How Comparative Studies of East Asia’s Bibliographical Traditions Could Transform Our History of the Book and History of Knowledge

This reflection piece retraces the surprising turns of the author’s research journey toward its central argument that a serious comparative study of East Asia’s bibliographical traditions challenges the current methodological underpinnings of the history of the book and the history of knowledge. The essay demonstrates how modern Eurocentric models of bibliography—especially those rooted in early modern commercial printing and weak academic traditions—distort the study of East Asian bibliographical traditions. It then shows how China and East Asia’s “Confucian hagiography of the book,” originating in the Han dynasty court more than two millennia ago, offers an alternative, more philosophical model to the pragmatic and commercial origins of Western traditions. Along the way, the article develops a comparative vignette of the diversity of bibliographical traditions in China, Korea, and Japan and rediscovers a neglected European formation—historiae litterariae—as a key site where bibliography, knowledge organization, and scholarly practice were once integrated before their fragmentation in the nineteenth-century research university. Through these comparisons, the article makes two interventions: first, a call for epistemic justice that not only restores non-Western traditions on their own terms, but also allows us to imagine alternative models of bibliography and knowledge transmission; and, second, a reconceptualization of bibliography as a central domain of knowledge production for a truly global history of knowledge beyond pseudoglobal frameworks.