Benjamin A Elman
Biographic Data
| ID | 324235 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin A Elman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin A |
| FAMILY NAME | Elman |
| SIGNATURE | ELMAN B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900
The 'Global' and the 'Local' in Early Modern and Modern East Asia
The “Global” and the “Local” in Early Modern and Modern East Asia presents a unique set of historical perspectives by scholars from two important universities in the East Asian region—The University of Tokyo (Tōdai) and Fudan University, along with East Asian Studies scholars from Princeton University. Two of the essays address the international leanings in the histories of their respective departments in Todai and Fudan. The rest of the essays s…
The Cambridge History of China
Volume 9, Part 2 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes which together explore the political, social and economic developments of the Ch'ing Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prior to the arrival of Western military power. Across fifteen chapters, a team of leading historians explore how the eighteenth century's greatest contiguous empire in terms of geographical size, population, wealth, cultural prod…
Early Modern or Late Imperial? The Crisis of Classical Philology in Eighteenth- Century China
World Philology
Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and time periods in which it has been practiced and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is essential to human understanding.
Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology
Antiquarianism, language, and medical philology
This volume rethinks the role of the Sino-Japanese medical classics during the early modern period in light of antiquarianism, languages, and medical philology. Philology in particular allows the authors to address the changing meaning of the same term, which often reflected well-known metaphors in the source language that were transposed to the target language. Each essay touches on the reliability of received medical texts and their modern fate
Breaking with the Past
Reviewed by: Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China by Hans van de Ven Benjamin A. Elman Hans van de Ven. Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 396 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-13738-6, $50.00 (cloth). Hans van de Ven has performed a great service as a China historian by accepting the invitation …
Optical and Cognitive Illusions
The “rise of China” narrative in the twenty-first century is replacing the long-standing “rise of Japan” story line of the twentieth century. This article examines the role of wars in redirecting public opinion and, in particular, the effect of the 1894–95 war in refracting Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) reforms since the 1860s into “failures” and contemporary Meiji (1868–1912) reforms into “successes.” To grasp this dramatic reversal, we need new inte…
Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919
The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why Ea…
A Society in Motion
Late imperial Chinese were on the move from 1400 to 1900. They regularly traveled along the waterways and roads of their extensive empire, moving up from villages to counties, townships, prefectures, provinces, and the capital. Why? To take the dynasty-wide civil service examinations! Once licensed by a local qualifying examination, millions of candidates traveled far and wide to take higher examinations. They relied on the fairness of the testin…
Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China
During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men gathered by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class bas…
The East Asian Challenge for Democracy
The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress (and regress)? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The res…
Early Modern or Late Imperial Philology? The Crisis of Classical Learning in Eighteenth Century China
The discourses of classical scholars during the eighteenth century reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. By making precise scholarship the source of acceptable knowledge, Qing classicists contended that the legitimate reach of ancient ideals should be reevaluated through comparative delineation of the textual sources from which all such knowledge derived. This turn to empirically based…
The Failures of Contemporary Chinese Intellectual History
This article explores the failures of modern approaches to Chinese thought among both Euro-American and Chinese scholars of classical learning in China. What to date has been called Chinese intellectual history usually has been a less technical version of the history of Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism. Despite important exceptions, there have been many subjective elements in the prioritizing of Confucian philosophy in Chinese intellec…
Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology
Leprosy in China
One Classic and Two Classical Traditions
One Classic and Two Classical Traditions:The Recovery and Transmission of a Lost Edition of the Analects Benjamin A. Elman (bio) IN both China and Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the turn away from the interpretive commentarial approach to classical texts associated with the Song and Ming traditions of Confucian scholarship led to an emphasis on textual criticism and philological approaches. It also spurred interest in older, pr…
Sinophiles and Sinophobes in Tokugawa Japan
This article first reviews the political, economic, and cultural context within which Japanese during the Tokugawa era (1600–1866) mastered Kanbun 漢文 as their elite lingua franca. Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges were based on prestigious classical Chinese texts imported from Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) China via the controlled Ningbo-Nagasaki trade and Kanbun texts sent in the other direction, from Japan back to China. The role of Japa…
Sinophiles and Sinophobes in Tokugawa Japan
This article first reviews the political, economic, and cultural context within which Japanese during the Tokugawa era (1600-1866) mastered Kanbun 漢 文 as their elite lingua franca. Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges were based on prestigious classical Chinese texts imported from Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China via the controlled Ningbo-Nagasaki trade and Kanbun texts sent in the other direction, from Japan back to China. The role of Jap…
Collecting and Classifying
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New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China
These essays collectively present new perspectives on the history of modem science in China since 1900. Fa-ti Fan describes how science under the Republic of China after 1911 exhibited a complex local and international character that straddled both imperialism and colonialism. Danian Hu focuses on the fate of relativity in the physics community in China after 1917. Zuoyue Wang hopes that a less nationalist political atmosphere in China will stimu…
A Cultural History of Modern Science in China
In A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom
On Their Own Terms
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms
Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China's Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure, 1865-1895
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese, Western, and Japanese scholarship debated the success or failure of the government schools and regional arsenals established between 1865 and 1895 to reform Qing China (1644-1911). For example, Quan Hansheng contended in 1954 that the Qing failure to industrialize after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the major reason why China lacked modern weapons during the Sino-Japanese War. This position has been built on…
Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction via Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China
Most previous scholarship about the civil service examination system in imperial China has emphasized the degree of social mobility such examinations permitted in a premodern society. In the same vein, historians have evaluated the examination process in late imperial China from the perspective of the modernization process in modern Europe and the United States. They have thereby successfully exposed the failure of the Confucian system to advance…
Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China's Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure, 1865-1895
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese, Western, and Japanese scholarship debated the success or failure of the government schools and regional arsenals established between 1865 and 1895 to reform Qing China (1644-1911). For example, Quan Hansheng contended in 1954 that the Qing failure to industrialize after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the major reason why China lacked modern weapons during the Sino-Japanese War. This position has been built on…
Imperial Politics and Confucian Societies in Late Imperial China
China began the transition from an aristocratic society to a bureaucratic one more than 600 years before Europe. From a society in which social position and political power were based largely on kinship credentials, China was transformed into a meritocracy in which social prestige and political appointment depended for the most part on written classical examinations to establish legitimate academic credentials. What took more than three centuries…
New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China
These essays collectively present new perspectives on the history of modem science in China since 1900. Fa-ti Fan describes how science under the Republic of China after 1911 exhibited a complex local and international character that straddled both imperialism and colonialism. Danian Hu focuses on the fate of relativity in the physics community in China after 1917. Zuoyue Wang hopes that a less nationalist political atmosphere in China will stimu…
Optical and Cognitive Illusions
The “rise of China” narrative in the twenty-first century is replacing the long-standing “rise of Japan” story line of the twentieth century. This article examines the role of wars in redirecting public opinion and, in particular, the effect of the 1894–95 war in refracting Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) reforms since the 1860s into “failures” and contemporary Meiji (1868–1912) reforms into “successes.” To grasp this dramatic reversal, we need new inte…
Education in Sung China
Nietzsche and Buddhism
L'A. pointe, derriere la difference entre nihilisme nietzscheen et nihilisme bouddhiste du vide, quelques affinites entre N. et le bouddhisme: identite personnelle, moralite, eternel retour... La relation Nietzsche-Schopenhauer est, a cet egard, plus particulierement abordee
From Value to Fact
The emergence of phonology as a key discipline during the Ch'ing dynasty was closely tied to the triumph of precise empirical techniques of philological analysis, championed by participants in the evidential research movement, over Neo-Confucian moral philosophy. In phonology, such applications stressed the reconstruction of archaic finals through an examination of ancient rhyme schemes. In the late eighteenth century, significant steps were take…
Wang Kuo-Wei and Lu Hsün
Geographical Research in the Ming-Ch'ing Period
From Value to Fact
The emergence of phonology as a key discipline during the Ch'ing dynasty was closely tied to the triumph of precise empirical techniques of philological analysis, championed by participants in the evidential research movement, over Neo-Confucian moral philosophy. In phonology, such applications stressed the reconstruction of archaic finals through an examination of ancient rhyme schemes. In the late eighteenth century, significant steps were take…
