China in the Early Modern World: Shortcuts, Myths and Realities
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China in the Early Modern World: Shortcuts,
Myths and Realities
Education About Asia, Summer, 1999.
Peter C. Perdue
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I. Introduction
China has attained new importance in world history. Recent textbooks now regularly include a
historian who specializes in China. [1] Asia's spectacular economic growth in the past two
decades,.and awareness of China's huge global demographic and economic weight have gained her
new recognition. Consequently, specialists now need to push beyond their focused research to
address broader questions raised by historians of other areas of the world. [2]
Writing and teaching world history is not easy. Unavoidably, we must simplify the story by knitting
together a few strands of the voluminous historical record. Anyone who tries to draw such a grand
picture deserves respect. There is nothing wrong per se with thinking big. But large-scale
explanatory schemes are fraught with dangers. Too often the big thinkers merely repeat old
stereotypes held by eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans about classical Asian civilizations.
Tired cliches are dressed up as new theories, ignoring recent research. My goal in the following
comments is to explore the implications of some recent work on imperial China in the early modern
period [ca. 1500-1800 CE]. I hope to undermine the popularity of excessively oversimplified
descriptions of imperial China and to point the way to more nuanced discussions. I am not trying to
present a final answer; more important is the process of thinking through the question: How do we
assess long term social and economic change in China comparatively? Consider these remarks as
sketches for lecture notes, or for class discussion, rather than finished research.
A central question for European historians is the origin of the Industrial Revolution. For China, the
inverse question is often raised: why did imperial China 'stagnate', or fail t