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Book Review
| The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time. Edited by LYNN A. STRUVE. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 405 pp. $49.50 (cloth).
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This volume grew out of a conference on "The Qing Formation in World and Chinese Time," held at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1999. "Qing formation" refers to the formative period of the Qing dynasty (1636–1911) broadly construed. The concern with "world-historical time" reflects ongoing debate among historians of China over how one reconciles events and periodization within China in relation to broader global processes, and specifically over the applicability of the term "early modern" to China. |
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For historians of late imperial China, periodization reflects China's place in the world and engages a whole array of debates that grew out of the historiography and events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These include assumptions about China's fitness to enter the modern world, European superiority, China's isolation and ability to undergo internal change, and so forth. Scholars who find that China, as well as Europe, can be aptly described as early modern argue implicitly that Europe was not somehow uniquely qualified (racially or culturally) to dominate world markets and politics. Nor was China willfully isolated during this period or innately incapable of developing and employing technologies that Europe enjoyed. Other scholars feel that using a term developed in the context of European history continues to subjugate the study of China to a model of "normalcy" and a trajectory to modernity that is not appropriate. The essays in this volume each explore questions of China's "early modernity" in different ways and represent a range of views on the use of the term. |
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