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Lost Modernities

Lost Modernities

China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

Alexander Woodside

ISBN 9780674022171

Publication date: 05/30/2006

In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures.

The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution.

A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Praise

  • In a fresh and provocative book, Alexander Woodside challenges us to rethink the meaning of modernity. Using three countries that share a Confucian heritage and have often been considered to lag behind the West in developing modern socio-political systems, he illuminates how East Asian thinkers grappled with many issues that later became salient in Western political thought. Lost Modernities places East Asia squarely within current discussions of global history, and will generate lively debate.

    —Hue-Tam Ho Tai, author of Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution

Author

  • Alexander Woodside is Professor of Chinese and Southeast Asian History at the University of British Columbia.

Book Details

  • 160 pages
  • 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Harvard University Press

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