Recent readings XXVII

I am back to Hong Kong for a while and just started to browse through the journals I missed in the summer. Some of them are quite interesting and a few related to my current research interests. They are:


伍伯常：〈隋唐之際的割據勢力－－以貴冑出身的李淵和李密為中心〉，《東吳歷史學報》，第25期（2011年6月），頁1-56。建制內外的力量角力及地緣政治的克服與制約。
何萍：〈英國與武漢國民政府之漢案交涉──以英國領事報告為中心〉，《東吳歷史學報》，第25期（2011年6月），頁187-252。 useful for my research on KW
李朝津：〈清末民初廣東大學學制之發軔〉，《東吳歷史學報》，第25期（2011年6月），頁141-185。1924年成立的廣東大學的政治牽絆。
羅麗馨：〈豐臣秀吉侵略朝鮮〉，《國立政治大學歷史學報》，第35期（2011年5），頁33-74。由侵略史到侵略史觀。
侯旭東：〈東漢洛陽南郊刑徒墓的性質與法律依據－－從《明鈔本天聖令 ‧ 獄官令》所附一則唐令說起〉，《中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊》，第82卷，第1分，2011年3月，頁1-42。


I read several critical reviews of some books I am interested in. It certainly does not do the justice without actually reading the books but it makes sense when I am forced to prioritise my reading lists.


David Lyon's Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Using ID cards as the point of departure, the book resonates with Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality. The finer the granularity of identifying information collected by the state, the greater will be the potentiality for treating citizens differently according to their respective administrative identities. The process of identification entails social sorting.


Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Why did Britain have an industrial revolution first? Why not other advanced European countries? Because in Britain ideas interacted vigorously with business interests in 'a positive feedback loop that created the greatest sea change in economic history since the advent of culture.' Technological innovation is the prime mover.


Patrick Wright's Passport of Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao's China (OUP, 2010). Wright makes extensive use of diaries, journals, reminiscences, and oral interview with key visitors to the Communist China as early as in 1954. The key visitors include the painter Stanley Spencer, artist-journalist Paul Hogarth, biologist Cedric Dover, sinologist Edwin Pulleyblank, philosopher A. J. Ayer, architect Sir Hugh Casson, MP Barbara Castle, former PM Clement Attlee, politician Anuerin Bevan etc.


George R. Trumbull's An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914 (CUP, 2009). Trumbull examines the views of colonial ethnographers about Islam as monolithic, primitive, and politically dangerous. The Imprimerie Adolph Jourdan in Algiers specialized in publishing works of colonial ethnography, which became widely known in colonial Algeria and France, and those the administration approved were bought for the libraries that existed in most administrative districts of Algeria.


Michael Curtis's Orientalism and Islam : European thinkers on Oriental despotism in the Middle East and India (CUP, 2009). Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Max Weber