Benjamin A. Elman is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University.
Elman has drawn upon his deep learning regarding the Chinese civil
service exams and his broad understanding of late imperial history
more generally to create a clear picture of the intellectual and
institutional components of the first political meritocracy in
world history, its adaptability to changing political challenges of
the nineteenth century, and the system’s unintended nurturing of
literati critics of the state. The capacities and limitations of
the late imperial Chinese state took shape amidst the complementary
and competing interests of emperor, bureaucracy and literati elites
expressed through the examination system. Rarely has intellectual
history been so well grounded in cultural history to yield such
fundamental insights into a non-Western political system.
*R. Bin Wong, coauthor of Before and Beyond Divergence: The
Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe*
This book, a remarkable feat of synthesis and analysis, is now the
best and most comprehensive account we have of ‘what was going on
inside’ the preindustrial world’s greatest single experiment in
holding civil service examinations. It is also an eloquent and
ambitious attempt to revise our understanding of the successes and
failures of the empire of China in its last five or six
centuries.
*Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia*
The most accomplished scholar of the examination system in China
looks at the denouement of the story: the nineteenth and early
twentieth century struggles between conservatives and
revolutionaries to assign meaning to the history of the examination
system, and to claim its legacy. The competing views illuminate not
only the sources of our modern assumptions about the form and
content of the examinations, but also the meaning given in the
modern world to stylized intellectual competition and institutional
transformation from within.
*Pamela Crossley, author of A Translucent Mirror: History and
Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology*
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