Tony Buchwald

Can the term "early modern" be used to describe Chinese history? Tony Buchwald

Academic Paper from the year 2013 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Chinese / China, grade: 1,3, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, course: Late Imperial China - Culture, Politics, History, language: English, abstract: "Early modernity" is a concept of ambiguity in historiographic scholarship and has been a topic for discussion for several decades. Søren Clausen discussed the term in regard to China in his paper, Early Modern China - A Preliminary Postmortem. For Clausen, the search for a terminology describing an "early modern China" emerged from the urge to incorporate China into a world history, whose importance he stresses in his introductory sentence: "A world that is increasingly becoming 'one world' needs a world history" . What he also did was to recap the influence other historians had on the discussion during the 1980s and 90s, which are partially also addressed in the paper.