Reflections on the transnational and comparative imperial history of Asia

Abstract

Two prominent approaches to the history of empires and nation-states are comparative imperial history [CIH] and transnational history [TNH]. Each group of historians has actively promoted their perspective, but the two have had little interaction. Furthermore, in the history of East Asia, nationalist perspectives have dominated over transnational approaches until very recent times. This article points to new studies that examine Chinese imperial and national history from transnational and comparative perspectives, and encourages further work, including an ecological and environmental viewpoint, that will foster this trend.

Keywords

Asian history comparative history East Asia empires environment modern China nation-states Qing dynasty transnational history

Recently, historians have begun to study empires and nation-states from broader and more comparative points of view. Instead of limiting themselves to one empire, one colony, or one nation-state as an isolated unit, they look at networks connecting these institutions together and how they are embedded in global economic, environmental, and political processes. Transnational history, on the one hand, and comparative imperial history, on the other, have become watchwords to inspire new scholarly directions for research on the early modern and modern eras. Both of these trends, however, have proceeded in parallel, with surprisingly little interaction between them. In the history of East Asia, where national paradigms still dominate, these cross-border approaches have only just begun. We can expect, however, further progress in the coming years. This article discusses some features of these new trends and offers some guidance for improving their conceptual tools.

The transnational history movement (TNH for short) has made great strides since its origins roughly 20 years ago. Some of the most distinguished members of the history profession have embraced it, and it has produced an abundant literature of monographic research, programmatic articles, and all-encompassing synthetic works. The recent publication of a large dictionary of transnational history and two methodological treatises by Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier show that the movement has reached a culminating moment (Iriye and Saunier, 2009; Iriye, 2013; Saunier, 2013). In addition, Harvard University Press has now published three volumes in its large series on the History of the World which are heavily influenced by the transnational turn. Now is a good time to reflect on its achievements, limitations, and its prospects for further development, and to ask whether its proponents, however skilled and well-intentioned, can truly shift the strongly entrenched paradigms of national history.

Since the term ‘transnational’ by definition presupposes the existence of nation-states, its bias is toward the late 19th- and 20th-century periods. But we need to look at the imperial history of the early modern era alongside the era of nation-states to understand what exactly transnational history contributes, what it inherits from imperial history, and what it omits. Focusing on this movement among historians may help to clarify the conceptual problems surrounding discussions of empires and nation-states in the modern world.

This article comments on the TNH turn from the perspective of the study of Asian empires and nation-states. I am struck by two paradoxes. First, despite the fact that many of the proponents of TNH are outstanding historians of Asia in their own right, the actual presence of Asia in the works of TNH scholars is quite slight. Transnational historians may include Asia in their synthetic works, but very few monographic studies have appeared in this category. Asian historians themselves still overwhelmingly concentrate on a single country, although prize-winning books that cross national boundaries have begun to appear in the last five years.

Second, a related field, which I will call comparative imperial history [CIH], has grown almost concurrently with the rise of TNH. Comparative imperial history is a movement dedicated to examining imperial formations around the world from a common perspective. Before the national age of the 19th century, large empires which crossed all the boundaries of today’s nation-states dominated a very large percentage of the earth’s surface. Only, arguably, England (in fact a United Kingdom of four nations), France (still not really a nation-state after the French Revolution) and the new United States, which split apart 72 years after its first constitution, could qualify even partially as major nations in 1800. Many of the approaches of CIH are quite similar to those of TNH. They both use multiple archives, span conventional boundaries, and develop globally comparative perspectives. And yet, the scholars in these two fields mostly travel on ships passing in the night: they rarely refer to each other or participate in joint work. TNH predominantly studies the 20th-century Anglo-American and European world; CIH embraces much of the non-western world before the 20th century. Yet many of their approaches overlap. A future genuinely transnational and comparative world history needs to join these two disparate domains.

In these brief comments, I can’t provide extensive substantiation of these points, but I will provide some suggestive evidence, based on a brief survey of the two fields, some analysis of their networks, and some suggestions for further cooperative development. Ian Tyrrell (2013: 493–5) dates the rise of TNH from the 1990s, when American historians, including himself, called for historians to look beyond the borders of the United States. An Ngram graph of the term ‘transnational history’ supports his assertion (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Transnational history.

