Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past by Pierre Fuller

Abstract

“intellectual historical,” he grounds this pursuit “in the context of quantifiable social change” (188). He is committed to the practice of intellectual and social history as a joint enterprise, while recognizing tension between them in explanations of the choices that historical actors make as between “the interests they pursue or the justifications they give for pursuing them” (227). As one reviewer of the first book in Bol’s trilogy pointed out, the explanation of how and why Daoxue succeeded in replacing earlier cultural values (literary, historical, and classical) requires not only knowing what people thought (or wrote) but also how they lived—the context of social experience, including kinship ties, social networks, and intellectual connections. Bol has aimed to do exactly that. One final point has to do with the “case study” paradigm, in which Wuzhou could be viewed as a microcosm of larger trends. Bol rejects this characterization, however, arguing that “case studies” are just local histories that may share some features with others, and may suggest ways of thinking about other places, but are not “representative.” He thus positions this work as a study of how the scholarly elite in one place developed its own distinctive cultural and geographical identity as they adapted to larger patterns of dynastic political change and intellectual transformation across four centuries. In doing so, he also makes an important contribution to current scholarship about evolving relations between literati elites, the state, and local societies in middle and later imperial China. Ways of being “local” were never simple; they were always embedded in a wider “national” context of intellectual and political life.