Peter K Bol
Biographic Data
| ID | 1160078 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter K Bol |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter K |
| FAMILY NAME | Bol |
| SIGNATURE | BOL P K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1485-095X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Geographic Models in Chinese History
Advancing historical geography through the Chinese Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS)
Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Big Gods and big science: Further reflections on theory, data, and analysis
Our target article empirically tested the Big Gods Hypothesis which proposes that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) contributed to the evolution of socio-political complexity (SPC) in world history. We tested this hypothesis using a suite of measures of MSP, SPC, and other potential evolutionary drivers coded in Seshat: Global History Databank. Our analyses indicate that intensity of warfare and productivity of agriculture were …
Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600
As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. The…
Lü Zuqian's Compacts
Lü Zuqian's Compacts Peter Bol The compacts that Lü Zuqian wrote out for his students1 are interesting in their own right and for their differences with the better-known rules that Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) later prepared for his White Deer Grotto Academy (Bailudong shuyuan 白鹿洞書院). Lü and Zhu had a history going back to about 1160 and lasting until Lü's death in 1181. The translation that follows is meant in the first place to make Lü's work availabl…
Introduction to the Utilities
A variety of databases, tools and platforms have created the foundation for digital scholarship in Chinese studies. The creators of some open-access projects introduce their work below, but first I offer some notes on the kinds of utilities that make up the expanding digital universe
Introduction to the Special Issue
This issue of the Journal of Chinese History aims to take stock of the effects of “the digital” on the study of Chinese history. We are doing this through a combination of research articles whose authors have made extensive use of digital resources and technologies and a set of introductions to non-commercial, open-access utilities and tools that scholars have created to support research in a digital environment. These hardly exhaust the universe…
The Visualization and Analysis of Historical Space
A brief introduction to historical Geographic Information Systems and the creation of the China Historical GIS. Introductions are given to the CHGIS datasets covering 221 BCE to 1911 and the many GIS datasets on nineteenth and twentieth century China created under the leadership of the late G. William Skinner
An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank
This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about t…
‘This Culture of Ours’: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
How the Digital is Changing Research and Teaching on Asia
Tools built for scholarship in a digital environment allow us to take more information into account, to share it more broadly, and to analyze it with greater precision. But they also require mastering new skills and making conceptual leaps. The importance of the digital for Asian studies applies generally to the liberal arts as a whole. Digital advances offer us all opportunities for reaching a broader audience through online teaching
Neo, Confucianism and Local Society, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century: A Case Study
Wm. Theodore de Bary: August 9, 1919–July 14, 2017
Wm. Theodore de BaryAugust 9, 1919–July 14, 2017 Peter K. Bol Wm. T. de Bary passed away in 2017 in his ninety-eighth year. He was one of the several academic leaders of the post-World War II generation who worked to establish East Asian studies in the United States and in particular the East Asian humanities. Through his own scholarship, his collaboration with Wing-tsit Chan, and his advising of graduate students he largely made the field of Neo…
Dingxin Zhao. The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History
Dingxin Zhao has written a work of Weberian historical sociology that combines original quantitative research on early China (antiquity into the first century b.c.e.) and a synthesis of the secondary literature on later periods. Zhao says (xi) that he was inspired by but ultimately rejected Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng’s theory of China as an “ultra-stable structure” (Xingsheng yu weiji: Lun Zhongguo fengjian shehui de chaowending jiegou [1988]).…
Mapping China's History
Exploring the Propositions in Maps: The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136
Exploring the Propositions in Maps:The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136 Peter K. Bol The Yuji tu 禹跡圖 (Fig. 1) that was engraved into stone in 1136 has become one of the most famous maps in China's cartographic history.1 It has been the subject of studies by many scholars of historical geography and cartography. In part this has been because it seems to be on the way to becoming a modern map: It is the earliest extant national map that not only appea…
Benjamin A. Elman. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China
The civil service examination system of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, the subject of this book, began in the Tang (618–907) as a means of recruiting well-born men for court office by testing poetic skill or memorization of the classics. In the late tenth century the Song dynasty (960–1279) expanded the exam system to recruit large numbers of civil officials. Reformers objected: this tested neither important ideas nor admini…
On Shao Yong’s Method for Observing Things
