German History of Chinese Globalization

Jürgen Osterhammel is one of those scholars whose writing seems to gain momentum the longer he works on a subject.  This summer, his latest tome, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, was omnipresent in book stores around Germany.  It looked like a promising read especially ebcause Osterhammel is described as an historian who writes within the context of globalization, that is to say that his 19^th century would be a global one, not just a cross Rhine struggle between Germany and France.

But I was already schlepping one of Osterhammel’s earlier books in my suitcase, and some sense of middle aged decorum pressed upon me that I ought to finish this book before buying the next—blame it on the financial crisis.

Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (1998) is a superb book, a wonder and a joy to read. When I first came across it, I was delighted that someone had written vast scholarly work on how Europeans described China.  Osterhammel works through all the major sources, French and English to be sure, the Spanish and Portuguese accounts are integrated through translations, and the whole thing from a German perspective, just to give you a sense of how all these travel writings and anthropological theories were integrated into German thought.  A masterful work, to reviewed and mined for footnotes. 

But that was just the start, Osterhammel has an earlier work on China that covers a much wider sweep: China und die Weltgesellschaft (1989).  This earlier book tries to accomplish many things: it is in part a history of China, an account of modernization theory and a history of European engagement. It tries to write Chinese history as well as the historiography of European accounts of China.  The two levels get a little tangled up, so that Osterhammel takes seriously the many accounts of China as a tyrannical Empire.  Old tropes such as “Asiatic despoticism” appear along side more modern statistical accounts of rural development.  In other words, Osterhammel treats all writing on China as source material.  The second book, Die Entzauberung Asiens, corrects this tendency by providing an intellectual history of how Europeans envisioned China.  Die Entzauberung is more conscious of how metaphors and discourses shape knowledge-claims, and in that sense it is a much more valuable to book for literary scholars.  But read them all, because Osterhammel has a lot to teach about globalization and Chinese history in the first book.  For those of you not well-versed in the layers of China Studies, the first book will be a continued source of information, even as the second book examines how its tropological genealogy.  Someday it may seem self-evident, selbstverständlich, that histories be written with an understanding of the international networks that connect eventhe most isolated nations, and when that point is reached, Osterhammel’s work will have brought us there.