The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere: The Early Modern East Asian Information Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiri Paramore
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Global History ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Information Order ◽  
Modern Information

This chapter argues for the existence of an intellectually Confucian-centred, Classical Chinese language delivered archive of knowledge across early modern East Asia. I argue that this broad, transferable, and often commercially delivered Sinosphere archive supported the creation of state-led information orders in early modern East Asia. This argument resonates with recent work in South Asian and Global History demonstrating the role of regional early modern information orders in facilitating global flows of knowledge. I focus particularly on the transregional nature of the literary, pedagogical, and book culture that underlay the information order of early modern East Asia, and the state’s prime role in its development in early modern Japan. The article thus employs the concept of archivality to analyse early modern information systems, demonstrating patterns of trans-regional knowledge development in East Asia which resonate with other early modern global examples.

Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-269
Author(s):  
Kiri Paramore
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Medical Intervention ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Information Order ◽  
Intellectual Knowledge ◽  
Imperial State

This article argues that Chinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced the institutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan. Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth-century Japan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including the introduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the use of transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge apparatuses. Through a sociology of knowledge approach, this article analyzes the links between earlier private-sphere Chinese medical practice, late Chinese imperial state ideas on medicine, and early modern state-led medical Westernization in Japan. The article highlights the role of trans-Asian Confucian ideas, networks and practices in mediating new approaches to technical innovation, including those from the West. The position for Confucianism argued in the article thereby resonates with Bayly’s idea of the early modern information order of India, and Pollock and Ricci’s ideas on cosmopolitan discursive spaces in other parts of Asia.

‘Chinese’ hegemony from a Korean shi perspective: aretocracy in the early modern East Asia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inho Choi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Order ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Normative Influence ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Chinese State

Abstract The study of pre-modern Chinese hegemony is crucial for both theorizing hegemony and envisioning a new global order. I argue the pre-modern Chinese hegemony was a reciprocal rule of virtue, or aretocracy, driven by the transnational sociocultural elites shi. In contrast to the prevailing models of Chinese hegemony, the Early Modern East Asia was not dominated by the unilateral normative influence of the Chinese state. The Chinese and non-Chinese shi as non-statist sociocultural elites co-produced, through their shared civilizational heritage, a hegemonic order in which they had to show excellence in civil virtues to wield legitimate authority. In particular, the Ming and Chosŏn shi developed a tradition of envoy poetry exchanges as a medium for co-constructing Chinese hegemony as aretocracy. The remarkable role of excellent ethos for world order making in Early Modern East Asia compels us to re-imagine how we conduct our global governance.

Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
Ceramic Vessels ◽  
The Look ◽  
Visual Cultures

Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this trade picture. Throughout the book, multi-part trade structures are excavated; the presence of European powers within the Asian trade nexus features as part of this narrative. Visual goods are highlighted, including lacquerwares, paintings, prints, musical instruments, textiles, ivory sculptures, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian ceramic vessels. These essays underscore the significance of Asian industries producing multiples, and the rhetorical charge of these goods, shifting in meaning as they move. Everyday commodities are treated as well; for example, the trans-Pacific trade in contraband mercury, used in silver refinement, is spelled out in detail. Building reverberations between merchant networks, trade goods, and the look of the objects themselves, this richly-illustrated book brings to light the Asian trade engine powering the early modern visual cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the American colonies, and Europe.

The Curious Journey of “Copyright” in East Asia

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-61
Author(s):  
Fei-Hsien Wang
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
East Asian ◽  
English Word ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
National Survival ◽  
The Right ◽  
Chinese Term

This chapter traces how the English word “copyright” became the Chinese term “banquan,” which literally means “the right to printing blocks.” It examines the negotiations and struggles of the early East Asian promoters and practitioners of copyright with the understandings of ownership of the book. The chapter looks at the use of words the early promoters associated with the notion of copyright. It discusses the practices they and their contemporaries undertook in the name of “the right to printing blocks” as a crucial subject of inquiry. The early promoters of copyright in East Asia portrayed copyright as a progressive universal doctrine completely alien to the local culture, one that, for the sake of national survival, needed to be transplanted artificially. The chapter also points out the “new” ways contemporaries used to declare banquan ownership that were derived from some early modern practices whereby profits were secured from printed books.

Domestic Politics and Nationalism in East Asian Security

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall L. Schweller
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Primary Factor ◽  
Security Policies ◽  
Asian Security ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
East Asian Security ◽  
The Rise Of China

This chapter works within the neoclassical realist tradition to examine the role of nationalism in foreign policymaking and the implication for the international politics of East Asia. Whereas the rise of China is an important structural factor necessarily affecting states' security policies throughout East Asia, China's rise does not determine these states' security policies. Rather, domestic politics ultimately determines how a state responds to changing security circumstances. In particular, nationalism can drive states to adopt more belligerent policies than warranted by their strategic environment, thus contributing to heightened bilateral conflicts and regional tension. The chapter argues that, in contemporary East Asia, rising China sets the context of policymaking, but domestic politics has been the primary factor shaping policy.

«Ultimamente con non poco travaglio alla Cocincina si videro»: viaggiatori gesuiti in Asia orientale nel secolo XVII

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-262
Author(s):  
Carlo Pelliccia
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Mutual Knowledge ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This article examines one section, Regno della Cocincina of the unpublished manuscript Ragguaglio della missione del Giappone (17th century) preserved in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI). I analyze the historical-political, socio-cultural, ethnographic, and geographical information conveyed by the report’s author. The text explores the role of the Society of Jesus’ correspondence in the phenomenon of cultural interaction and mutual knowledge between Europe and East Asia in the early modern era.

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