Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existen…
"Explores premortem shrine theory to illuminate Ming politics, including the Donglin Party's battle with eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian and Gu Yanwu's theories. Argues that because elites often served their own interests, shrine rhetoric stressed the role of commoners, which allo…
Grannies, geishas, warriors, mystics, recluses, and predators--these are the dangerous women of traditional China. In a culture that is resoundingly patriarchal, these women are a vivid counterpoint. Violating state-sponsored orthodoxies, the granny mocks and mimics, the geisha …
"An unprecedented passion for saving lives swept through late Ming society, giving rise to charitable institutions that transcended family, class, and religious boundaries. Analyzing lecture transcripts, administrative guidelines, didactic tales, and diaries, Joanna Handlin Smit…
"This book is a history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, Empire of Great Brightness instead introduces the reader to themes that provide points of entry into Ming China: to ideas of mo…
This study challenges the conventional assumption that law in pre-modern China was used merely as an arm of the state to maintain social control and as a secular tool to exercise naked power.
"Imperial China's dynastic legal codes provide a wealth of information for historians, social scientists, and scholars of comparative law and of literary, cultural, and legal history. Until now, only the Tang (618-907) and Qing (1644-1911) codes have been available in English tr…
"Imperial China's dynastic legal codes provide a wealth of information for historians, social scientists, and scholars of comparative law and of literary, cultural, and legal history. Until now, only the Tang (618-907) and Qing (1644-1911) codes have been available in English tr…
