5월 28일 브라운 백 미팅 일정을 공지합니다.
이번 주 브라운 백 미팅은 27일 목요일 있을 인문학강좌와 연동되어 진행되는 관계로,
금요일에 있습니다.
양지하시기 바랍니다.
* 초청인사: Barend J. ter Haar (Sinological Institute, Leiden University, The Netherlands)
* 발표시간: 12:00-14:00 점심, 발표 및 토론
* 발표주제: Writing an Interpretative History of the Chinese Empire (221 BCE-1911CE)
* 아래는 발표할 내용의 개요입니다. 참고하시기 바랍니다.
Writing the history of a complicated and fascinating past like Chinas over two millennia requires making choices in dealing with certain topics and leaving out others, but also of selecting one interpretation over another. Recently I have published a medium length history of China in Dutch and I would like to exchange views on some of the interpretative choices that I made.
A. I propose a much more critical view of the so-called unified empire, using criteria such as the stability of the imperial succession and the quality of local control through taxes, violence and the recruitment of officials. According to these criteria the expansive Han and Tang dynasties are seen as much less successful than in the past. Inversely, the supposedly militarily weak Song and Ming dynasties are seen as relative successes.
B. By consciously questioning the traditional moralistic view of Chinese history due to the model of the Mandate of Heaven, I propose treating the last decades of the Northern Song and the Ming in particular as periods of relative success. The fall of these two dynasties is not treated anymore as the result of political decline (as is required by the traditional Mandate of Heaven framework), but as coincidence. In the same way, I no longer see the 19th century as one long century of decline of the Qing until its fall in 1911, but as a series of contingent events that should not be read as the inevitable process towards imperial collapse, but as the coming together of outside events (the rise of the imperialistic West) and the inherent difficulties of any huge empire. The fall of the Qing is seen as the result of the abolishment of the examination system in 1905, after which the imperial system no longer had a mechanism for binding the regions and its elites to the imperial center. When in 1908 the imperial center literally died (both Cixi and Guangxu) and no adult emperor succeeded to the throne, this center was simply unable to deal effectively with the events that presented themselves in 1911.
C. Instead of using the moralistic Mandate of Heaven to structure long term developments, I see other crucial moments in Chinese history, such as the advent of an administration based on writing on bamboo (but only in the course of the third century BCE and not with the Shang or Zhou dynasties), the role of paper in creating a new type of elite based on the ability to write from the 3rd century CE onwards, and so forth.
D. Once the moralistic approach to Chines history is relinquished, the narrative of opium in the nineteenth century needs to be rewritten as well. If time permits, I would like to talk briefly about some new ways of seeing this narrative proposed by Frank Dikotter and others.