| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Rodney Koeneke. Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. 256. $55.00.
This book illuminates the China connection of I. A. Richards, the pathbreaking literary critic grounded in interwar internationalist politics at the University of Cambridge, where he lectured on understanding words as dynamic instruments with fluid meanings. Richards spent over four years in China, beginning with a year of teaching at Tsing Hua (Qinghua) University in 1929–1930. In 1936, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, he launched the Orthological Institute of China, later relocated from Peking (Beijing) to wartime Kunming. In 1950, Richards taught at Yenching (Yanjing) University for a semester. His final visit to China was for a lecture tour in 1979 at the invitation of the Chinese government. This scattered sojourn in China merged with a life and career equally at home in Peking, Cambridge (England), and Cambridge (Massachusetts), and spent promoting Basic English, a simplified language invented by Richards's friend C. K. Ogden.	1
Rodney Koeneke argues that Richards undertook his project in China to teach Basic English, to get this language into precollegiate education, and to train teachers as a progression of his critical ideas, not a departure from earlier work. For Richards, communication was the key to world peace, but the cultural assumptions embedded in language prevented cross-cultural understanding. This insight was part of Richards's negative assessment of Western modernism in the wake of World War I, and it provided the background for his discovery of China as a possibility for constructing a more humane and less commercial modern sensibility.	. . .

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