Magic of Concepts

Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History and Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and co-translator (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang's Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966, all also published by Duke University Press. She co-translated and coedited (with Lydia H. Liu and Dorothy Ko) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory.

"A challenging and often compelling perspective on modern Chinese history." - Terry Peach (European Journal of the History of Economic Thought) "An intelligent analysis of important historiographical issues in modern Chinese history." - Margherita Zanasi (American Historical Review) “Since The Magic of Concepts came out, I have found myself constantly recommending it to friends and colleagues, and in particular to friends and colleagues who are not scholars of modern China. And not just because I assume all modern China specialists already pay attention to Rebecca Karl’s work; rather, it is because she achieves in this book what historians often strive and fail to do, or at least fail to do well-to truly engage the global and the present from the specific geographical and chronological perspective of our chosen historical subjects.” - Fabio Lanza (Journal of Asian Studies) "Karl’s book . . . is an important contribution to the fields of Chinese, global, and economic history. . . . Her argument challenges us to ever more carefully observe our perspective and level of analysis, deconstruct our models and tools of research, and realize the 'magic' of the concepts we utilize and repeat." - Thorben Pelzer (Connections) "The Magic of Concepts makes a powerful case that the limitations of empiricism and reified consciousness have foreclosed realms of inquiry that possess considerable potential to complicate and deepen our understanding of social history. . . . This book is eloquent testimony to the need for historians to pursue a serious engagement with such theory in our training and in our research, not just to open new possibilities in our scholarship but to make sense of our own increasingly unstable historical moment." - Jake Werner (Journal of Social History)

• Preface and Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Repetition and Magic  11. The Economic, China, World History: A Critique of Pure Ideology  192. The Economic and the State: The Asiatic Mode of Production  403. The Economic as Transhistory: Temporality, the Market, and the Austrian School  734. The Economic as Lived Experience: Semicolonialism and China  1135. The Economic as Culture and the Culture of the Economic: Filming Shanghai  141Afterword  160Notes  167Bibliography  199Index 213