Now, 20 years later, the term pervades historical work. As the co-chair of the AHA program committee for the 2014 meeting, I was impressed with the large number of proposals that embraced transnational perspectives. Thirty-six of 259 formal panels at AHA 2014, or 14 percent, had the word ‘transnational’ in the title of papers or panels. The term ‘transnational’ is not listed in the Topical Index of the AHA program, and yet there are more panels using the word ‘transnational’ than those listed as ‘global’ (23) or ‘comparative’ (19). There was surprisingly little overlap between these categories: only eight of the total of 78 panels in three categories spanned two of them. Removing the overlaps, that means that at least 70 of 259, or 27 percent of the panels, spanned several nations. If we added ‘world history’, ‘environmental history’ and other border-crossing topics, there would be more.

Even panels that did not use the word ‘transnational’ could have transnational implications, by juxtaposing individual papers on widely divergent regions. One panel, for example, was entitled ‘Jaguars, Guanacos, and Anchovies: Global Markets, Local Environments and the Commodification of Animals in Postcolonial South America’. Some panels explored new regions such as the northern polar region, lying at the conjunction of eight Arctic nations (nine if one accepts China’s claim).¹ It is a place that has become increasingly important as a source of resources with the melting of the polar ice cap.² Even so, by a generous definition, explicitly transnational, global and comparative panels may have been about 30 percent of the total. TNH and its associated companions of global and comparative history were still far from being the dominant practice of historians at the AHA.

Aside from simply counting uses of the word ‘transnational’, are there other ways of defining the field? Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, co-editors of The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, do not wish to define the field too strictly, but they do distinguish it from related movements in global, world, and comparative history. All of these movements question the primacy of the nation-state in historical narratives, but global historians begin with contemporary trends of globalization, world historians attempt universal histories of mankind, and comparative historians set one or more nation-states side by side. Transnational historians look for interactions between nation-states found at levels below the elite strata of intellectual and diplomatic history (Saunier, 2013: 1047–54).

Saunier also defines TNH by its demand for new methodologies of research. It maintains a close tie to primary sources, unlike more synthetic fields, but employs new tools for discovering hidden relations. A minimal definition of TNH as a research specialty would include the following criteria: monographic works that rely on primary sources in more than one language, in more than one country, which describe interactions between two or more nations or large regions, and which stress the interaction of external forces and non-state actors with internal developments. Unlike the ambitious syntheses of global or world historians, most TNH limits its frame to a small number of national actors, economic forces, or social processes.

We may add that since the goal of TNH is to question the assumption that the nation-state is the ‘natural’ unit of study for historians, truly transnational studies will try to frame their geographic perspectives at different scales. They may study global networks, or they may examine frontier regions, or cross-border interactions, rather than putting nation-state organs at the center of their analysis. Those who promote ‘translocality’ rather than ‘transnationalism’ argue that important connections exist between small places well below the national level, and that the entire idea of neatly nested national, regional, and local scales needs to be questioned.

The TNH movement has become important enough to stimulate a conservative backlash by some traditional historians. David A. Bell’s (2013) recent review of Emily S. Rosenberg’s volume in the Harvard History of the World, A World Connecting, 1870–1945, is a case in point. Essentially he argues that this type of history is incoherent, because it abandons a focus on battles, domestic policies, and international politics, and it is parochial, because it omits other important topics. He argues that historians have overdone the focus on networks and global flows, at the cost of more traditional topics like war and the history of individuals. He states that historians should ‘turn back’ to ‘rapid, incredibly intense changes that took place in very small spaces indeed’.

Bell correctly raises the issue of linking microhistory to macrohistory, a perennial problem for all historians, but I find his critique to be misplaced. His airy dismissal of the magisterial world history of Christopher Bayly (2004), based on only three pages of this 540-page book, indicates that he is not really interested in detailed criticism.³ Similarly, he attacks the authors of A World Connecting for neglecting the study of war, his own favorite subject, but a quick look at the index indicates that they do no such thing. True, the book does not narrate battles, the strategies of European armies, or the deeds of generals, but it does recognize the enormous impact of the First World War on the entire world.

