Dissertation Information for Minghui Hu NAME: - Minghui Hu
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2004)
ADVISORS: - Benjamin A. Elman - Theodore M. Porter
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Sharon Jean Traweek - Robert Westman - Theodore Huters
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Cosmopolitan Confucianism: China's road to modern science
Abstract: This dissertation shows the centrality of scientific issues in the history of late imperial China. It engages issues of comparative history, trans-cultural contacts and exchange, and mobility of knowledge. I focus on three major regions in China (the court in the north China plain, lower Yangzi delta, and Canton in the south) between 1680 and 1820, and investigate a specific intellectual and cultural fusion of science and classicism as part of the elite mentality that had taken form by the end of eighteenth-century in China.
The value-creating elites in eighteenth-century China relentlessly reconstructed and reinvented the physical cosmos, and sought political and social legitimacy seeking sanction for their scientific views in the Classics. I call this process the emergence of cosmopolitan Confucianism, a movement that can be further decomposed into two intertwined subprocesses. The first part is the state-driven enterprise to appropriate Jesuit cosmography, trigonometry, algebra, and global geography; the second part is the gentry-led resistance leading subsequently to the reconstruction of this body of foreign knowledge into domesticable form and content. The Qing state monopolized the formative phase of cosmopolitan Confucianism by appropriating Jesuit science into the state apparatus. The gentry-merchant alliance in the lower Yangzi basin initiated the second phase of cosmopolitan Confucianism by promoting a specific vision of classical interpretation. The development of cosmopolitan Confucianism culminated around 1820 and then declined, on the eve of the second wave of the protestant import of industrial science into China.
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MPACT Scores for Minghui Hu A = 0
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calculated 2008-08-10 16:22:57
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