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A volume with views of Chinese historians on the history of Western historiography

Herodotus, the founder of Western historiography, and Sima Qian, the greatest historian of ancient China

“History of Western historiography: The views from China—Introduction

Q. Edward Wang

Pages 73-78 | Published online: 04 May 2020

This issue presents a group of articles written by Chinese scholars on the tradition and transformation of Western historiography. Perhaps somewhat surprising to some of our readers, the subject is an important subfield in the garden of history in China. The course of “History of Western Historiography” or “History of Foreign Historiography,” for instance, is regularly taught to history majors on many college campuses. There are also specialists on the history faculty at several key universities who research and publish around the area and supervise students at both M.A. and Ph.D. levels. In fact, the majority of important historical texts constituting the tradition of European historiography from the ancient to modern periods have already had Chinese translations, readily available to Chinese readers and students. In more recent years, notable studies of the European/Western tradition of historical writing, its modern transformation and contemporary developments by scholars in the Western academe have also been rendered into Chinese. As a result, Chinese history students are familiar with major scholars in the field, such as Lynn Hunt, Peter Burke, Georg Iggers (1926–2017), Donald Kelley, Hayden White (1928–2018) and Frank Ankersmit. Indeed, in China’s historical circles, these scholars’ reputation rivals that of well-known China scholars in the West, such as Philip Kuhn (1933–2016), Frederic Wakeman (1937–2006), Jonathan Spence, Susan Mann, Timothy Brook and Benjamin Elman. And this trend of interest, in my opinion, would probably continue into the future. In January 2019, the Chinese government established the Chinese Academy of History (中國歷史研究院 Zhongguo lish yanjiuyuan) under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中國社會科學院 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan). Of its six departments, there is an Institute of Historical Theory (歷史理論研究所 lishi lilun yanjiusuo). Its task, needless to say, is to continue exalting the importance of Marxism as the theory in guiding historical research in China. Yet in order to promote the study of Marxism, which originated from the West, it is necessary for Chinese scholars to enhance their knowledge of Western historiography as well as to compare Marxist theory with other theoretical constellations advanced by Western scholars in both Marx’s times and more recent decades.

Looking around the world, it is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon that the country’s history students and teachers accord substantial attention to Western academic cultures and historiographies. In his influential work, Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty, a prominent postcolonial theorist, has made the following observation:

This engagement with European thought is also called forth by the fact that today the so-called European intellectual tradition is the only one alive in the social science departments of most, if not all, modern universities.

As a result, Chakrabarty continues:

That European works as a silent referent in historical knowledge becomes obvious in a very ordinary way. … Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. … “They” [Western historians] produce their work in relative ignorance of non-Western histories, and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work.1

Indeed, not only do historians in the West feel unnecessary to reference the histories of the rest of the world in their writings, but they also feel, as it were, irrelevant to pay attention to how historians outside Euro-America think and study of their history, or the histories of Europe and America. Given the rise of global history, the situation of the former is rapidly changing in recent years—comparative history and historiography, large or small in scope, are becoming increasingly attractive to historians in the West and their counterparts around the world. But no significant improvement has been made on changing the latter, or the indifference of Western historians toward the works of their counterparts in non-Western regions and countries. To a degree, this is perhaps not entirely the fault of Western historians. Concerning scholarly publication, its circulation and translation, there has been an asymmetrical relationship in our world: “Many of the important works in history or related social science and humanistic disciplines are translated from English into non-Western languages, as are important French and German books and articles. But very few Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Farsi, Turkish, or Arabic writings have been translated into English.”2 In other words, many valuable studies of Western history are inaccessible to Western historians as they are untranslated and unavailable. This, of course, also circulates back to the same question addressed earlier: while language proficiency is usually required for a proper training in history, many historians of Britain or the US, for instance, don’t feel the urge to learn a language other than English, which is in stark contrast to their counterparts in other countries and even their colleagues specializing in non-Western history.

All this accounts for the principal reason for editing this issue, which is to showcase some selected studies of Chinese historians on the history of Western historiography. Before moving on to discussing these articles, I think a brief review of the origin and development of Western historiography in China is in order. In China’s long tradition of historical writing, which spanned about two millennia before modern times, it was customarily for historians to record about their neighbors in the surround. Their approach to the writing, however, was ethnocentric, in that they regarded China as the “Middle Kingdom” that radiated its influence, or civilization, outwardly to the neighboring regions. Throughout the period of imperial China, as Ge Zhaoguang, a noted intellectual historian and a frequent contributor to this journal, observes, the idea of “the central empire as the principal, the peripheries as subordinates,” which was formulated by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE) in his magisterial Records of the Grand Historian (史記Shiji), was the guiding principle for Chinese historians to write about the relationship between “China,” or whatever a regime that occupied the Central Plain in a given time, and its relation to and position in the known world. During the long period, Ge avers, there emerged three opportunities for Chinese historians to develop a different worldview, but it was not until the end of the nineteenth century, after a series of defeats the then ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911) suffered in battling Western powers, that a fundamentally new approach was adopted. This approach was characterized by the full recognition of the development of a multipolar world in modern times, of which China was a part but not the center. As such, it became necessary for Chinese historians to learn and write about the much-expanded world beyond the Sinitic sphere.3

