Book Review

Asia

For over a decade, scholars of late imperial China have been arguing over the use of the term "early modern" to describe the Qing empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether the term can be abstracted from its usual European context to describe similar patterns of change in China without assuming a Eurocentric, or Western-driven, trajectory of historical development. In her examination of the colonizing aspirations of the Qing dynasty, Laura Hostetler moves this debate to center stage. Her central argument is that the independent yet parallel political application of emerging cartographic and ethnographic technologies in both China and Europe reveals sufficient continuity in historical development to validate the identification of an early modern world reaching across various societies and civilizations.

1

As Hostetler describes it, the use of scientific cartography under Qing emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was driven above all by the state's need for more precise delineation of territory in relation to neighboring states. As an expansive colonial empire, moreover, the Qing shared this interest with the emerging nation-states of Europe, where similar concerns with colonial political boundaries had already contributed to a separation of cartography and ethnography into distinct disciplines. Hence, while premodern maps in both Europe and China combined ethnographic descriptions with impressionistic representations of land, those of the early modern period show a greater use of scaled projections, with ethnographic information increasingly left out.

. . .