Xiaohongshu
- Hosted by World History Society
Join the World History Society for our talk on The Qing Court in Global Perspective by Dr Nora Yitong Qiu!
"For nearly a century, Qing China has been characterized in Western scholarship as an empire turned inward, resistant to foreign influence and ignorant of the wider world. Recent scholarship, drawing extensively on Manchu archival sources and material evidence, has substantially revised this picture. Over the past two decades, historians have traced the sustained presence of Jesuit missionaries at the Qing court, where European expertise shaped artillery manufacture, court portraiture, cartographic production, and the design of mechanical timepieces commissioned from English clockmakers. The Qianlong emperor commissioned French artists to produce prints for his ten military campaigns; Western pharmaceutical knowledge entered the imperial medicine chest and, in the case of the Kangxi emperor, may have prolonged the ruler's life. This body of scholarship recasts the Qing court as a site of active and selective global engagement rather than studied isolation. This talk surveys the major contributions of that historiographical transformation, tracing the methodological and archival advances that made it possible, and arguing that the category of a "global Qing" offers a more accurate and productive framework for understanding the dynasty's intellectual and material life."
Dr Nora Yitong Qiu is a historian of modern East Asia, specializing in the period from 1600 to 2000. Her research examines the social interactions among diverse communities in the Qing Empire, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China, with particular attention to the ways power and identity shaped social and economic development. She also engages with broader questions on the roots of inequality and the processes of modernization, and she conducts her research across nine languages (See more here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/history/people/academi…)
Please email me (Danilo, President of World History Society) if you have any questions! And please get a free ticket :)