In this newly acquired worldview, the West figured centrally, for it was largely due to the Western powers’ challenge that sufficiently pained Chinese to realize their modern woes as a nation. And from the mid-nineteenth century throughout the twentieth century, this Western-centered worldview persisted, despite the drastic changes happening in the political arena. So much so that in the minds of Chinese students today, “History of Western historiography” is by and large equivalent to “History of foreign historiography.” And, indeed, if one looks and compares the syllabi of the two courses taught in China’s colleges, one often finds that there are substantial overlaps between them, even though the latter is supposed also to cover historical practices in Asia, Africa, South Asia and Latin America. In fact, as shown in Zhang Guangzhi’s article in this issue, the course of “History of Western Historiography” is taught more frequently than its counterpart, “History of Foreign Historiography,” in Chinese universities. Zhang, a seasoned scholar who has witnessed as well as participated in the expansion of the field over the past several decades, also chooses to concentrate his discussion on the teaching of “History of Western Historiography” in the PRC.

As an academic field, the development of the history of Western historiography began only a half century ago in China. Yet from the late nineteenth century, some Chinese historians had already taken an interest in learning about how history was written in the West. In his Pufa zhanji (普法戰紀 Report on the Franco-Prussian War), for example, Wang Tao (王韜 1828–1897), who had gotten an opportunity of sojourning in Scotland while assisting James Legge’s (1815–1897) translation of Chinese Classics, not only recorded the War that led to the German unification, but he also experimented with new ways in constructing his narrative by drawing elements from Western historiography. From the early twentieth century, buoyed by Liang Qichao’s (梁啟超 1873–1929) call for making a “historiographical revolution” (史界革命 Shijie geming), more attempts were made to translate works of Euro-American historians on the nature and methodology of history. He Bingsong’s (何炳松1890–1946) translation of James Harvey Robinson’s New History and Li Sichun’s (李思純 1893–1960) rendition of Charles-Victor Langlois’ and Charles Seignobos’ Introduction aux études historiques were well-known examples at the time.4

Both He and Li were returned students from the West. For the advance of Western historiography as an academic field in China, students with an educational background similar to theirs were forerunners. But the opportunity to formally introduce it into the college curriculum did not occur until 1961, after China, now ruled by the Communists, suffered from the disastrous Great Leap Forward Movement launched by Mao Zedong (1893–1976) in 1958. Perhaps for assuaging the pain and suffering of the Chinese people (the educated Chinese had fared worse because they were severely chastised in the Anti-Rightists Campaign waged by Mao, almost simultaneously as he commanded the Great Leap Forward) had experienced in the previous decade, the Chinese government introduced several projects in the 1960s that permitted, if also covertly encouraged, Chinese historians to find alternatives to the Soviet model of historiography, for, by that time, the honeymoon between Communist China and the Soviet Union had ended. It is perhaps worth noting that in his call for taking the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s hope was for China to catch up with the UK and US, not the USSR. In any case, what transpired was that a group of Western-educated Chinese historians was invited to a meeting held in Shanghai in 1961 by the Department of Education, discussing the likelihood of teaching the course on “History of Western Historiography” and composing a textbook. Motivated by the meeting, some of them also published journal articles in its wake on the need for developing the course and gaining knowledge on Western historiography for history students in China.5

Due to the interruption of the Cultural Revolution, which took place only a few years after but lasted for a decade, Western historiography as a bourgeoning field failed to take root in the 1960s. It was not until the 1980s that its research and teaching were resumed. By the time, most scholars who had received education in the West were already in the retirement age—some had even already passed away. Yet the survivors cherished the hard-earned opportunity and renewed their enthusiasm for plowing and establishing the field. Again, as covered by Zhang Guangzhi’s article, some of the pioneering studies, including valuable translations, of Western historiography were produced by these Western-educated historians from the period, such as Geng Danru (耿淡如 1897–1975), Wu Yujin (吳于廑 1913–1993), Guo Shengming (郭聖銘 1915–2006) and Zhang Zhilian (張芝聯 1918–2007), whose works laid the foundation for historians of younger generations to continue expanding the field to this day.

