The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making

by Lydia H. Liu

What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms.

The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history. Drawing on her archival research and comparative analyses of English--and Chinese--language texts, as well as their respective translations, she explores how the rhetoric of barbarity and civilization, friend and enemy, and discourses on sovereign rights, injury, and dignity were a central part of British imperial warfare. Exposing the military and philological--and almost always translingual--nature of the clash of empires, this book provides a startlingly new interpretation of modern imperial history.

Genres: China, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

Lydia H. Liu 劉禾 is the W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Professor Liu also holds a joint professorship at the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University 清華大學 in Beijing.

(from http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2410/)

Reviews

[Jeremy Hurdis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really great book when it comes to understanding language, translation, and international law. I thin psychoanalysis could have played an interesting role, but is absent. More pressingly, I think Liu really should have taken the opportunity to critique liberalism and the role of ideology in the construction of 'super-signs' in translation for the purposes of international law. It's a good book, and further studies can only make this topic more interesting.

[Derin B]

If anyone's interested I have bullet point notes on all the chapters. Might paste them here one day. Overall, important read, but honestly it didn't feel like an Imagined Communities (i.e. wasn't like a breathtaking, world view shifting read). It was cool though. We need more Lydia Liu's out there in the world.

[Yaqi Tong · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very nuanced take on the subject of international relations
the author did an excellent job of balancing the use of historical materials and its imaginative and insightful interpretations

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Will we never be rid of the literary critic masquerading as historian?! From page one Ms Liu concerns herself with a battle of words, as her own postmodern jargon-ladden prose might somehow stand in for serious historical scholarship. She tells us that the book 'is engaged with the hetero-cultural legacy of sovereign thinking' and 'emphasizes moments and forms of moral and affective investment of sovereignty that articulate effectively to the modern world of empires,' when in fact the book is one long exercise in Foucault-speak, i.e. sound and fury (of course hurled mostly at everything Western and male) signifying nothing. Such fascination with 'the itinerancy of signs' and fabricated linguistics has little to do with proper historical scholarship and should vigorously routed from the discipline. The fact that Liu concludes her long-winded meanderings on "intersubjectivity, indexicality" and theory with, not, as we might suspect a summary of her thesis (there really isn't one; how can you summarize 200 pages of deconstructionist mental masterbation?), but rather with anecdotes of her weird and disturbed obsession with the photographs of Chinese thrones, should say something about the usefulness of this work for anyone seeking a history of the interaction of British and Chinese Empires.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Key words in this book: super-sign--a heterocultural signifying chain; the politics of recognition and non-recognition; grammar and the sovereign desire.
Super thoughtprovoking in thinking about language and the creation of a "international law"

other key questions asked in this volume "Can international law rise above its brute realism and submit to a higher ideal of peace, not a condition of war?" The key issues here is sovereign desire and imperial desire.

key super-signs: yi/barbarian&guizi/yangguizi, hua/xia/china/zhongguo, zi/word; ci/word;

[Lashonda Slaughter Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I understand the theoretical premise of this work, at times I think that it overly muddied the historical events that almost became the backdrop of the text. That being said, the exploration of yi/barbarian provides ample examples of how signs and symbols truly can impact international diplomatic relations and pave the way for imperial intrusion.