Philosophy (I-Li) Versus Philology (K'Ao-Cheng)
Nietzsche and Buddhism
L'A. pointe, derriere la difference entre nihilisme nietzscheen et nihilisme bouddhiste du vide, quelques affinites entre N. et le bouddhisme: identite personnelle, moralite, eternel retour... La relation Nietzsche-Schopenhauer est, a cet egard, plus particulierement abordee
From Philosophy to Philology
The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology . John Henderson
Scholarship and Politics
Vol. 7, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1986 SCHOLARSHIP AND POLITICS: CHUANG TS'UN-YU AND THE RISE OF THE CH'ANG-CHOU NEW TEXT SCHOOL IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA Benjamin A. Elman* Introduction During the Ch'ien-lung emperor's reign (1736-1795), Han Learning (Han-hsueh), was the most heralded and at the same time most opposed school of Confucian learning. Confucian literati routinely associated Han Learning with the ascendency of evidential research (k…
The 1898 Reforms Revisited
Vol. 8, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1987 THE 1898 REFORMS REVISITED A Review ofLuke S. K. Kwong's A Mosaic ofthe Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of1898* Tang Zhijun and Benjamin Elman The 1898 Reform Movement has long been accepted as a fairly wellresearched event in late imperial Chinese history. Historians initially explored the writings of many of the participants in the "hundred days of reform" and frequently came to the co…
The Relevance of Sung Learning in the Late Ch'ing
Vol. 9, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1988 THE RELEVANCE OF SUNG LEARNING IN THE LATE CH'ING: WEI YUAN AND THE HUANG-CH'AO CHING-SHIH WEN-PIEN1 Benjamin A. Elman In the early nineteenth century, advocates of Sung Learning [Sunghsueh ], champions of Han Learning [Han-hsueh], and proponents of New Text studies [chin-wen-hsueh] were all united in their recognition that construction of a statecraft ideology was necessary within late imperial poli…
Ch'ing Dynasty Education Materials in the Department of Special Collections, Ucla
Vol. 10, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1989 CH'ING DYNASTY EDUCATION MATERIALS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UCLA Benjamin Elman Two groups of rare materials of interest to Ch'ing social and intellectual historians are now available in the Han Yii-shan Collection in the Department of Special Collections as part of the UCLA University Research Library. The collection at UCLA enables scholars to get at materials that are for the mos…
Imperial Politics and Confucian Societies in Late Imperial China
China began the transition from an aristocratic society to a bureaucratic one more than 600 years before Europe. From a society in which social position and political power were based largely on kinship credentials, China was transformed into a meritocracy in which social prestige and political appointment depended for the most part on written classical examinations to establish legitimate academic credentials. What took more than three centuries…
Man and Nature in The Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-chih
Education in Sung China
Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction via Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China
Most previous scholarship about the civil service examination system in imperial China has emphasized the degree of social mobility such examinations permitted in a premodern society. In the same vein, historians have evaluated the examination process in late imperial China from the perspective of the modernization process in modern Europe and the United States. They have thereby successfully exposed the failure of the Confucian system to advance…
Classicism, Politics, and Kinship
The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit
Where Is King Ch'Eng
L'ideologie imperiale Ming s'abrite derriere un deguisement confucianiste qui masque un Etat autocratique mais non encore totalitaire. Ainsi, l'Empire Ming reussit a faire accepter les formes militaires et bureaucratiques sur lesquels il etait fonde. L'A. cherche a identifier les usages culturels et politiques de cette ideologie. La coherence de cette ideologie imperiale trouve son origine dans la reproduction de la philosophie de l'enseignement …
Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China
Classicism, Politics and Kinship
Scholars have generally agreed that the story of New Text Confucianism in late imperial China centers on K'ang Yu-wei and the late nineteenth-century political reforms he took credit for after fleeing China in 1898. In this important new book, Benjamin Elman explores the roots of New Text ideas and shows that Confucians first dissented from the orthodox raison d'etre of the imperial state over three hundred years earlier, during the transition fr…
Afterword
Changes in Confucian Civil Service Examinations from the Ming to the Ch'ing Dynasty
Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900
This comprehensive volume integrates the history of late imperial China with the history of education over three centuries, revealing the significance of education in Chinese social, political, and intellectual life. A collaboration between social and intellectual historians, these fifteen essays provide the most wide-ranging study in English on China's education in the centuries before the modern revolution
Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy
The Rise of Early Modern Science
Chinese history and philosophy (51 works) · History (49 works) · China (41 works) · Political science (40 works) · Law (34 works) · Ancient history (30 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Archaeology (24 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Politics (18 works)