Content area
Full text
The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time. Edited by LYNN A. STRUVE. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. xiv, 412 pp. $49.50 (cloth).
It is perhaps inevitable, given the way that agendas for papers at academic conferences are negotiated, that conference volumes seldom offer new paradigms for the field. The current volume under review is no exception, despite the striking locutions "Qing formation," and "world-historical time," which appear in its title. The present volume assesses the claim made in the pages of several academic journals (see "The Eurasian Context of Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia," special issue, Modern Asian Studies, 31{3}{1997}; special issue, Daedalus, 127{3}{1998}) that a definition of "early modern" valid all across the Eurasian land mass can be usefully formulated. The volume goes about this assessment in two ways. The articles in part 1 offer empirical studies of the penetration of early modern ideas, technologies, and consciousness into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Qing empire. The articles in part 2 more directly address the claim that the Qing period was "early modern," reaching surprisingly varied conclusions. Although the volume does not present a single interpretive vision, it does contain much valuable scholarship and will well reward the specialist or even the generalist in search of assessment of challenging ideas.
The articles in part 1 make rich contributions to...