Chinese Lineages of the Absolutist State

Timothy Brook

Department of History

University of Toronto

This paper is concerned with the historical evolution of the state rather than the nation. European languages attach different meanings to these words, with hyphenation marking their point of overlap, whereas Chinese allows the two to more or less in the the word guojia, for particular reasons. The paper consists of two parts and a proposal. The first part traces the history of Western conceptions of the Chinese state backward from the present to the sixteenth century as a way of probing the assumptions that influence our perception of the Chinese state today. The second explores the terms by which Chinese in the early sixteenth century (Ming) named what we think of as the state. The proposal is to call for a rethinking of the concept of the state on the basis of the Chinese experience, and to see the Ming state as the norm toward which European state-making in 1500 was tending, but which it failed to achieve.