There is an undertone of defensiveness in such comments. The rise of social history, quantitative history, cliometrics, gender history, new cultural history, and other ‘new histories’ also met with a conservative critique.⁴ These critics typically argued that the new history was incoherent, because it abandoned conventional narratives, that it omitted crucial events, people, or processes, and that it followed fashionable trends and theories in the wider world of the social and cultural sciences, thereby undermining the integrity of history as a distinct discipline. Accusations of incoherence and omission of one’s favorite topics are a perennial theme of this kind of critique. In my view, history is robust enough to absorb many challenges to conventional practice, and it thrives by doing so. Reasserting time-tested verities is not the best way to defend historical study.

But even if the TNH turn has positive effects, and even if it has just begun in some areas, that does not mean that it has no limitations. In modern European and American history, where the trend is more advanced, several critics have pointed to flaws in the TNH program:⁵

it can be an uncritical ‘handmaiden of globalization’, focusing only on the positive effects of global linkages, the experiences of privileged elites, and the economic gains of a minority, while neglecting the oppression of large populations and the experience of those who do not leave written records;

it tends to favor historians of the 20th century, the era when global linkages were the strongest, with the danger of implying that this century set the standard for judging earlier periods;

it presumes the pre-existence of nation-states, particularly European nation-states, beginning conventionally from the Westphalian system after 1648. This narrow focus leaves historians ill-equipped to analyze large areas of the world where nation-states came into existence much later. This line of criticism argues that TNH unprofitably narrows the scope of historians’ thinking, directing it into certain channels that reflect mainly the 20th-century European and American experience.

These critiques point out the exclusions entailed by the TNH perspective. Conversely, the appearance of a number of very large-scale histories of global connections has inspired a second line of criticism which argues that the concept of TNH covers too broad a sweep of time and space to be analytically useful. These days the appropriate parameters of time and space, the two fundamental frameworks of all historical study, span an incredible diversity. Proponents of the Big History movement assert that we need to begin at the origins of the universe 38 billion years ago; others more modestly begin with the exodus of humans from Africa 50,000 years ago (International Big History Association (ibhanet.org); Morris, 2010). Extending the boundaries of history in such a capacious way relegates most of the recent history of humanity to a brief instant. Others argue for the microhistory of a single short-term event, lasting only a few months, or a single day. From both ends of the temporal and spatial scales, transnational history suffers critique as being either too narrow or too diffuse. These critiques have some merit, but they are overstated and they do not reflect the broad spectrum of transnational approaches or the ambitions of their proponents.

Calls for TNH are omnipresent, but others have noticed that the actual monographic practice of TNH, as opposed to manifestoes, syntheses and methodological debates, is still rather limited. In East Asia this is even more the case than in many other regions, because of the powerful dominance of nationalist narratives in all four East Asian nations (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam). These nations formed themselves out of the collapse of empires and dynastic formations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the nationalist narrative is a fundamental component of their identity in the modern world. In addition, two of them, China and Korea, are still divided nations, where constant reassertion of the need for future reunification of the Korean and Chinese peoples as compatriots reigns as the ideology that legitimizes the dominant regime against dissident voices. An assertion of difference within the nation, or the investigation of peoples and processes that crossed national borders, can get historians and others into very hot water, or a cold prison. The PRC, for example, repeatedly denounces advocates of a distinctive historical trajectory of Taiwan, Xinjiang, or Tibet as ‘splittists’ who serve the interests of imperialists by undercutting national solidarity.

