The Invention Of China In Early Modern England

The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how England’s growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed China’s representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or arbitrary authoritarian state, associated with crooked business dealings, and cloaked in a rhetoric of secrecy and exclusion—a dangerous exception to the traditions, values, and identities of the emergent English speaking states. Finally, the book points out some of the ways that contemporary English language sources continue to represent this early modern English thought tradition, labelling the complexities of modern China with analytical vocabulary perhaps better suited to the pressing political anxieties of the seventeenth century.

"This book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes "superfluous things" - the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China - and describes contemporary attitudes toward them. He informs his discussions with references to both socio-cultural theory and current debates on eighteenth-century England concerning luxury, conspicuous consumption, and the growth of the consumer society." --Book Jacket.

The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in having a multi-state system in international relations and liberal democracy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric perspective believes that China is destined to have authoritarian rule under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656–221 BC) was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. Both cases witnessed the prevalence of war, formation of alliances, development of the centralized bureaucracy, emergence of citizenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book, first published in 2005, examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive universal status.

This innovative textbook recounts famous and infamous incidents of death and disorder in early modern England, including the executions of St. Thomas More and Mary Queen of Scots and the untimely end of thousands of others.

"[A] smart take on modern Chinese nationalism" (Foreign Policy), this provocative account shows that "China"--and its 5,000 years of unified history--is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals. In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China's present-day geopolitical problems--the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea--were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to "invent' a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic's reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago--but continues to motivate and direct policy today.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.

The Vision of China is the first book on China as it came to be reflected in English literature. As such, it also offers the first comprehensive study of the image of China in Western literature. Featuring essays by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zongshu, Fan Cunzhong, and Chen Shouyi, it complements such works as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literature des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).Together with William W. Appleton's A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951) and Raymond Dawson's The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), the book studies the last phase of the Chinese mode in England. Some of the articles collected here actually inspired Appleton's study, at least in part.As a contemporary volume on the construct of China, The Vision of China can readily be considered the companion study to Edward Said's envisioned Orient in Orientalism (1979), to Tzvetan Todorov's Africa in Nous et les autres: la reflection francaise sur la diversite humaine (1989), and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989).

The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.