The importance of the aforementioned scholars, too, is shown that most of the articles sampled here were written by their students and/or students of their students. Wu Xiaoqun, the author of the first article, for instance, worked with Zhang Guangzhi in earning her Ph.D. degree, and Zhang had been a graduate student of Geng Danru during the Cultural Revolution. Taking the recent disputes on Herodotus regarding his “father of history” status as a point of departure, Wu, a professor of history now at Fudan University in Shanghai where Geng and Zhang both worked before, offers her defense of Herodotus as a bona fide historian. She acknowledges the value of recent scholarship on Herodotus, as it offers a much more in-depth analysis of the cultural “context” in which Herodotus worked on his Histories. Meanwhile, she emphasizes that while he inherited the genre of Historia from earlier Greek writers, Herodotus made a great improvement on it in his writing. “Although the “historia” method was not his original invention,” Wu argues, “nor did he elevate it into a theoretical or systematic proof, he [Herodotus] did nonetheless make it the most important method of narration. Since Herodotus, everyone who studies past events in human history and everyone who studies changes in society all add their own judgments and interpretations.” By and large, Wu champions the view advanced by such historians as Arnaldo Momigliano (1908–1987) that modern historiography indeed had “classical foundations.” In her opinion, recent studies of Herodotus in the West have overemphasized Herodotus’ cultural inheritance while overlooking the paradigmatic influence of the Histories in developing European historiography.

Li Longguo contributes the second article to this issue on the transition from ancient to medieval historiography in Europe. A specialist in the history of the Middle Ages at Peking University, where Zhang Zhilian used to teach, Li has made an interesting observation of the transition. As shown by its title, “From ‘Walking’ to ‘Sitting’: Changes in the Practices of Western Historiography From Ancient to Medieval Times,” Li’s article compares the different research styles adopted by ancient and medieval historians. In ancient Greece, he writes, as exemplified by Herodotus and Thucydides, followed also by Xenophon, historical writing was mostly drawn on eyewitness experiences; those Greek historians usually collected information for their writings by personally traveling to the places where historical events had taken place. By comparison, Roman historians like Livy and Tacitus began to use materials already collected in the imperial library; they no longer “walked” as much as their Greek predecessors had. Then in the Middle Ages, historical records were mostly produced by Christian monks who tended to lead a solitary and sedentary life in the monastery. That is, they seldom “walked” to gather source materials but instead they “sat” in the library where they went through its source collections for their writing. This evolution of research style, Li opines, also unveiled a change in epistemology: ancient historians “walked” to locate the sources for ensuring their factuality whereas medieval historians believed that their religious faith could guarantee the truthfulness of their records.

The third article is written by Zhang Yibo, a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of Peking University. His research focuses on a key moment in the development of European historiography into the modern age. In the so-called “Age of Discovery” of European history, Zhang finds, the tradition of universal-history writing experienced a notable change—after discovering the Americas, European historians embarked on the task of expanding their horizons in perceiving the world. The multivolume Universal History, compiled chiefly by George Sale (1697–1736) but assisted by many others, was a prime example. Appearing in the mid-eighteenth century, Zhang finds, this massive book of sixty-five volumes contained many fresh ideas that were unseen before. However, no sooner had it become a commercial success than it received harsh criticisms, for, in the eyes of the historians who then already aspired to turn history into a science, such as August Ludwig Schözer (1735–1809), Sale’s work was a mere assemblage of unscrutinized materials, lacking the commitment for ascertaining their credibility. Consequently, in Zhang’s words, “the kind of encyclopedic history writing model represented by Sale’s Universal History was a tradition that gradually disappeared following the professionalization and scientificization of historiography.” His study thus offers a specific case that documented the transformation of modern European historiography.

In developing scientific historiography in Europe, German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) evidently played an instrumental role, well recognized by many experts in the West. Over the centuries, a great number of works have been published on Ranke and his influence as the “father of modern scientific historiography.” In his article, “Equal Emphasis on ‘Research’ and ‘Representation’: A New Analysis of Ranke’s Debut Work,” Lü Heying, who teaches at Sichuan University, offers a close-up examination of Ranke’s two Prefaces to the First Edition of the Geschichten der Romanischen und Germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1515 (Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494–1514). The Prefaces are important because in which Ranke declared that while previous historians sought in history political idealism and moral didacticism, his writing of the book was merely for telling history “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” or “as how it actually was.” Engaging critically with some of the recent Western publications, such as that by J.D. Braw and Jörn Rüsen in History and Theory,6 Lü argues that for a better understanding Ranke’s well-known statement, one needs to conduct an in-depth reading and textual analysis of the two Prefaces as well as the appendix to the work, Zur Kritik Neuerer Geschichtschreiber (Criticisms of modern historians). He believes that all of them holistically as an organic system that addresses not only what Ranke desired to accomplish in his writing but also how he devised his research method and his style of presentation.