In the increasingly globalized world in which the PRC participates, however, promotion of perspectives that go beyond the limitations of national narratives serves a constructive function. It allows thoughtful scholars to imagine new forms of identity that are not so tightly tied to the fateful amalgam of single-party authoritarian rule and class-based anti-imperialist ideology. It creates space for more marginal peoples, who are denigrated or excluded from the dominant Han narrative. And it can lead to questioning in fruitful ways the unity of the Han majority itself, allowing for consideration of a looser collective identity than an exclusively racial, linguistic, or monocultural one (Mullaney, 2012; Standen, 2013). In Japan likewise, moves to a more international history help to undermine the insistence on the unique superiority of the Japanese people that undergirded Japanese imperialism. The nefarious Nihonjinron debate over the essential nature of the Japanese race far too often served the interests of those who glorified Japan’s militarist and imperial past (Dale, 1987; Miller, 1982). It may even be conceivable that a common historical understanding of the deeply interactive processes that linked China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam in the modern age will alleviate the very sharp tensions that afflict the region today. There are some welcome efforts to move in this direction by private individuals and associations collaborating on common textbooks of East Asia, although no national Ministry of Education endorses them (He, 2009; Wang, 2009).

For a number of reasons, including political restrictions, institutional limitations on academic work, financial limits on travel and constraints on access to archives, western historians have done more exploration of TNH perspectives than historians in East Asia. Within East Asia, arguably, the more western-oriented nations of Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have moved in a more international direction than mainland China or Vietnam. Even in the West, however, the position of East Asian history in the TNH movement is rather paradoxical. On the one hand, several of the leading proponents of TNH are excellent historians of East Asia in their own right.⁶ Yet the products in recent times of TNH include very few studies of the region. In the Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, edited by Akira Iriye and Rana Mitter, only three of 26 titles cover East Asia: two on Japan and one on China. This unfortunate situation partly reflects the scarcity of prominent East Asian scholars who take an interest in TNH, and the limitations of graduate school training of History PhDs. Learning East Asian languages for non-native speakers is such an arduous task that it leaves little time to pursue yet another language or documentary source collection.

A quick analysis of the Palgrave Dictionary, the defining tome for the field, reveals a heavy bias toward European and American regions. In the Names and Places index, of over 1400 total entries, 133 refer to East Asian names and places, less than 10 percent of the total. Since East Asian peoples constituted almost 30 percent of the world in 1900, this figure indicates substantial underrepresentation. The places and people that are included also show some curious biases. The Asian place with the largest number of page references is tiny colonial Singapore (10), followed by Hong Kong (9) and Shanghai (5). The mighty capitals of Beijing and Tokyo get only three to seven pages. Seoul, Korea, in fact, does not appear at all.

Many of the people listed are hardly household names. Even a relatively well-informed Asian historian like myself had to scratch his head to ponder the significance of such people as Rei Kawakubo (a Japanese fashion designer), Chen Feinong (a Chinese actor), or Lee Kun Hee (a South Korean business magnate), while major political and cultural figures like Chiang Kai-shek and Emperor Hirohito are barely mentioned. The towering intellectual Hu Shih, who studied philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia, reformed the Chinese language, and tirelessly advocated western thought, is a transnational individual if there ever was one. In an Ngram cohort study of the most famous individuals (i.e. most mentioned in English language texts) of the last 150 years, Hu Shih ranks as the most famous individual born in 1891 (Aiden and Michel, 2013). But he gets no mention at all. When Diane Keaton gets as much play as the city of Kyoto, and major writers like Lu Xun, Tanizaki Junichiro, and Kawabata Yasunari are not mentioned at all, something is clearly amiss.

TNH supporters may reply, first, that most TNH work concentrates on abstract processes and influences, not individuals, and second, that the historiographical tradition of research on East Asian transnationalism is much less developed than that of Europe and America. But history ultimately, as Emerson said, is biography, collective or individual, and the presence of individual names does reveal a historian’s predilections. The second point, however, is well taken. Historians of East Asia have yet to develop a mature tradition of transnational research and publication that will seriously inflect the TNH movement.

If we look for examples of this kind of East Asian history, we quickly discover that the number of outstanding works in this category is quite small, and they have appeared only since the late 1990s. The Fairbank Prize in East Asian history is awarded annually by the American Historical Association for ‘the best work on the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan since the year 1800’. It can serve as one simple indicator of the very recent rise of TNH in Asia. No book prize from the inception of the prize in 1969 to 1998 could qualify as transnational history in the modern sense. A breakthrough occurred in 1998, when Louise Young’s study of the Japanese empire in Manchuria, Japan’s Total Empire, comprehensively described how Japanese imperial visions of China affected policymaking in Japan (Young, 1998). It, however, did not rely on any Chinese sources. John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, the winner for 1999, examined intensively the impact of the American occupation on Japanese social transformation, using US and Japanese sources (Dower, 1999). Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence is still a classic example of binary comparative economic history, setting European economic development and Chinese development side by side. Pomeranz, however, did not stress interactions between them (Pomeranz, 2000).

