Can the term "early modern" be used to describe Chinese history? E-Book

Tony Buchwald

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Academic Paper from the year 2013 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Chinese / China, grade: 1,3, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, course: Late Imperial China - Culture, Politics, History, language: English, abstract: “Early modernity” is a concept of ambiguity in historiographic scholarship and has been a topic for discussion for several decades. Søren Clausen discussed the term in regard to China in his paper, Early Modern China – A Preliminary Postmortem. For Clausen, the search for a terminology describing an “early modern China” emerged from the urge to incorporate China into a world history, whose importance he stresses in his introductory sentence: “A world that is increasingly becoming ‘one world’ needs a world history” . What he also did was to recap the influence other historians had on the discussion during the 1980s and 90s, which are partially also addressed in the paper.

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Inhalt

Is ‘early modern’ a meaningless term?

Bibliography

Is ‘early modern’ a meaningless term?

“Early modernity” is a concept of ambiguity in historiographic scholarship and has been a topic for discussion for several decades. Søren Clausen discussed the term in regard to China in his paper, Early Modern China – A Preliminary Postmortem. For Clausen, the search for a terminology describing an “early modern China” emerged from the urge to incorporate China into a world history, whose importance he stresses in his introductory sentence: “A world that is increasingly becoming ‘one world’ needs a world history”[1]. What he also did was to recap the influence other historians had on the discussion during the 1980s and 90s, which I will partially address later.

First, to answer a question as provocative as “Is ‘early modern’ a meaningless term?” one must investigate the reasoning of the person who inspired it. Here, this person is John A. Goldstone, who wrote a paper called The Problem of the “Early Modern” World, in which he says, “In other words, ‘early modern’ can mean almost nothing, or almost everything, and as such, is a wholly meaningless term”[2]. The problem of an ‘early modern’ China or even world seems to be that the term ‘early modern’ did not evolve out of historiography’s need to label any period in world history or even Chinese history, but “developed out of the need to fill a space in Marxist theory of stages of history”[3]. Thus, applying it to distinctly different historical circumstances than those of an ‘early modern’ Europe can only cause discrepancies in the meaning of the term, rendering it essentially meaningless.

As for Goldstone’s argumentation, one could agree that the application of ‘early modernity’ to world history is problematic without being alone with this view, as David Porter calls this application “historical colonialism”[4]. However, as Goldstone himself illustrates, ‘early modern’ is de facto not wholly meaningless. There are various societal characteristics the term can be applied to without causing misunderstandings amongst historians. When using the term to describe “the emergence of markets dominated by merchant capital and proto-industry”[5], for example, one could examine markets and proto-industrial societies outside of Europe. When these markets then show similarities to European ones, applying the same term to them would seem reasonable, as long as one does not go so far as to extend that term to cover a whole period. By saying that one region displays certain ‘early modern’ features in terms of their economy thus indeed carries meaning, making it valuable as a historical term when discussing said features.