Old China Books
"How can mankind move upward," John K. Fairbank once asked, "except by standing on the shoulders and faces of the older generation?" Join Micah Muscolino and his guests as they put feet to faces and discuss the best books about Chinese history that no one reads anymore.
Episodes
Matthew Sommer joins Micah to discuss Law and Society in Traditional China (Mouton, 1961). Listeners should also check out Matt's two groundbreaking books on Chinese legal history: Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2002) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (University of California Press, 2015).
EPISODE BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Jeffrey Wasserstrom joins Micah to discuss Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China (William Sloane Assoc., 1946).
Interested listeners should take a look at Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020). Here's a bibliography of the other books and articles that we mentioned in the episode:
Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen. China Reporting: An Oral History of Ameri...
Elisabeth Köll and Micah discuss Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
For cutting-edge research on the history of business in modern China, take a look at Elisabeth's two books:
Elisabeth Köll, Railroads and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
Elisabeth Köll, From Co...
Lawrence Zhang joins Micah to discuss The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (Columbia University Press, 1962). You can read some of Lawrence's research on the effects of purchasing offices on the Qing bureaucracy in his article "A Legacy of Success: Office Purchase and State-Elite Relations in Qing China," The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 73:2 (2013).
Micah and Matthew Mosca discuss John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (Harvard University Press, 1953).
Check out Matthew's book From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013), which uses Manchu, Mongolian, Chinese sources to reformulate our understanding of Qing...
Micah and Sarah Schneewind talk about the article “A Ming Landscape: Settlement, Land Use, Labor, and Estheticism in T'ai-ho County, Kiangsi” by John W. Dardess, which was published in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1989.
Anyone who listens to this podcast will enjoy reading Sarah Schneewind's book A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China. Her most recent book is Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Politic...
A little preview of what Old China Books is all about.
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