Shao Yong's "Inner Chapters on Observing Things" develops a method for understanding the unity of heaven and man, tracing the decline of civilization from antiquity, and determining how the present can return to the ideal socio-political order of antiquity. Shao's method is based on dividing any topic into fours aspects (for example, four Classics, four seasons, four kinds of rulers, etc.) and generating the systematic relations between these fou…
Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman (review)
Reviewed by: Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Peter Bol Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman. Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012. Pp. 223. …
On the Cyberinfrastructure for GIS-Enabled Historiography: Space–Time Integration in Geography and GIScience
From a historian's perspective, the use of GIScience and technology in the study of history holds the promise of an integration of historical and geographic modes of analysis. The national geographic information systems (GIS) that provide extensive coverage of changes in administrative structures over time provide important support for GIS-enabled historiography. Other parts of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to support collaborative research i…
GIS, prosopography and history
This study of the early spread of Neo-Confucianism as an intellectual–social movement in southern China in the twelfth century applies geospatial analysis to a prosopographical study of the social networks of leading figures. By analyzing the spatial distribution of intellectual networks, we see that Neo-Confucianism was most successful in areas that had strong traditions of investment in education but that were generally marginal to the commerci…
The Intellectual Persuasion in the Twenty-First Century: A Conversation With Peter K. Bol
Interviewer’s Note: Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. A leading scholar in the field of Chinese intellectual history, the much-published Professor Bol has long been an active figure in academic conferences and research collaborations. Professor Bol’s influential works on Neo-Confucianism, especially the monograph, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T…
The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (review)
Reviewed by: The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties Peter Bol Timothy Brook. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 336. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN 9780674046023. The Troubled Empire is Timothy Brook’s contribution to the “History of Imperial China” series, of which he is the general editor. The series successfully fills the space between one-volume textboo…
The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou
lAW HY did Chinese literati begin to write history? And what does this tell us about Chinese history? For historians the local history in a Chinese context refers in the first place to the local gazetteer, a rather standardized compendium of information about an administrative unit: the prefecture, county, canton or town. The gazetteer is a record of those the central government appointed to administer the area, as prefectural administrators and …
Seeking Common Ground: Han Literati Under Jurchen Rule
Looking to Wang Shizhen: Hu Yinglin (1551–1602) and Late-Ming Alternatives to Neo-Confucian Learning
Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), from Lanxi county in Jinhua prefecture, gained a reputation in his own lifetime as a literary man and erudite scholar. Hu is of interest in his own right—for a series of rather bibliographic studies of literature and thought—but here I shall ask what his case can tell us about how some intellectuals responded to intellectual uncertainty in the late sixteenth century. Hu was a protégé of Wang Shizhen (1526–1590). I assume t…
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Mapping China's History
Exploring the Propositions in Maps: The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136
Exploring the Propositions in Maps:The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136 Peter K. Bol The Yuji tu 禹跡圖 (Fig. 1) that was engraved into stone in 1136 has become one of the most famous maps in China's cartographic history.1 It has been the subject of studies by many scholars of historical geography and cartography. In part this has been because it seems to be on the way to becoming a modern map: It is the earliest extant national map that not only appea…
On the Cyberinfrastructure for GIS-Enabled Historiography: Space–Time Integration in Geography and GIScience
From a historian's perspective, the use of GIScience and technology in the study of history holds the promise of an integration of historical and geographic modes of analysis. The national geographic information systems (GIS) that provide extensive coverage of changes in administrative structures over time provide important support for GIS-enabled historiography. Other parts of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to support collaborative research i…
Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions Under The Jurchen-Chin Dynasty
Seeking Common Ground: Han Literati Under Jurchen Rule
Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching
The I Ching , or Book of Changes, has been one of the two or three most influential books in the Chinese canon. It has been used by people on all levels of society, both as a method of divination and as a source of essential ideas about the nature of heaven, earth, and humankind. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sung dynasty literati turned to it for guidance in their fundamental reworking of the classical traditions. This book explores…
Li Ao: Buddhist, Taoist, or Neo-Confucian?
Li Ao and history Li Ao and Zen Li Ao and friends the Fu-hsing shu of Li Ao understanding Li Ao - a historical approach. Appendix: Li Ao's date of birth and the date of the Fu-hsing shu.
