Recent readings X

Niv Horesh's "Between Legal and Illegal Tender: The Chartered Bank and its Notes in and around China, 1864-1939" (Modern China, Vol. 34, No. 2, Apr 2008, pp. 276-289) drew me to his "The Bund and beyond: Rethinking the Sino-foreign Financial Grid in Pre-war Shanghai" (China Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-26) and "Printed in London, Disbursed on the Bund: the Hongkong Bank and its Early Note Issue in Shanghai, 1865-1911" (Late Imperial China, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2006, pp. 109-40), which I read earlier, also Wellington K. K. Chan's "Personal Styles, Cultural Values and Management: the Sincere and Wing On Companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1900-1941" (Business History Review, Vol. 70, No. 2, 1996, pp. 141-67), and Stephen Freeth's Destroying Archives: a Case Study of the Records of Standard Chartered Bank" (Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1991, pp. 85-94).

Latika Chaudhary's "Determinants of Primary Schooling in British India," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 269-302. Misallocation of resources, i.e. low public spending, for primary education in British India was due to greater caste and religious diversity that put constraints on public spending in basic education.

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen's "Leopold Ranke's Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2008), pp. 425-453.

"all history is comment on a text," by Frederick Jackson Turner (W. Stull Holt (ed.), Historical Scholarship in the Unite States, 1876-1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams (Baltimore, MD, 1938), p. 160)

"History is done with documents...no documents, no history," by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos's Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898), pp. 1-2)

Anne Gerritsen's "Fragments of a Global Past: Ceramics Manufacture in Song-Yuan-Ming Jingdezhen," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient," Vol. 52 (2009), pp. 117-152. "Chinese writers generally ignore matters of technology and commerce beyond the confines of the Chinese realm." (p. 117)

Christian de Pee's "Wards of Words: Textual Geographies and Urban Space in Song-Dynasty Luoyang, 960-1127," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient," Vol. 52 (2009), pp. 85-116. "The conventions of inherited genres of literary composition reorganized the essential horizontality of eleventh-century urban space into vertical, hierarchical geographies that excluded markets, stores, alleyways, and commoners." (p. 85)

Another two articles on literature: Tzvetan Todorov's "What Is Literature For?" New Literary History, Vol. 38, 2007, pp. 13-32; and Laurent Dubreuil's "What Is Literature's Now?" New Literary History, Vol. 38, 2007, pp. 43-70.

A few more:

Sandra Khor Manickam's "Common Ground: Race and the Colonial Universe in British Malaya," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3, Oct. 2009, pp. 593-612. Manickam explores the common bases of knowledge on race among Malay intellectuals and British scholar-officials in British Malaya.

H. V. Bowen's "Bullion for Trade, War, and Debt-Relief: British Movements of Silver to, around, and from Asia, 1760-1833," Modern Asian Studies, 2009, 31pps.

Kent G. Deng, "Miracle or Mirage? Foreign Silver, China's Economy and Globalization from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries," Pacific Economic Review, Vol. 13, 2008), pp. 320-358. A revisionist study that China's demand for foreign silver was actually far smaller than is often claimed.