The 2010 winner, James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, for the first time among the Fairbank prize winners challenged orthodox thinking about East Asian geography (Scott, 2009). A political scientist and anthropologist who worked on Southeast Asia, Scott incorporated the hill regions of southern China into his analysis of alternative political and social structures. The fact that Scott, neither a historian by discipline nor an East Asianist, could win the premier prize in the field indicates a definite need for new approaches. In 2011, Carol A. Benedict’s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010, tracked the history of this New World crop from its importation to China to its transformation into a global commodity in the 20th century (Benedict, 2011). In 2012, Jun Uchida’s Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 used both Japanese and Korean sources to examine Japan’s long-standing intervention in Korea over the 19th and 20th centuries (Uchida, 2011). It was only the third book in more than 40 years of prize awards to discuss Korea at all. By focusing on ‘mid-level’ interactions between Japanese settlers and local Koreans, she moved away from previous studies of Japanese imperial elites, producing a brilliant analysis of how Japanese settlers and businessmen embedded themselves in the colonial environment.

The Fairbank Prize by itself, of course, does not necessarily represent the consensus of opinion of all East Asian historians. But as a crude yet telling indicator, it shows a very recent and sudden rise to prominence of histories which explicitly aim at transnational perspectives, challenging a single-minded focus on one nation-state and exploring newer geographical structures, such as commodity networks and physiographic regions. They relied on earlier innovations in geography and other social sciences (Van Schendel, 2002; Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1990).

Other prizes of the Association of Asian Studies reveal a similar trend. Beginning around 2005, many winners of the Levenson Prize for China, the Hall Prize for Japan, the Palais Prize for Korea, the Coomaraswamy Prize for South Asia, and the Benda Prize for Southeast Asia wrote books that crossed conventional boundaries of Asian empires and nation-states. In sum, transnational history has only made its appearance in western studies of Asia in the decade of the 2000s, lagging behind the field in Europe and the US, but the recent prominence across all the subfields of Asian studies of these border-crossing books indicates great promise for future growth.

Some pioneering Japanese scholars, however, have also led the way in efforts to conceptualize a broader East Asian region beyond individual nation-states. Takeshi Hamashita’s abundant works have shaped very powerfully the conception of a ‘tributary sphere’ of East Asian commercial and diplomatic relations focused on the maritime regions (Arrighi et al., 2003; Hamashita et al., 2008). Hamashita argues that the concept of tributary relations informed the activities of the newly formed nations of Japan, Korea, and China since the end of the 19th century. Japanese imperial efforts were an attempt to replace China as the central pole of a hierarchical system of domination and economic exchange. Contrary to the perspective of John K. Fairbank and his followers, who traced the demise of the Qing tributary system in a transition toward a western world of independent nation-states, Hamashita finds a strong legacy of tributary relations lasting into the 20th century. In this way he links the practices of the Qing empire to the era of engagement with major western nation-states.

The ‘maritime Asia’ (Umi no Ajia) project of a team of Japanese scholars led by Omoto Keiichi and including Hamashita produced from 2000 to 2001 six volumes examining the countries of maritime East Asia, with a special interest in commercial networks, mobile peoples including pirates and traders, capital flows, and migrants, from early times to the present day. (Hamashita, 2001) The six volumes bear the titles: 1. The Maritime Paradigm [Umi no paradaimu]; 2. The Monsoon Cultural Sphere [Monsūn bunkaken]; 3. The Dynamism of Island Peoples [Shima to hito no dainamizumu]; 4. The World of [Alfred Russell] Wallace [Wooreshia to iu sekai], covering the natural history of southern islands; 5. Border-Crossing Networks [Ekkyōsuru nettowāku ]; 6. Asia’s Seas and the Japanese [Ajia no umi to Nihonjin]. The Chinese writer Zheng Yangwen has also published a volume on China’s relationship to the sea (Zheng, 2012).

