China, therefore, as seen through the framework of its national historiography, had been a relatively successful self-contained, self-referential political, economic, philosophical, cultural, and religious system. Foreigners, by contrast, were viewed with a combination of suspicion and condescension: as episodic invaders; culturally inferior; and, in most practical respects, irrelevant to China’s essential national needs. It was within this wider frame that, by the mid-nineteenth century, neither the West nor the British, let alone their distant American cousins, loomed large in the collective
...more
