Well done everybody on submitting your blog post for week 2!
One overall big message:
The strongest posts are those that contain the following elements:
- not a summary, but personal thoughts and musings,
- based on facts and details, in other words evidence, to illustrate your insights, or to back up your claims
- a well-chosen focused episode, rather than trying to cover everything – although if you detect a strand running through the different sets you can use that to weave together, as Sarah demonstrates.
Some posts managed to engage with high level, complex concepts, but you will notice that these still contain all three elements listed above.
It is much more interesting to read what you think, because that will allow us to engage in debates and see how your thoughts evolve across the semester.
Try to take your posts in future to a new level:
- incorporate hyperlinks, e.g. If you looked up additional materials, or maybe to earlier posts from yourself for your colleagues
- refer to earlier weeks (Nate did a great job of that)
- check for typos, use paragraphs, and read out loud before hitting publish: make sure the medium does not obscure the message!
- Write for your fellow students in the course: they are your main readers after all!
Some tips about the materials we use and how to refer to them:
- books: recognizable by the title in italics
- book chapters or articles: title in ” “, and title of the book or journal there from in italics.
If it’s a in older, pre-modern source, check how I described it: diary, letter, edict, memorial,… The type of texts very often shapes the contents. The genre limits or dictates the expectations of the reader, but also of the writer. Think about the difference between a movie described as a rom com, thriller, a horror, or documentary.
Contents
The questions of “what is China?” and “what is modernity?” naturally occupied quite a few of you. Because we are only at the start of the semester, you may want to bookmark your post, and return to these ideas at later stages this spring. Bianca‘s post gave us some good questions to use as a yardstick for the rest of the semester. Chloe implicitly encourages you all to study (more) history, because it helps to make the tricky concept of modernity a little bit less tricky, or as Aryeh calls it “slippery”. Jialin makes the important point that in Chinese history there is a long tradition of looking back to an idealized past, rather than a sense of progress towards the future. That is something that definitely changes throughout the period of time we study.
The economic turbulence of the Ming period drew the attention of many, but I wonder if anyone would like to push the point into connecting the issue of the economic ups and downs of the Ming with the question of modernity. Is what we see happening in the Ming, that is: a globally integrated economy, with strong specialization locally, influences from the outside world, and in the late Ming a financial crisis as the result of forces well outside the control of the Ming government, and outside the intention of the trading partners, something that is similar to systemic problems we see in what we would comfortably call modern economies, for instance 19th and 20th century? Jenessa’s post starts to move towards this question, but I think we can push this question further for analytical purposes.
Finally, the issue of the conquest, and the ethnic differences between conqueror and conquered, and in how far that influences what it means for our definition of “China”. Patrick points out the importance of our perceptions, which leads me to think about the nature of the sources: always think about who benefits from telling the story in a particular way? Who is telling the story, who is the intended reader? If you need a list of questions to help you analyze sources, use this handy PDF. Also check out Daniel’s post on this particular question of conquest.
Ethan and Nya both explored the issue of what conquest means in this case, when apparently the conquerors take on much of the culture of their subjects. I want to push back a little bit against this. While it is easy to think about China as always coming out on top in the long run, it might give us the incorrect idea that the non-Han conquerors had no influence beyond a temporary inconvenience. That is not true. Their influence can be seen in language, food and drink, clothing, to name just a few; some of these have now become part of what we see as “traditional Chinese”. Maybe you can think of it the same way that Chicago or New York pizza could not exist without Italian immigration first.
Overall great first round of posts, lots of food for thought, and as I’m about to head into the comments on hypothes.is I’m sure lots of great work there too! Nice job, historians!
