A History of China (2 page)

There is nothing new in the attempt to understand history as a whole. To know how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the religious and ­philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the past few decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current knowledge. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, history itself was generally treated as a subordinate branch of other fields of learning, of literature, rhetoric, law, philosophy, or religion.

When historians began to establish history’s independence as a field of scholarship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and ­methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehensive account of the human past but the history of western Europe and of the societies ­created by European expansion and colonization. In laying the scholarly ­foundations of their discipline, they also reinforced the Enlightenment’s belief in the advance of “civilization” (and, more recently, of “western civilization”), and made it, with relatively minor regional variation, the basis of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece and Rome, dominated by philology, and conducted through the exposition of the canonical texts of their respective languages. World history as such remained the province of thinkers and writers principally interested in constructing theoretical or metaphysical systems. Only toward the very end of the century did the community of ­academic historians begin to recognize world history as a proper and even urgent field for the application of their knowledge and skills.

The inadequacy of the traditional parameters of the discipline is now widely – though not universally – acknowledged, and the sense is growing that a world facing a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation needs its common history. Its emergence has been delayed, however, by simple ignorance on the one hand – for the history of enormous stretches of space and time was known not at all, or so patchily and ­superficially as not to be worth revisiting – and on the other by the lack of a widely ­acceptable basis upon which to organize and discuss what is nevertheless the enormous and enormously diverse knowledge that we have.

The first of those obstacles is now being rapidly overcome. There is almost no part of the world or period of its history that is not the subject of vigorous and sophisticated investigation by archaeologists and historians. The ­expansion of the horizons of academic history since the 1980s has been dramatic. The quality and quantity of historical research and writing has risen exponentially in each decade, and the advances have been most spectacular in the areas ­previously most neglected. Nor have the academics failed to share the results of their labors. Reliable and accessible accounts are now readily available of regions, periods, and topics that even twenty years ago were obscure to everyone but a handful of specialists. In particular, collaborative publication, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes in which teams of authors set forth, in more or less detail, their expert and up-to-date conclusions in the field of their research, has been a natural and necessary response to the growth of ­knowledge. Only in that way can non specialists, at any level, be kept even approximately in touch with the constantly accelerating accumulation of information about the past.

Yet the amelioration of one problem exacerbates the other. It is truer than it has ever been that knowledge is growing and perspectives are multiplying more quickly than they can be assimilated and recorded in synthetic form. We can now describe a great many more trees in a great deal more detail than we could before, but it does not always follow that we have a better view of the wood. Collaboration has many strengths, but clarity, still less ­originality, of vision is rarely among them. History acquires shape, structure, ­relevance – becomes, in the fashionable catch-phrase, something for thinking with – by advancing and debating new propositions about what past societies were like; how they worked and why they changed over long ­periods of time; and how they resembled and why they differed from contemporaneous societies in other parts of the world. Such insights, like the sympathetic understanding without which the past is dead, are almost always born of individual creativity and imagination.

There is a wealth of ways in which world history can be written. The oldest and simplest view, that it is best understood as the history of contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another, from which (as some think) all change arises, is now seen to be capable of application since the earliest times. An influential alternative focuses upon the tendency of economic exchange to create self-sufficient but ever expanding “worlds” that sustain successive ­systems of power and culture. Another seeks to understand the differences between societies and cultures, and therefore the particular character of each, by comparing the ways in which their values, social relationships, and structures of power have developed. The rapidly emerging field of ecological history returns to a very ancient tradition of seeing interaction with the physical ­environment, and with other animals, at the centre of the human predicament, while insisting that its understanding demands an approach that is culturally, chronologically, and geographically comprehensive. More recently still, “Big History” (one of the leaders of which is among the contributors to this series) has begun to show how human history can be integrated with that not only of the natural but also of the cosmic environment, and better understood in consequence.

Each volume of the
Blackwell History of the World
offers a substantial account of a portion of the history of the world large enough to permit, and indeed demand, the reappraisal of customary boundaries of regions, periods, and topics, and in doing so reflects the idiosyncrasies of its sources and its subjects, as well as the vision and judgment of its author. The series as a whole seeks not to embody any single approach but to support them all, as it will use them all, by providing a modern, comprehensive, and accessible account of the entire human past. Its plan combines the indispensable narratives of very-long-term regional development with global surveys of developments across the world at particular times, of interaction between regions and what they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another. In combination these volumes will provide a framework in which the history of every part of the world can be viewed, and a basis upon which most aspects of human activity can be compared across both time and space. A frame offers perspective. Comparison implies respect for difference. That is the beginning of what the past has to offer the future.

R. I. Moore

The editor is grateful to all of the contributors to the
Blackwell History of the World
for advice and assistance on the design and contents of the series as a whole as well as on individual volumes. Both editor and contributors wish to place on record their immense debt, individually and collectively, to John Davey, formerly of Blackwell Publishers. The series would not have been ­initiated without his vision and enthusiasm, and could not have been realized without his energy, skill, and diplomacy.

