundred-foot pits where steam-driven winches lifted coal to the surface, coal-powered pumps were used for draining, and its own railway system hauled coal from the mouth of pits to the piers (McMaster 1963). [Driscoll (2020) p. 82]
After two miners died and labor conditions didn’t improve at Glover’s Takashima operation, three major uprisings by workers took place in the first full year of operation in 1870
Glover was being hounded by his creditors, so he stopped commuting from his Ipponmatsu mansion on Nagasaki Bay and built a small shack right at the main Takashima mine in 1871, where he would live for a week straight amid the coal ash and the machine shrieks (Gardiner 2007, 93). His only respite from this nightmarish activity was one day a week back at his mansion with his new seventeen-year-old sex servant Tsuru (McKay 1993, 86). There the pioneering Climate Caucasianist in Japan would drink and fornicate until he passed out, doing this for thirty-six hours before returning to his toxic shack at Takashima—shuttling back and forth from one site of extraction to another. [Driscoll (2020) p. 83]
Mitsubishi Founder Yataro Iwasaki was like, "whatever, as long as you can make me and my brother rich, do whatever you want..." basically. No, he didn't say that, but he sure acted that way.
Source:
Driscoll, Mark W. (2020). “The Whites are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection”. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-1121-7.