THREE Government, Society, and State: On the Political Visions of Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih
Learning for One's Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought
Well known as a scholar of Asian culture, de Bary examines the concepts of self-understanding and self-cultivation in neo-Confucian thought from the 12th to the 17th centuries, in relation to the social, political, and scholarly roles of educated men in late imperial China. Rejecting the notion that
This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China
Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in T'ang China, 773-819
Center for the Study of Local History in Jinhua
The new Center for the Study of Local History at Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua is worth the attention of all scholars interested in local historical studies of this region. Students of the Ming period will know Jinhua as the home of such illustrious Ming figures as Song Lian, Wang Wei, Zhang Mao, Cheng Wende, Hu Yinglin, and Li Yu. John D. Langlois, Jr., John Dardess, Beverly Bossier, Yeh Wen-hsin, Ronald Knapp, Eugene Cooper, and I have w…
The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou
lAW HY did Chinese literati begin to write history? And what does this tell us about Chinese history? For historians the local history in a Chinese context refers in the first place to the local gazetteer, a rather standardized compendium of information about an administrative unit: the prefecture, county, canton or town. The gazetteer is a record of those the central government appointed to administer the area, as prefectural administrators and …
Neo-Confucianism and Local Society, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century: A Case Study
The "Localist Turn" and "Local Identity" in Later Imperial China
For many years historians of the middle period of Chinese history—roughly from mid-eighth century into the fifteenth century—found considerable appeal in the idea that the Tang-Song transition represented a transition from a feudal society dominated by great aristocratic clans to an emerging "modern" world of commerce, urbanization, social mobility, rationality, and technology. This search for the modern in China's past, which assumed that Europe…
Looking to Wang Shizhen: Hu Yinglin (1551–1602) and Late-Ming Alternatives to Neo-Confucian Learning
Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), from Lanxi county in Jinhua prefecture, gained a reputation in his own lifetime as a literary man and erudite scholar. Hu is of interest in his own right—for a series of rather bibliographic studies of literature and thought—but here I shall ask what his case can tell us about how some intellectuals responded to intellectual uncertainty in the late sixteenth century. Hu was a protégé of Wang Shizhen (1526–1590). I assume t…
Neo-Confucianism in History
Neo-Confucianism in History
The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (review)
Reviewed by: The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties Peter Bol Timothy Brook. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 336. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN 9780674046023. The Troubled Empire is Timothy Brook’s contribution to the “History of Imperial China” series, of which he is the general editor. The series successfully fills the space between one-volume textboo…
GIS, prosopography and history
This study of the early spread of Neo-Confucianism as an intellectual–social movement in southern China in the twelfth century applies geospatial analysis to a prosopographical study of the social networks of leading figures. By analyzing the spatial distribution of intellectual networks, we see that Neo-Confucianism was most successful in areas that had strong traditions of investment in education but that were generally marginal to the commerci…
The Intellectual Persuasion in the Twenty-First Century: A Conversation With Peter K. Bol
Interviewer’s Note: Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. A leading scholar in the field of Chinese intellectual history, the much-published Professor Bol has long been an active figure in academic conferences and research collaborations. Professor Bol’s influential works on Neo-Confucianism, especially the monograph, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T…
On Shao Yong’s Method for Observing Things
Shao Yong's "Inner Chapters on Observing Things" develops a method for understanding the unity of heaven and man, tracing the decline of civilization from antiquity, and determining how the present can return to the ideal socio-political order of antiquity. Shao's method is based on dividing any topic into fours aspects (for example, four Classics, four seasons, four kinds of rulers, etc.) and generating the systematic relations between these fou…
Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman (review)
Reviewed by: Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Peter Bol Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman. Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012. Pp. 223. …
On the Cyberinfrastructure for GIS-Enabled Historiography: Space–Time Integration in Geography and GIScience
From a historian's perspective, the use of GIScience and technology in the study of history holds the promise of an integration of historical and geographic modes of analysis. The national geographic information systems (GIS) that provide extensive coverage of changes in administrative structures over time provide important support for GIS-enabled historiography. Other parts of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to support collaborative research i…
Benjamin A. Elman. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China
The civil service examination system of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, the subject of this book, began in the Tang (618–907) as a means of recruiting well-born men for court office by testing poetic skill or memorization of the classics. In the late tenth century the Song dynasty (960–1279) expanded the exam system to recruit large numbers of civil officials. Reformers objected: this tested neither important ideas nor admini…
Mapping China's History
Exploring the Propositions in Maps: The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136
Exploring the Propositions in Maps:The Case of the 'Yuji tu' of 1136 Peter K. Bol The Yuji tu 禹跡圖 (Fig. 1) that was engraved into stone in 1136 has become one of the most famous maps in China's cartographic history.1 It has been the subject of studies by many scholars of historical geography and cartography. In part this has been because it seems to be on the way to becoming a modern map: It is the earliest extant national map that not only appea…
Neo, Confucianism and Local Society, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century: A Case Study
Chinese history and philosophy (29 works) · History (27 works) · China (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · History (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Art (12 works)