Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences 1890–1949

Abstract

The grand theorists of the mid-nineteenth century and the developmental and degenerative models they constructed, conspicuously disregarded the burgeoning commentaries and documentary evidence that bore testament to the fact that neither Asia, China nor India fell into the broad racial, economic or philosophical categories devised for them. Reading Mill, Spencer, Marx, de Gobineau, Chamberlain or Spencer it is interesting to find how sparing and selective are the references that they make to the various British, French, Dutch and German administrators, historians and sinologists who drew attention to the variegated character and sophistication of Chinese culture and language. Indeed, the dichotomy between the discourse of the supposedly ‘orientalized’ colonial administrator or sinologist and that of the developmental social scientist becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the century. Let us now examine a little more closely the sinology of the late nineteenth century and its impact on the western social, political and cultural imagination as that evolved in the first half of the twentieth century.