Gertrude Stein once remarked that history must be understood not as the passage of time, but as the killing of centuries. This killing of centuries takes a very long time, she added, and she discerned the final death throes of the nineteenth century—a period in thrall to science and the idea of civilizational progress—in the middle of World War II. Being an American Jew in France, that denouement was realized, for her, by Hitler's Germany, in the moment that it fell to American industrial war making. But Stein's insight might as easily and as correctly be applied to the analysis of anticolonialism and the collapse of European rule in South and Southeast Asia. It was there, after all, that the ideology of a civilizational mission was revealed in all its hypocrisy. Such, at least, is the impression one gathers from reading the works of Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Leela Gandhi, and Benedict Anderson, each of whom offers a perspective on the history of empire's end, and the rise of revolutionary and nationalist independence movements in Asia. As counterpoint to their insistently particularizing narration of these movements, James C. Scott sketches a deep history of recurrent antistatism as the context in which European empires made their ill-fated claims to civilizational exceptionalism, and in which anarchism could emerge as a technics of ungovernability.

Just a century ago, in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson read for the first time a complete translation of “The Four Books” of the Chinese classics, copying many sentences from them in his “Journals.” Many of these quota-tions reappear in his later “Works”—and almost every volume contained one or two illustrative sayings taken from the Chinese classics. The greater part of these entries in his journals are in an appreciative tone, and his quotations from them in the “Essays” are mostly used to confirm his own beliefs.

The surviving private papers of Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs, 1863-1911, were deposited at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1971. They have been studied in part by a few scholars, including the present writer. Most of Hart's papers, private and official, were destroyed in the Boxer Revolution, when his house and office were burned, but his private diary, in 77 volumes, was saved from the general destruction by a 4th Assistant (B) of the Customs who carried it from the house in a black tin chest. Apart from the diary, the papers consist of loose materials, some 120 packages of private letters and miscellaneous printed Customs reports for the period 1900 through 1908.