By looking at China from the periphery, this study shows how European sources offer a unique way of expanding the knowledge about the gazette of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its interconnected history illustrates how the Chinese gazette, as translated by European missionaries, became a major source for reflections on state and society by Enlightenment thinkers.

In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state and its activities, transmitting state news across a vast empire and beyond. And the most essential window onto Qing politics was the Peking Gazette, a genre that circulated globally over the course of the dynasty. This illuminating study presents a comprehensive history of the Peking Gazette and frames it as the cornerstone of a Qing information policy that, paradoxically, prized both transparency and secrecy. Gazettes gave readers a glimpse into the state’s inner workings but also served as a carefully curated form of public relations. Historian Emily Mokros draws from international archives to reconstruct who read the gazette and how they used it to guide their interactions with the Chinese state. Her research into the Peking Gazette’s evolution over more than two centuries is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between media, information, and state power.

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.

In face of rapid social and economic changes since the late 1970s, where is China transforming toward? If culture, in the form values, ideals, and ideological struggles, plays a key role in China’s latest round of social transformations, what are the cultural legacies and resources that are at play and in what ways they do so? This collection of essays aims at addressing these questions. Written by some of the leading intellectuals and thinkers, in and outside of contemporary China, these essays, in different ways, re-examine and reflect on the extent to which three major cultural legacies, namely traditional, May Fourth, and socialist, can function as cultural resources under the changed and changing social and economic conditions of the reform era.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

This fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing reveals how Sino-Western engagements transformed traditions, institutions, and networks of communications.

The European view on history was shaken to its foundations when missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discovered that Chinese history was older than European and Biblical history. With an analysis of the Chinese, Manchu and European sources on ancient Chinese history, this essay proposes an early case of “intercultural historiography,” in which historical texts of different cultures are interwoven. It focusses on the ways Chinese and European authors interpreted stories about marvellous births by the concubines of Emperor Ku. These stories have been the object of a wide variety of interpretations in Chinese texts, each of them representing a different historical genre. They are excellent case-studies to illustrate how the Chinese hermeneutic strategies shaped the diversity of interpretations given by Europeans.