These are a few pioneering efforts by Asian historians to join the transnational wave. I hope that they will soon bend the directions of transnational history as currently practiced toward greater emphasis on the non-western world.

Comparative imperial studies: Its growth and future

Comparative imperial history [CIH] also began to flourish in the late 1990s. The foundational text for this field was Tensions of Empire, edited by Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Cooper and Stoler, 1997). The historians in this volume analyzed interactions between metropole and colony in the major European empires of the 19th century, including the British, French, Belgians, and Germans. They took as much an ethnographic as a political stance, examining intimate relations of colonizers and indigenous peoples and the repercussions of local relationships in the colonies on definitions of citizenship in the metropole.

But imperial historians owe a great debt to George W. Bush for reinvigorating the comparative study of empire. In the wake of the second Iraq war in 2001, his administration’s open endorsement of the imperial idea led to vigorous discussion of the United States as a colonial empire. Numerous conferences led to a series of edited volumes, each with chapters examining one or more imperial formations. Almost every one of these volumes included at least one historian each of Britain, China, and America, and many embraced the Ottomans, French, Dutch, and Spanish as well (Esherick et al., 2006; Calhoun et al., 2006; Stoler et al., 2007; Maier, 2006; Levine and Marriott, 2012; Islamoglu and Perdue, 2008; Go, 2011). This wave culminated in the massive synthetic volume of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History, a grand narrative of the rise and fall of empires from ancient times to the present (Burbank and Cooper, 2010). It would be instructive to compare this kind of comparative imperial history with the earlier synthesis by Paul Kennedy (1987), who also took a broad synthetic approach and attracted great public attention with his intimations of the future decline of American power. However, he focused almost exclusively on contention between major European empires.

The second wave of comparative empire studies always extends beyond Europe, and it recognizes the historical importance of Middle Eastern formations like the Ottomans, and the dominant power of the Qing empire in East Asia. These two extremely long-lasting imperial formations, which despite growing weaknesses never fell under complete western domination even in the 20th century, have many lessons to offer about the interaction and evolution of empires in general. Including them in the imperial mix broadens and deepens our understanding of just what is distinctive about British and American imperial practice, and stimulates much more comprehensive examination of imperial rivalries going beyond diplomatic and geopolitical elites.

In this sense the CIH movement parallels the TNH movement in at least in principle embracing the non-western world and examining actors and processes below the level of central political and military power. Neither movement tries to develop a general theory of empires, or globalization; instead, its proponents pursue multiple themes and pathways. Many of them are the same: inter-imperial flows of migrants, commodities, cultural products; the impact of expanding empires and transnational formations on the natural world; the socially and materially embedded analysis of war, etc.

Yet a quick examination of the two scholarly communities reveals rather little overlap between them. Only Prasenjit Duara, it appears, has participated both in comparative empire conferences and the Palgrave Dictionary project. Charles Maier’s extremely insightful book, Among Empires, straddles the divide between ancient and early modern empires and the postwar United States. His chapter ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood’, in the Harvard University Press History of the World series, ranges widely over imperial and national state-building in the 19th century (Maier, 2006, 2012). Once Within Borders, his most recent book, covers the entire period from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries (Maier, 2016). Aside from these two prominent historians, nearly all CIH adherents focus on the early modern world, and most TNH historians concentrate on the 20th century. But even when there is chronological overlap, the participants are different. There are certainly individual interactions within history departments and at certain conferences, and several historical centers explicitly endorse both comparative and transnational research.⁷ More careful study of citations could reveal further referencing of common themes, but at the institutional level of books and departmental positions the two ships still sail on different courses.

However, it is possible to link the two realms of scholarly discourse in a more systematic way. A collective three-volume project, Asia Inside Out, examines new ways of framing the geography of Asia from the 16th century to the present (Amrith, 2016; Tagliacozzo et al., 2015a, 2015b).⁸ Volume 1, in which each chapter pivots on a single year, spans the period from the 1550s to the 2000s, and flows of commodities and people from Qatar to Japan. Volume 2, dedicated to critical places, likewise spans a broad chronology, and includes examples from Chittagong and Cairo to Beijing and Korea. Volume 3 will analyze people and processes that transcend imperial and national boundaries, so that Asia becomes a site of flows, not fixed territorial containers. The most exciting work of current PhD students in East Asian History at Yale and other places often is devoted to explicitly transnational themes (Hasegawa, 2013; Lee, 2013).

