Empire, Nation, and Beyond

Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern Times—A Festschrift in Honor of Frederic Wakeman

Joseph W. Esherick

• Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781557292193
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The essays in this collection, all by Frederic Wakeman's former students, approach the past with sensitivities to the dynamics of politics, the power of cultural or ideological norms, the complexities of local infrastructures and the significance of human choices. Part 1 sheds light on the inner workings of late imperial society. Part 2 addresses local patterns of profit-making and the role of the state. Part 3 looks at China's response to the West. Part 4 is about social history and the networks of patronage, community service, and family that characterized Chinese society. Part 5 examines the contested narratives of China's twentieth-century history.

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Notes to this edition
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Manchus as Ethnographic Subject in the Qing
• 2. Fictional and Real-Life Rulers: Journey to the West and Sixteenth-Century Chinese Monarchs
• 3. The Disputation of the Body Snatchers: Scandal in Chinese Legal Culture
• 4. Spatial Decorum, Transgression, and Displacement in Shen Fu's Six Records from a Floating Life
• 5. Eastern Sichuan Coal Mines in the Late Qing
• 6. Rural Commercialization, Polder Reclamation, and Social Transformation in Modern China: State and Society in the Pearl River Delta
• 7. “Native" and "Foreign": Discourses on Economic Nationalism and Market Practice in Twentieth-Century North China
• 8. Shards of Ming: Culture and Improvisation in Enterprises Great and Small
• 9. Terror and War at the Turn of Two Centuries: The Boxer Crisis Revisited
• 10. The Culture of Patronage in Early Nineteenth-Century China: Ruan Yuan's Circle at Canton
• 11. The Zhigongtang in the United States, 1860–1949
• 12. Two Generations of a Chinese Family
• 13. Beijing University as a Contested Symbol
• 14. History in Modernity: The May Fourth Movement and Shanghai
• Index
• Back cover