| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Kai-wing Chow. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 397. $49.50.

Influenced by a European historiography (Lucien Febvre, Elizabeth Eisenstein, etc.) that finds some of the origins of modernity in the Gutenberg revolution, Kai-wing Chow strives to rescue Chinese history from that line of interpretation. To do so, he must confront two influences, one historiographic ("the sinologistic mode of historical narration") and the other historical (the enduring Chinese tendency to camouflage commercial pursuits). The sinologistic mode, Chow writes, is constrained by "historicism, Eurocentrism, and modernism." Having convinced his readers of the value of looking at "early modern" (not a Chinese term) China on its own terms, however, Chow undermines his achievement by leaning on a complex system of Euroanalytics: Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of "field" and "habitus"; Gérard Genette's framework of paratext, peritext, and epitext; Roger Chartier's "literary public sphere"; Michel de Certeau's concept of reading as "poaching"; and D. F. McKenzie on the materiality of texts. Fortunately, these formulae generally take a back seat to the empirical and biographical details of China's late Ming and early Qing (1550–1650) book production and responses to book culture.

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