Future possibilities

Because the rise of Asian TNH is so recent, and still quite marginal – at least in quantitative terms – it would be both premature and destructive to subject this new sprout to too much withering criticism. Still, some aspects of the new work do indicate directions that deserve some comment. Here I simply claim that closer connections with comparative imperial history will help to avoid pitfalls and develop original approaches.

‘Presentism’, meaning here the assumption that modern Asian history begins in the mid-19th century, or even in the 20th century. Japanese historians conventionally begin the story of modern Japan with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and divide off the postwar period after 1945, just as historians of China begin with the Opium War of 1839–42, follow the story to the collapse of the empire in 1911, then begin again with a separate account of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1949, and start all over again with the People’s Republic of post-1949. Each period often looks like the history of a completely different country, with different primary sources, different analytical tools, different historians, and different styles of narrative. This Procrustean carving up of time ignores the obvious fact that the preceding Tokugawa regime in Japan and the ‘high Qing’ era of the 17th and 18th centuries each had their own sources of dynamism, much of which carried over into the conventional ‘modern’ era. But for both countries, the language of the sources and the institutional structure of archives changed radically during these transitions. The technical difficulties of the sources and the reconstitution of the archive conceal longer continuities spanning the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ periods. Of course it is even more daunting for the budding transnational historian of China and Japan to contemplate the prospect of studying both Tokugawa and Meiji Japanese, or the classical Chinese of the Qing and the vernacular of the 20th century, not to mention Manchu, but she must at least try.

The need to reconceive our definitions of Asian space, so that instead of presuming the eternal existence of nation-state units, divided or not, we think about turning ‘Asia Inside Out’, making it a collection of shifting nodes and linkages rather than fixed containers of peoples and institutions. We need to pay more attention to the imperial past, whose boundaries did not correspond to nation-states, and to the highly integrated cultural sphere in which East Asian peoples interacted through a common script, classical Chinese, in order to think about Asia in new ways. English and modern Chinese are now becoming the new transnational languages of Asia, replacing the dominance of classical Chinese in the past, but they serve analogous functions within Asia to those of the classical past.

A bias toward mobile peoples, economic flows, and frontier relations may lead to neglect of those peoples more rooted in one place. The puzzling case of the peripheralization of much of north China, for example, needs further discussion. Certain areas, especially coastal cities, now get the lion’s share of media and academic attention, but much of the rural interior, and declining cities like ancient Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, or Yangzhou, deserve intensive analysis.

One approach that will help to link the concerns of these two fields is based in ecological history. Ecological history examines the systematic interrelationship between humans, non-humans, and natural processes, in specific locations, at a human scale of time. It reflects the recognition by historians that natural forces strongly shape human behavior at all times, and the recognition by ecologists that social, political, and economic factors need to be included in their models of ecosystems (Schmitz, 2016). For both empires and nation-states, a focus on resource extraction and mobilization reveals the common concerns of all states and societies in sustaining themselves from the products of nature. Pre-modern states relied heavily on grains, extracted through taxation from settled farmers, and this agricultural production in turn depended heavily on supplies of water, soil, animals, and climatic conditions. Modern states needed even greater resources to fuel their industrial and imperial machines, so they extended the search for resources across the entire world. Nature, by necessity, never obeys the boundaries of nation-states or empires, so these structures perforce had to cross political boundaries, engage in geopolitical rivalry, and extend supply chains over large distances to sustain themselves.

Imperial China and modern China, both states of gigantic scale, still could not supply themselves entirely from within their own borders. They constantly engaged with the world around them, looking for new resources from the Central Eurasian steppe, the mountains of Southeast Asia, and the maritime regions to their east and south. Here I will cite two examples of how the expansion into imperial peripheries, driven by military conflict and the need for grain, affected imperial China and the modern Chinese nation-state in comparable ways.

