Discovering Empire in China

Lecture by Prof. Marc Elliot in cooperation with Asian Modernities and Traditions (AMT).

The custom in the West is to speak of the “Chinese empire,” but the absence of any such word as “empire” in the Chinese language ought to give us pause:  Why, exactly, do we in the West speak of China historically as an “empire,” and when did this habit begin?  Since when have Chinese writers referred to China as an empire (diguo), and what do they mean by it?  Through an examination of early modern Sinological discourse, this paper makes the argument that the European discovery of “empire” in China coincided with the Manchu conquest of China in the mid-17th century.  It goes on to examine the adoption of this vocabulary by the Chinese themselves in the 19th c., before building a case for why, apart from old habit, we might be able to think of the Qing state – if not all of “China” historically – as an empire.

Mark C. Elliott is the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History and holds a joint appointment in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and in the Department of History at Harvard University.  He is a leading figure in the “New Qing History,” an approach to the history of the last dynasty that emphasizes the significance of steppe political and military institutions, the role of the frontier, and the use of non-Chinese-language sources.  Elliott is best known for his influential study, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2001), based on previously untouched Manchu-language sources.  His newest book is Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (Longman, 2009), which appeared in Chinese translation in April 2014.  In addition to a specialization in Qing history and Manjuristics, Elliott’s research interests include comparative empire and imperialism, ethnicity, and frontier studies.  Professor Elliott is chair of Harvard's PhD Committee in History and East Asian Languages and is Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Registration: Heleen van der Minne h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl