In the Parlor with The Cambridge History of China

In the Parlor with The Cambridge History of China Pamela Kyle Crossley The Cambridge History of China, Volume 9: The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800, Part 2, edited by Willard J. Peterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 830. $200.00 cloth, $49.99 paper, $152.00 e-book. Some books command academic subcultures. They have their own time references, cant, standards, signifiers. When you enter their space you agree to suspend disbelief (or irritation, whichever comes first). The Cambridge History of China (hereafter CHC) is a whole series of such books. Wade-Giles romanization, British book title style, Oxford commas, and a proper feudal attitude that allows “Lord Elgin” and “Lord Rosebery” and such to never reveal their real names—all distinguish the volumes. More important, John King Fairbank’s chronology and causality are unquestioned in the CHC world. The Qing started in 1644. It ended in 1911. Within dynastic periods (in all the volumes), time is largely perceived as reign periods, and a high number of chapters in any volume will be titled “The [X] Reign.” Even more important, “traditional” China and “modern” China are separated by the challenge manifested as foreign intrusion and the responses to it—inflexibility leading to the Opium War; government delegitimation leading to the Taiping rebellion; unsuccessful attempts to reform education, the military, and the law; a nationalist revolution; and a communist revolution. We often think of Fairbank’s historical model as fashioned almost whole from early twentieth-century Chinese nationalist scholarship. But it shared a great deal with J. E. E. Dalberg-Acton’s The Cambridge [End Page 477] Modern History,1 the 1912 ancestor of all “Cambridge” histories, which accepted the conventional date of 1500 as the beginning of modernity—because the Renaissance (for Acton, the first modern thing that happened) challenged the medievals, to which challenge the Reformation responded, to which challenge the Enlightenment responded, to which challenge the French Revolution responded, to which challenge nationalism responded, and voilà! The twentieth century, literally from its birth, was historiographically inscribed with challenges and responses that became new challenges, and The Cambridge History of China just happens to be the lightbox on which we see the challenge-response arrows of Chinese historiography neatly overlapping the challenge-response arrows of a generic Actonian dialectic. The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800, Part 2 (CHC, vol. 9, bk. 2) is a faithful addition to the corpus. When the first volume of CHC appeared in 1978—Fairbank’s own Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1—it already had all the mannerisms that mark the series.2 The two latest volumes—Sung China, 960–1279, edited by John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett (active posthumously, not uncommon in the CHC world),3 and The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800, Part 2—adhere to the rules of this consensual universe, despite the fact that Wade-Giles makes them almost inaccessible to many who could benefit from reading them, and the remainder of the eccentricities of style and narrative now strike potential readers as ostentatious. To understand how peculiar the transliteration is, compare the single, very large volume of The Cambridge History of Ancient China, entirely in pinyin transliteration.4 Also, The Cambridge History of Inner Asia—which can be considered to encompass three volumes published 1990, 2009, and one forthcoming—used Wade-Giles in the first volume and switched to pinyin for the second.5 I think this is a [End Page 478] small clue to what CHC really is, and what it means for the field. Today, if I may venture to say it, we do not see 1644 as the first year of Qing, but as the year in which Qing imperial and Chinese imperial histories converged. We do not see the end of the Qing in 1911, but in 1912—the year the last emperor abdicated; we do not feel compelled to make the empire end on the day that the Republican government was declared. We are likely to tell students that Lord Elgin was James Bruce, and Lord Rosebery was Archibald Primrose. Reign periods as time references are almost indecipherable to most students and some specialists. They also make no sense in...