In North China the flow of the Yellow River fundamentally shaped the conditions of agrarian production for millions of peasant farmers, and the conditions of survival for imperial states. From the 10th through 20th centuries, the enduring geomorphic features of the Yellow River forced states and peoples to address its demands. Carrying a heavy silt load, it repeatedly flooded the flat plain and shifted its course, inundating the population and wreaking havoc on the landscape. Zhang’s book on the Yellow River flood of 1048, and Micah Muscolino’s discussion of a flood in nearly the same place in 1938, display remarkably similar processes across nine centuries (Muscolino, 2015; Zhang, 2016). In the 11th century, the young Song dynasty, founded in 960 CE, faced serious military challenges from the Liao state to the north and northeast. The Song used natural defenses, including walls, ponds, and watercourses, to block Liao invasions of the north China plain. Zhang argues that the state put more hydraulic effort into protecting civilian populations in regions south of the river than it did in the north, so the river ultimately broke out of its southern channel and flooded Hebei province in 1048. For the next 80 years, the Song state, the river, and the inhabitants engaged in a ‘trialectic’ relationship of struggle over control of the natural sources of human life. The geostrategic imperatives of the Song state, the impulse for survival of north Chinese farmers, and the autonomous forces of water, sand, and climate created a remarkably entangled relationship, filled with drama, suffering, and violence. Zhang, brilliantly reconstructing these intertwined forces, shows how analysis of the Yellow River crisis must consider much more than Song state policy alone. Song officials engaged in debates which embraced vast scope, extending well beyond the borders of the state itself.

In 1938, once again the Yellow River flooded, but this time because of more direct human intervention. Chiang Kai-shek deliberately broke its dikes in an unsuccessful effort to ward off the Japanese invasion of north China. The Nationalist state behaved much like its Song predecessor: it sacrificed the lives of large numbers of peasant farmers to serve goals of state security and national defense. Muscolino, like Zhang, also investigates the consequences of the flood for the lives of the local population, and the desperate efforts made to restore ordinary living in north China, beset by military occupation, civil war, and famine. Once again, this ecological approach extends the boundaries of inquiry well beyond conventional analysis of a single state.

Far to the west, in arid Xinjiang, the Chinese imperial and nation-states faced radically different ecological imperatives, but often followed similar paths. Kwangmin Kim and Judd Kinzley both examine how these states attempted to extract resources from Xinjiang to serve their interests in revenue (Kim, 2016; Kinzley, forthcoming). Xinjiang, a vast region in far western China, contains oasis farmers, nomadic pastoralists, and caravan traders from a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups. After conquering the region in the mid-18th century, the Manchu rulers of the Qing relied on local Turkish agrarian entrepreneurs, ‘beg capitalists’, to provide them with revenue from agrarian production in the oases. The trade routes of the begs, including products like wool, cotton, jade, and rhubarb, extended far across central Eurasia, into Russia, India, and the core of China. Qing rule of the territory favored the profits of the begs, but their activities drove many impoverished farmers into rebellion. Ultimately, the cutting off of currency supplies by the Opium War in the mid-19th century damaged the Xinjiang economy so much that it fell into the hands of foreign rebels and invaders.

Kinzley picks up the story in the late 19th century, after the Qing restored its control. Once again we find fevered efforts to extract natural resources, especially minerals for industrial and military production, driven by Qing state drives toward modernization and Russian ambitions for resource exploitation in the 20th century. As in the case of the Yellow River, we see long-term continuities in imperial and national attitudes toward this resource-rich frontier, and extensive contact across the borders with all of the imperial players in the central Eurasian ‘great game’.

Conclusion

These works and others now have laid the framework for new ways of linking China’s imperial past to the present, and for extending the study of China across its traditional boundaries. Bringing together Asian TNH and CIH in this kind of dialogue should help historians to establish common perspectives that apply to both the early modern and the modern world, and to both empires and nation-states. Of course, industrialization, population growth, and modern imperialism dramatically transformed the world in the 19th century, but we have come to realize that the legacies of ancient empires have not vanished. If in the palimpsest of the modern world nations and empires remain inextricably entangled, we need to find methods for studying both of them together.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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