State Versus Society in Late Imperial China, 1572-1644 PDF Download

Author: Harrison Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 1148

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Author: H. Miller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230617875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book looks at the bitter factionalism in the last days of China's Ming Dynasty as an ideological struggle between scholar-officials who believed that sovereignty resided in the imperial state and those who believed that it resided with the learned gentry.

Author: H. Miller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137334061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Continuing the argument developed in the author's previous book, this exhaustively researched study describes the humiliation of the Chinese gentry at the hands of the statist Oboi regents in the 1660s and the Kangxi emperor's self-declared Confucian sagehood in the 1670s, which effectively trumped the gentry's claim to sovereignty.

Author: Kenneth M. Swope
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134462093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book examines the military collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty to a combination of foreign and domestic foes. The Ming’s defeat was a highly surprising development, not least because as recently as in the 1590s the Ming had managed to defeat a Japanese force considered to be perhaps the most formidable of its day when the latter attempted to subjugate Korea en-route to a planned invasion of China. In contrast to conventional explanations for the Ming’s collapse, which focus upon political and socio-economic factors, this book shows how the military collapse of the Ming state was intimately connected to the deterioration of the personal relationship between the Ming throne and the military establishment that had served as the cornerstone of the Ming military renaissance of the previous decades. Moreover, it examines the broader process of the militarization of late Ming society as a whole to arrive at an understanding of how a state with such tremendous military resources and potential could be defeated by numerically and technologically inferior foes. It concludes with a consideration of the fall of the Ming in light of contemporary conflicts and regime changes around the globe, drawing attention to climatological factors and developments outside state control. Utilizing recently released archival materials, this book adds a much needed piece to the puzzle of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China.

Author: David M. Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
"This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology."

Author: Richard J. Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442221941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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The Qing dynasty (1636–1912)—a crucial bridge between “traditional” and “modern” China—was remarkable for its expansiveness and cultural sophistication. This engaging and insightful history of Qing political, social, and cultural life traces the complex interaction between the Inner Asian traditions of the Manchus, who conquered China in 1644, and indigenous Chinese cultural traditions. Noted historian Richard J. Smith argues that the pragmatic Qing emperors presented a “Chinese” face to their subjects who lived south of the Great Wall and other ethnic faces (particularly Manchu, Mongolian, Central Asian, and Tibetan) to subjects in other parts of their vast multicultural empire. They were attracted by many aspects of Chinese culture, but far from being completely “sinicized” as many scholars argue, they were also proud of their own cultural traditions and interested in other cultures as well. Setting Qing dynasty culture in historical and global perspective, Smith shows how the Chinese of the era viewed the world; how their outlook was expressed in their institutions, material culture, and customs; and how China’s preoccupation with order, unity, and harmony contributed to the civilization’s remarkable cohesiveness and continuity. Nuanced and wide-ranging, his authoritative book provides an essential introduction to late imperial Chinese culture and society.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004244794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Chinese rulers and statesmen were naturally concerned about the issue of war, when to wage it, when it was justified, and when to avoid it. Although much has been asserted about how these issues were understood in Chinese culture, this work is the first study actually to focus on the debates themselves. These debates at court proceeded from specific understandings of what constituted evidence, and involved the practical concerns of policy as well as more general cultural values. The result is a decidedly messy portrait of Chinese decision making over two millenia that is neither distinctly Chinese nor entirely generic. Contributors are Parks Coble, Garret Olberding, David Pong, Kenneth Swope, Paul Van Els, David Wright, and Shu-Hui Wu.

Author: Giovanni Ciotti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311047753X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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As records of the link between a manuscript and the texts it contains, paratexts document many aspects of a manuscript’s life: production, transmission, usage, and reception. Comprehensive studies of paratexts are still rare in the field of manuscript studies, and the universal categories of time and space are used to create a common frame for research and comparisons. Contributions in this volume span over three continents and one millennium.

Author: Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136819649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Using a unique "old–new" treatment, this book presents new perspectives on several important topics in Southeast Asian history and historiography. Based on original, primary research, it reinterprets and revises several long-held conventional views in the field, covering the period from the "classical" age to the twentieth century. Chapters share the approach to Southeast Asian history and historiography: namely, giving "agency" to Southeast Asia in all research, analysis, writing, and interpretation. The book honours John K. Whitmore, a senior historian in the field of Southeast Asian history today, by demonstrating the scope and breadth of the scholar’s influence on two generations of historians trained in the West. In addition to providing new information and insights on the field of Southeast Asia, this book stimulates new debate on conventional ideas, evidence, and approaches to its teaching, research, and understanding. It addresses, and in many cases, revises specific, critically important topics in Southeast Asian history on which much conventional knowledge of Southeast Asia has long been based. It is of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as Asian History.

Author: Sukhee Lee
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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The internal dynamics driving the relationship between the state and local society during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties has both captivated and baffled scholars. In this book, Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites in the middle period of Chinese imperial history. Directly challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the power of the state and that of local elites, Negotiated Power shows in vivid detail how state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing. It was precisely the connectedness of social elites to the state, as well as the presence of the state in local life, that was essential to the rise of a self-conscious local elite society during this period. In probing the historical trajectory of Mingzhou prefecture (today’s Ningbo), Lee makes extensive use of local gazetteers from the Southern Song and the Yuan dynasties, and the abundant literary collections that still survive from this area, including some 280 epitaphs written for Mingzhou people of the time.