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ReOrient or Not: That IS the Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Extract

Peer Vries asks ‘Should we really ReORIENT?’ He never really tells us but instead like my political science professor fifty years ago answers ‘yes and no, with certain reservations’. Fortunately for me, he certainly does not say no with no reservations, but rather yes with some reservations — ‘again I think Frank has truth on his side’. I accept with thanks. Vries does, however, give a careful reading and quite accurate summary rendering of the argument in the book. I wish I could have done as well myself. Then he sets out his legitimate reservations about the same within the universe of discourse that the book sets out, which he also accepts. Unlike so many reviewers, he does not discuss a book that was not written and/or set up only straw men to knock down. For all that, the author and our readers can only be very thankful to Vries, and it behooves the author also to take his critiques and reservations seriously, that is to attempt to use them constructively. Unfortunately in his good effort to be critical, Vries also makes several factually wrong attributions to me, some of which bear correction.

Type
Reactions From Our Readers
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1998

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References

Notes

1 Vries, Peer, ‘Should we really ReOrient?’, ltinerario 22/3 (1998) 24.Google Scholar

2 A draft of this response was also delivered to Paul Bairoch on my behalf by my daughterin-law in Geneva. In the meantime, I now feel the sad obligation to add this note to the page proofs to inform, as I have just been by her, that Paul Bairoch died from a heart attack on 19 February. He will be sorely missed, and his passing now obliges younger scholars like Peer Vries to do the good work Bairoch would have done.

3 Embree, Ainslie T. and Gluck, Carol eds, Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching (Armonk 1997).Google Scholar

5 Vries, ‘Should we really ReOrient?’, 25 et al.

6 Ibid., 25.

7 Ibid., 33.

8 Ibid., 34.

9 Ibid., 32.

10 Ibid., 35.

11 Ibid., 38, note 63.

12 See note 2.

13 Vries, ‘Should we really ReOrient?’, 35.

14 Ibid.

15 About our Authors’, Itinerario 22/3 (1998), 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar