| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Lynn A. Struve, editor. The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 234.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2004. Pp. xiv, 412. $49.50.
Historians of the final half-millenium of imperial China have in recent years sought simultaneous escape from two narrative frameworks now seen as myopic: a eurocentric narrative in which the modern history of China is largely reduced to a function of the Western impact, and a sinocentric one that organizes the histories of various peoples in mainland East Asia in terms of a Han nationalist teleology. Scholarly efforts to escape these narratives have prompted resistance to inherited modes of periodization. Few specialists today, for example, would still place much credence in the conventional division of Chinese history into "traditional" and "modern" with the Opium War of 1839–1842 as the breakpoint—a division that effectively equates "modernity" with Westernization. Similarly suspect is a dynastic model that sees the last ruling house, the Qing (1644–1911), as basically equivalent to earlier, Han-dominated, imperial regimes, and its "Manchu" rulers as an alien people that became "sinicized" in order to remain in power and then "assimilated" out of existence in the face of the triumphal Chinese nation-state. Periodizations that instead view the Qing, along with all or part of the preceding Ming (1368–1644), as a distinctive "late imperial" or "early modern" era have become increasingly popular ways of breaking out of older teleologies. But both, of course, have problems of their own.	1
This ambitious and provocative collection of essays is a bold exercise in both reperiodizing Chinese history and integrating it into a new, heady, global historiography. It asks whether the most useful points of comparison in understanding the early Qing are the earlier regimes it succeeded, or models of modernizing change within the history of the West, or other contemporaneous Eurasian empires such as the Ottoman and the Romanov. The book proceeds from the assumption that the Great Qing Empire (Da Qing) was qualitatively different from dynasties that preceded it—it was explicitly multinational and universal in its claims—and in many aspects more like the "China" we recognize today than what had gone before. The questions then become: what do we call this distinctive phase of China's history, when and why did it begin, and how similar was it to what was going on elsewhere? Moreover, as Richard von Glahn asks here, how does this new conception screw up the "late imperial" and "early modern" narratives we have labored so hard to construct?	2
Editor Lynn A. Struve has assembled an outstanding roster of contributors. Most authors gamely address a portion of their essay to the volume's general issues, then go on to (quite good) empirical studies that more or less digress from the central problematic. As editor, Struve seems to have sought simultaneously to impose two separate organizational schemes. On the one hand are differing scales of analysis: the global, the regional, and the personal. On the other is the division of the book into two parts, the first concentrating on comparisons over space, and the second on questions of periodization.	3
There is little disagreement in the first part, where Inner Asian specialists Peter C. Perdue, James A. Millward, and Nicola Di Cosmo, all influenced by the late Joseph Fletcher's call for an "integrative" world history, find intriguing evidence for a "convergence" of centralizing imperial styles across the Eurasian continent. John E. Wills, Jr., looking at coastal Fujian, then struggles valiantly to supply both the global-maritime perspective and the regional-provincial one.	4
The volume's second half, entitled "Was the Early Qing 'Early Modern'?," is more contentious. We find here two essays on the personal scale, one by Struve on memoirs by conquest survivors and one by Jonathan Hay on early Qing aesthetics. While Hay finds "hidden modern aspects" (p. 331) in the subjective emphasis of Qing painters, Struve insists that her memoirs betray "nothing new in Chinese thought" (p. 358) and thus opts to term the early Qing (rather weakly) an "advanced premodern society" (p. 339).	. . .

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