Control, Resistance, and World History in the 1950s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2021
In the 1950s, the increasing pressure of state control had a subtle effect on the position of world history within the general discipline of history in China. World historians remained a vulnerable minority among the community of historians. This chapter examines why many historians chose to dismiss the universalism espoused by China’s world historians as a “forced analogy.” For many historians, this universalism was an unwelcome ideological Marxist intrusion into historical studies; moreover, world historians who were working closely with the state were not considered serious scholars. Owing to such attitudes, many historians neglected the significant developments that took place in world-historical studies at the time. Among these, as the chapter contends, were various attempts by world historians to place China within a world-historical narrative that is based on a non-Eurocentric schema. The debates between Lin Zhichun and Tong Shuye on the Asiatic mode of production are indicative of this alternative perspective. These developments planted the seeds for the future development of the field.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.