Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography - Böcker

Revolution as Restoration examines the journal Guocui xuebao (1905-1911) to elucidate the momentous political and social changes in early twentieth-century China. Rather than viewing the journal as a collection of documents for studying a thinker (e.g., Zhang Taiyan), a concept (e.g., national essence), or an intellectual movement (e.g., cultural conservatism), this book focuses on the global network of commerce and communication that allowed independent publications to appear in the Chinese print market. As such, this book offers a different perspective on the Chinese quest for modernity. It shows that, from the start, the Chinese quest for modernity was never completely orchestrated by the central government, nor was it static and monolithic as the teleology of revolution describes.

The European view on history was shaken to its foundations when missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discovered that Chinese history was older than European and Biblical history. With an analysis of the Chinese, Manchu and European sources on ancient Chinese history, this essay proposes an early case of “intercultural historiography,” in which historical texts of different cultures are interwoven. It focusses on the ways Chinese and European authors interpreted stories about marvellous births by the concubines of Emperor Ku. These stories have been the object of a wide variety of interpretations in Chinese texts, each of them representing a different historical genre. They are excellent case-studies to illustrate how the Chinese hermeneutic strategies shaped the diversity of interpretations given by Europeans.

Winner of the Foundation Council Award of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen Public Law Foundation in the category of “Outstanding Publications of Young Scientists”, 2017. In Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s) Julia C. Schneider give an analysis of nationalist and historiographical discourses among late imperial and early republican Chinese thinkers. In particular, she researches their approaches towards non-Chinese people within the Qing Empire and the question on how to integrate them into a Chinese nation-state.Non-Chinese people, mainly Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Turkic Muslims, (Uyghurs), have not been considered as important factors in the history of early Chinese nationalism so far. But Chinese nationalist and historiographical discourses tell not only a lot about the Chinese image of the Other, but also shed new light on the images of the Chinese Self and its assumed ability to assimilate and integrate other ethnicities.

The “Global” and the “Local” in Early Modern and Modern East Asia presents a unique set of historical perspectives by scholars from two important universities in the East Asian region—The University of Tokyo (Tōdai) and Fudan University, along with East Asian Studies scholars from Princeton University. Two of the essays address the international leanings in the histories of their respective departments in Todai and Fudan. The rest of the essays showcase how such thinking about the global and local histories have borne fruit, as the scholars of the three institutions contributed essays, arguing about the philosophies, methodologies, and/or perspectives of global history and how it relates to local stories.Authors include Benjamin Elman, Haneda Masashi, and Ge Zhaoguang.

Roger Des Forges here examines the puzzle of Li Yan, a Chinese scholar who advised the rebel Li Zicheng (1605-1645), and helped him to overthrow the Ming, only to die at his hands. For more than three centuries, Li Yan’s identity and even existence were seriously questioned. Then, in 2004, there was discovered a genealogical manuscript which includes a Li Yan (1606-1644). He now appears to be the principal historical reality behind the Li Yan story, which became a powerful metaphor for the rise and fall of Li Zicheng’s rebellion. Offering a fresh theory of Chinese and world history, the author elucidates Li Yan’s historical significance by comparing and contrasting him with similar figures in other times and places around the globe.