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A Contemporary Chinese View of British History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
Few of us really know much about the way in which we are perceived by the rest of the world—we as Americans, we as scholars, we (in this case) as historians of Great Britain. Indeed, to many this last question probably appears irrelevant; insofar as we function as historians, we are members of an international community of scholarship, whose compass transcends national boundaries, and conscious as we may be of our cultural and temporal biases, we seek as far as possible in our work to throw them off, and as scholars we welcome any contributions by our fellows throughout the world if what they say adds to the store of knowledge.
So the studies, the monographs, the interpretive works pour out, year after year; certainly few specialists of the Stuart period could hope to master the vast mass of material which exists. Why then be concerned with what a group of professors and dockworkers in a provincial Chinese town has to say about British history? With one or two exceptions, their sources are a half-century or more old; have they read Hill, Stone, Trevor-Roper, Hexter? There is no evidence of it. Are they aware of the work which is being done in local history, in demographic history, in the studies of the composition of Parliament? Do they know anything of what court and country parties stood for? Do they appreciate at all the impact of Puritanism (which after all was perhaps not too far from Maoism in its techniques of mobilization and organization)?
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