Li Hongtu, our fifth contributor, is a professor of European intellectual history at Fudan University where Lü Heying received his Ph.D. In recent years, Li has published extensively on the modern, postwar trends of intellectual history, centering around the works of Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006). In this article, he traces the origin of the history of ideas as defined and advanced by Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962) in the prewar period and proceeds to discuss the vicissitudes of its change from the second half of the twentieth century. He notes that the changes stemmed from a wide range of new interests among the practitioners. Due to the “linguistic turn,” intellectual historians developed a focus on context, rhetoric, actions, etc., whereas the growing influence of sociocultural history also prompted them to look into the relationship between ideas and social contexts. Last but not least, echoing the march of globalization, the “spatial turn” has now emerged in the field as well. As a result, Li believes, there is no decline of the history of ideas as a field, but historians have since expanded its boundary and enriched its research paradigms. He himself points out a few cases that call for historians, Western and Chinese alike, to note how the intellectual variances in China could help produce new and different understandings of certain well-received concepts in the field.

The sixth article is written by Huang Yanhong who, after obtaining his Ph.D. from Peking University, worked at the World History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for over a decade. He is now a professor of European history at Shanghai Normal University. Having commanded several European languages and translated a number of works from French, English and German into Chinese, Huang has also written extensively on modern historiography and intellectual history in Europe. In this article, he offers a detailed analysis of Pierre Nora’s “Lieux de Mémoire” concept and project and their international influence. His aim is to explore the transformation of historical consciousness and historical writing in postwar France. Nora’s introduction of the project, which incidentally has been translated into Chinese at present,7 according to Huang, reflected the changing intellectual milieu, which gave rise not only to New National History, but also to the idea of “presentism” (présentisme). As such, Huang maintains, while Nora’s project (as he himself admitted) was specific to France, it has far-reaching implications for contemporary historiography in both Europe and beyond.

Zhang Guangzhi, mentioned earlier, provides the seventh and last article for this issue. A professor emeritus of history at Fudan University, where he spent his entire career of over forty years, Zhang is a well-known expert on Western historiography in China. Over the decades, he has trained a number of students in the field, many of whom have also become established scholars (e.g., Wu Xiaoqun). In writing this review article, Zhang observes that the development of the Chinese study of Western historiography went through three major periods in the twentieth century and the progress in the third period, beginning from the late 1970s after China was ushered in the “Reform and Open-up” era, has been most impressive. And, as I point out at the beginning of this introduction, this trend of growth will likely continue in the years to come.

All in all, I believe, editing this issue can help our readers to see the other side of the recent and robust globalization of history writing—as historians in the West are searching for ways to expand their research horizons, their counterparts in the other hemisphere have also been working on enhancing their knowledge of Western history and historiography. In his thought-provoking work, Global Perspectives on Global History, Dominic Sachsenmaier, a noted global historian at the University of Göttingen who serves on our editorial board, observes sharply that for the future expansion of global history, it is necessary for Western historians to diversify their outlooks and augment their knowledge base. For “much of global history in Europe and North America,” he aptly notes, “remained more characterized by a rising interest in scholarship about the world rather than scholarship in the world” (italics original).8 While a rather small step, I hope this issue will make a contribution to reaching this goal by stimulating more interest among our readers in Chinese scholarship on the West and the world.

Notes

1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8, 28.

2 Georg Iggers, Q. Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (London: Routledge, 2017), 312.

3 Ge Zhaoguang, “The Evolution of World Consciousness in Traditional Chinese Historiography,” a keynote speech delivered at the international symposium on “The Conceptions of the World in Twentieth-century China” at the University of Göttingen on October 26, 2017. See also his What Is China? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History, trans. Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); and Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space and Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,” Journal of World History, 10, no. 2 (Sept. 1999), 285–305.

4 For a general discussion of the origin of modern Chinese historiography and its connection with the West, see Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

5 Besides Zhang Guangzhi’s article in this issue, Chen Heng also discusses the development of the history of Western historiography in his “Xifang shixueshi de dansheng, fazhan jiqi zai Zhongguo de jieshou” (The Origin and development of the history of Western historiography and its acceptance in China), Shixueshi yanjiu (Journal of historiography), 2 (2016), 56–66. For a discussion in English, see Qingjia Wang, “Western Historiography in the People's Republic of China (1949-to the present),” Storia della Storiografia [History of Historiography], 19 (1991), 23–46.

6 J. D. Braw, “Vision as Revision: Ranke and the Beginning of Modern History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007), 45–60.

7 Sun Jiang, a professor of history at Nanjing University, is in charge of the translation project, which is expected to complete in 2021.

8 Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. Also, Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00094633.2020.1743162?src=recsys

Introduction to “History of Western historiography: The views from China”, in Chinese Studies in History, Volume 53, Issue 2 (2020), Routledge

#china #west #historiography #herodotus

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