Thammasat University students interested in China, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, imperial studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 22 October Zoom webinar on Was China an Empire and, if so, of What Kind?
The event, on Tuesday, 22 October 2024 at 3pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS).
The TU Library collection includes several books about Imperial China.
Students are invited to register at this link.
https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/20241022-krishan-kumar/#form
The event announcement states:
Empires come in a variety of forms. They have certain basic features in common, but they also differ in significant ways. It is common, for instance, to distinguish between land and overseas empires. Some would also distinguish between ancient and modern empires, stressing differing legitimating ideologies and the enhanced role of new technologies of warfare, transport, and communications.
Dynastic China from 221 BCE–1911 CE is commonly referred to as an empire, both popularly and in the scholarly literature. It also seems to have a unique continuity and persistence, lasting for 2000 years and bridging the divide between ancient and modern periods. Yet it is also generally recognized that China had no proper word for empire until the late 19th century. Only then did it begin to call itself an empire, and compare itself to the Japanese and European empires.
If nevertheless we agree that China did for a long time have or was an empire — the distinction might be important — what kind of an empire was it? How does it compare with the much-studied Western empires, ancient and modern? How also does it compare with non-Western empires, such as that of the Moghuls or Safavids? How does the argument for continuity square with the long periods of non-Chinese rule, by Jurchens, Mongols, Manchus? How multinational or multiethnic was the Chinese empire, as are other empires? Can it be called a colonial empire, despite the absence of overseas colonies? To what extent was it expansionist, as are most empires? These and other questions will form the basis of this lecture, as an exercise in the comparative analysis of empires.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Krishan Kumar is University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at University of Virginia, USA. […]
The TU Library collection includes a number of books by Professor Kumar.
According to his university homepage,
Krishan Kumar is University Professor, as well as William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He was previously Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge and his postgraduate education at the London School of Economics […]
In 2017, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) reviewed a book by Professor Kumar:
To scholars of comparative imperial history Krishan Kumar surely needs no introduction. The previous book by this acclaimed sociologist, Visions of Empire: How five imperial regimes shaped the world (2017), exceeded its stated ambitious remit to encompass six rather than five cases, adding a discussion of Rome to its focus on the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and Soviet, British and French empires. In Empires: A historical and political sociology, Kumar now extends his reach far wider across both time and place in less than half the length, taking on board ancient empires as well as contemporary imperial formations East and West in thematically structured chapters. He succeeds admirably in posing a range of important questions and highlighting core issues connected with land as well as overseas empires spanning millennia, doing so in a format accessible for established scholars and students alike.
Readers familiar with Visions of Empire will see some topics resurface here, among them Kumar’s excellent analyses of the overlaps and distinctions between empires and nation-states. These rest alongside new subjects, such as the many legacies of “empire after empire” still palpable across the world today, particularly in multi-ethnic societies ridden with inequality. Kumar’s special attention to the United States and China alongside Western and Eastern European empires makes this book particularly timely in the light of current geopolitical constellations.
He writes eloquently on China’s status as the oldest and longest-lasting of the non-Western empires, which endured more than 2,000 years until 1911–12, and also grapples with the imperial behaviour of contemporary China. While defining itself as a “multinationality nation-state”, modern China has “as much the appearance of an empire as of a nation-state, as any Uighur or Tibetan will attest” – not to mention those observing the rollout of its Belt and Road Initiative far outside its borders. Like the United States, China’s insistence that it neither is, nor has, an empire cannot simply be taken at face value: as Kumar persuasively outlines, denying imperial activities and intentions at home or abroad has long been standard procedure among powerful states.
While experts will inevitably wish for more detail to support some arguments or take issue with generalizations that are unavoidable in a study so succinct, Krishan Kumar’s work nonetheless counts as an invaluable contribution to a field in which thoughtfully conceived, globe-spanning efforts remain all too few.
In an article last month in the TLS, Professor Kumar wrote:
After 1840, feudal China gradually became a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country.” Thus, in somewhat vague and colourless terms, the preamble to China’s current State Constitution affirms the onset of what, in countless schoolrooms and museums across the country today, is officially dubbed “the century of humiliation”. This refers to the period in which China was reduced to a state of dependency at the hands partly of its near-neighbour and one-time tributary Japan, but, earlier and more importantly, by a series of western powers, Britain the first and most prominent among them.
The first Opium War (1839–42) – Kerry Brown prefers the term “Anglo-Chinese War” – is usually seen as the event that launched the century-long period of Chinese weakness. Not only did Britain force the opium trade on China and annex Hong Kong, but soon after China was induced to concede crippling trading and other rights to most of the other western powers – France, Germany, Russia and the US in addition to Britain. Buttressed by the Second Anglo–Chinese War (1856–60), this system of dependency involved both the creation of a large number of “treaty ports” along the east coast – Canton, Shanghai and Tianjin chief among them – which were virtually controlled by the western powers, and the establishment of the principle of “extraterritoriality”, which meant that foreign subjects were governed by the laws and authorities of their own countries, not those of China. Though few parts of China were formally colonized, effectively it was reduced to the condition of an “informal empire” of the West.
Weakened by these incursions, embroiled in a civil war of colossal proportions – the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) – China was further humiliated by a crushing defeat by Japan in the Sino–Japanese War (1894–5), which entailed the loss of Taiwan and the Chinese tributary of Korea; and by the huge indemnity and other concessions imposed by the western powers as punishment for the short-lived anti-western “Boxer Rebellion” (1899–1901). Unable to resist foreign pressure or sufficiently to “modernize” its institutions, the 2,000-year-old Chinese Empire succumbed in 1911, to be succeeded by a Republic that was largely ignored by the West and was in its turn once again humiliated – and brutally occupied – by Japan in the 1930s. Only in 1949, with the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists over their rivals the Nationalists, was China able to end its century of humiliation.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)