| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Alexander Woodside. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. (The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, 2001.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. 142. $22.00.

The insight that there are multiple "modernities" with timeframes that do not necessarily coincide with Western periodization is not new, but Alexander Woodside takes the issue a great deal further and puts it provocatively into the frame of global history. In this book, which is a reworked version of the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 2001, Woodside argues that aspects of rationalization usually associated with "modernity" resulting from the rise of capitalism and industrialization are also found, independently and with their own timetables, in the preindustrial societies of China, Korea, and Vietnam. Indeed, it is Woodside's stated aim radically to change conventional Eurocentric views of what "modern" means. To substantiate his arguments, Woodside chose two institutions common to all three "mandarinates" as prime examples: the civil service examinations and the social welfare systems.

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