First JESHO Lecture on Asian History - Mark Elliott (Harvard University) "Was China an Empire?" Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, October 13, 2015 (original) (raw)

This lecture seeks to contribute to the integration of the Chinese past into global history by examining the basis upon which we think of China as an “empire.” It begins with a discursive analysis, drawing attention to the profound disjuncture between internal and external perceptions of “China” as “empire”: after 1600 most of the world was in the habit of describing China as “imperial,” but in China itself, explicit recognition of this status did not come until 1895. Even today, a conceptual impasse persists that hinders comparative study at a time when empire as a political and cultural formation attracts ever more attention. To remedy this aporia, the second part of the lecture offers an analysis of the historical processes and institutions that underlay the building of the Qing state in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the degree to which these might be considered to be “imperial” in nature.