I have deliberately titled this book
A History of China
. It is not
The History of China
. In fact, such an all-encompassing book has not been and probably will never be written. Chinese history is beyond the scope of a single volume. In this work, much in the history of China has been omitted, partly due to size restrictions. I have tried to replicate the course on Chinese history I have taught at a variety of universities. However, I have left out some anecdotes and have eschewed documentary overkill. I have had to select from a vast array of political, economic, social, and cultural developments.

Yet this work offers a survey of Chinese history, with one innovation. The basic events and trends are described, but I have emphasized China as part of a larger world, starting with its contacts with its neighbors in early times and stretching to west, south, and southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan in later eras. From the Mongol age in the thirteenth century onward, I portray China in the context of global developments and history. Specific Chinese policies and practices can be understood as, in part, responses to foreign influences. Indeed, non-Chinese peoples have ruled China for almost half of its history since 1279, the date the Mongols crushed the Southern Song dynasty. In the past, some histories depicted the Mongol and Manchu rulers who governed China during that time as typical Chinese potentates and their people as highly sinicized. This history and many recent scholarly studies have challenged that interpretation, and I devote more space than most texts to describing Mongol and Manchu societies and analyzing their impact on China. In addition, since 1279, China has had a significant non-Chinese population, mostly along ­strategic frontier areas. Again, I have emphasized these peoples’ histories in this book, often devoting more space to the subject than almost all other ­histories of China.

Such emphases on China in global history and on the non-Chinese population living in the country have not been my sole perspective. To be sure, many developments in China generally reflected internal events and were not responses to foreign pressures or stimuli. Chinese officials, military commanders, artists, scientists, and philosophers most often reacted to indigenous political or cultural challenges. Yet China and the Chinese were not isolated; they had contacts with foreigners adjacent to their lands, and the Mongol Empire linked them with Eurasia (a connection that was never truly severed). Events and trends in other parts of Eurasia – and indeed in other parts of the world – have influenced China. Similarly, developments in China occasionally reverberated in Europe, west Asia, the Americas, and, to an extent, Africa. Such external impacts did not necessarily determine the course of events or the development of discoveries or ideas. Yet a conception of China from a global perspective provides unique insights. Consideration of domestic causes of events in Chinese history will be of primary concern, but, unlike many other appraisals of Chinese society, a new global perspective, capitalizing on recent research, will also be presented and will, I trust, add to the understanding of Chinese history.

On another note, even within the country, there have been many different Chinas. China’s population has long been sizable and the territory under its control substantial. In traditional times, various regions faced numerous obstacles in transport and communications. Thus, different parts of the country and different peoples had differing values and differing histories. A peasant in Sichuan, an official in the city of Changan (modern Xian), a merchant in the city of Quanzhou, and a woman in a remote village in Gansu all had different histories.

Until the late nineteenth century, the elite produced nearly all the written sources, which described the lives, activities, concerns, and values of a single group of people who derived from the same social background. They hardly portrayed other groups of Chinese. Peasants, the vast majority of the population, barely appeared in these texts. Women also received short shrift, and only through painstaking perusals of numerous texts have scholars begun to piece together aspects of their roles in Chinese history. Confucian officials, who wrote most of the histories, relegated merchants and artisans to a lowly social status and scarcely mentioned them in historical accounts; thus, information about these two groups is limited. The available sources are not as multi­dimensional and diverse as historians would like. Scholars have used the briefest of mentions in texts and material remains to offer a glimpse of the lives and roles of merchants and artisans. Nonetheless, until changes in nineteenth-­century Chinese history, most sources, both written and visual, center on the careers and roles of the imperial families and officials. The reader needs to bear this in mind in reading this book.

A historian would find that traditional Chinese historical texts portrayed Confucianism as the system of values governing personal relations and the philosophical view that shaped people’s lives. Yet he or she could wonder whether popular religions played as important or greater roles for the ordinary Chinese. However, little is known about popular religions in certain eras of Chinese history because of the nature of the sources. Such religions were generally the province of ordinary Chinese, nearly all of whom were illiterate. Written texts that described these religions have, by and large, not survived (if they existed in the first place). Because the elite embraced Confucianism, wrote extensively about it, and appear to have led lives shaped by it, historians may assume that it was pervasive because the surviving texts portray it as such. This may not have been the case for ordinary people.

I have chosen to organize this history based on the various dynasties of China. I realize, of course, that changes in dynasties do not necessarily coincide with or reflect transformations in society and economy, cultural and ideological patterns, technological and scientific knowledge, or other equally significant developments. I am aware that a Japanese scholar has divided Chinese history in two, arguing that dramatic changes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
CE
changed the course of Chinese society. Other historians have adopted a variety of schemes for the periodization of Chinese history, including a disputed one centering on China’s response to the West. I have referred to some of these interpretations, describing them while also alluding to crucial assessments and critiques of these theories. However, in many years of teaching, I have found that students are better able to grasp the fundamentals of Chinese history through the lens of dynasties. Because this book is aimed at students and the nonspecialist reader, the dynastic approach appears to be less confusing and more optimal for a work of this kind.