Pamela Kyle Crossley

Pamela Kyle Crossley (born 18 November 1955) is an historian of modern China, northern Asia, and global history. She is author of The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800: An Interpretive History (2010), as well as influential studies of the Qing dynasty and leading textbooks in global history. Crossley is known for a high-level interpretation of the source of twentieth centuries identities. In her view overland conquest by the great empires of early modern Eurasia produced a special form of rulership which gave high priority to the institutionalization of the concepts and practices of cultural identity. Crossley suggests that these concepts were encoded in political practice and academic discourse on "nationalism," and prevailed till the end of the twentieth century. Her book A Translucent Mirror laid out this idea with regard to China. A forthcoming book, The Mongol Moment, looks at the origins of these patterns at the beginning of the early modern period in Eurasia, while an ongoing project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the rise of nationalist movements at the turn of the twentieth century looks at the end.

Biography

Crossley was born in Lima, Ohio, and attended high school in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. After leaving high school she worked as an editorial assistant and writer on environmental subjects for Rodale Press. In 1977 she graduated from Swarthmore College, where she was editor-in-chief of The Phoenix; her fellow students included David C. Page, Robert Zoellick, Ben Brantley, Wing Thye Woo, Robert P. George, Jacqueline Carey and David G. Bradley. At Swarthmore she was a student of Lilliam M. Li and Bruce Cumings, and as an undergraduate began graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania with Hilary Conroy. She later entered Yale University, where she was a student of Yu Ying-shih and Parker Po-fei Huang, and wrote a dissertation under the direction of Jonathan D. Spence. She joined the Dartmouth College faculty in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1985. She holds the Robert 1932 and Barbara Black chair in Asian Studies and is a Professor of History in the Department of History. After David Farquhar, Gertraude Roth Li, and Beatrice S. Bartlett, Crossley was among the first scholars writing in English to use Manchu-language documents to research the history of the Qing Empire. More specialists subsequently adopted this practice. Though she does not teach Manchu to graduate students, Crossley has conducted advanced seminars in Manchu document reading with post-doctoral researchers, mostly from China and South Korea. The seminar is normally conducted in Chinese. Crossley is a Guggenheim fellow, an NEH fellow (2011–2012) and a recipient of the Association for Asian Studies Joseph R. Levenson Prize for A Translucent Mirror. Dartmouth students have given her the Goldstein Prize for teaching. Crossley resides in Norwich, Vermont.

Publications

Most recently Crossley has published The Wobbling Pivot: China Since 1800, An Intrepretive History which takes the resilience and coherence of local communities in China as a theme for interpreting the transition from the late imperial to the modern era. Crossley's previous books are What is Global History? (Polity Press, 2008), an examination of narrative strategies in global history that joins a new series of short introductory books inspired by E.H. Carr's What is History?. Crossley's books on Chinese history include Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton University Press, 1990); The Manchus (Blackwells Publishers, 1997); A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (University of California Press, 1999). She is also a co-author of the best-selling global history textbooks, The Earth and its Peoples (Houghton Mifflin, 5th edition, 2009) and Global Society: The World since 1900 (Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 2007). Her work has appeared in two separate series of the Cambridge histories. She is widely published both in academic journals and in periodicals such as Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Royal Academy Magazine, Far Eastern Economic Review, Calliope, and in the online editorial spaces of the BBC. She has participated in A&E's "In Search of..." series ("The Forbidden City"). In January of 2012 the new educational platform The Faculty Project announced that Crossley would produce a video course on Modern China for their site. Unusually, Crossley maintains an errata page for her publications, including exchanges with translators.

"Simultaneous rulerships" in Eurasia and "Ethnicity"

In Crossley's view the "simultaneous" rulership of the Qing empire which she described in A Translucent Mirror can be compared to other early-modern rulerships to understand how the twentieth-century derived its "objective" criteria of national identities (specifically language, religion, race or ethnicity, and homeland). She has specifically studied the Ottoman and Russian empires as comparisons, but has implied that other empires—Mogul, Safavid, Spain, France, and the Austro-Hungarian empire—might also be examples. Her description of the imperial style of the Qing as "simultaneous" (using language, ideology, monuments and history to both acknowledge and stereotype separate cultures within the empire), first published in 1992, has been extremely influential in the field of Qing history and also in research on other empires of Asia, particularly Safavid Iran.

Simultaneity in these rulerships is the tendency of the emperor to speak for conquered or absorbed cultures in proclamations, dress, rituals, and monuments and architectures, but only if those cultures were somehow involved in the acts of conquest or domination; otherwise, conquered cultures are likely to be ignored. This aspect of simultaneity is very old and found throughout Eurasian history. What the early-modern simultaneous rulerships have in common is that the cultures represented by the emperor, or the "constituencies," are not real people, but are historical "narratives" that the empire may try to enact through its policies on education, tsponsoring new historical works, and modern media of print. Many cultural communities, she argues, accepted these "imperially-ascribed" identities in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and used the resources of the imperial era to make these identities prestigious and teachable. At about the same time, the emperors unsuccessfully attempted to align themselves with a national majority. These identities Crossley refers to as "objective," and are "narrated as inevitable." But there are many other groups, she argues, who survived and remained coherent during the imperial era, who entered the twentieth century as "subjective," or "narrated as contingent." Some identities, however, were erased by the empires using history and law, especially when cultural or ancestral ambiguities in their backgrounds came into conflict with ideological or economic imperatives. As examples she has pointed to the Chinese-martial 漢軍) bannermen of the Qing dynasty, the "New Christians" of Spain and portions of the Ottoman Janissaries.

Beginning in 1990 Crossley argued that historians should avoid using the term "ethnicity" in the way it is used by anthropologists. She explained that cultural differences and are always present, but that the great empires of the early modern period had been influential in affecting the way the people understood the significance—and most especially the "criteria for recognition"-- of some differences. Claiming that anthropologists used "ethnos" or "ethnicity" mostly as a polite alternative to "race," or to mean any kind of inherited cultural community, Crossley argued that historians should look at "the process by which some cultural groups are made visible," or powerful, by the state and others are erased or marginalized. The visible or central groups, she argued, are not "ethnic," and may be national or have national movements. The marginalized groups are, she argued, "ethnic." She followed the history of the term ethnos/ethnic to show that it had been used to describe groups whose cultures were regarded as folk, undeveloped, or marginal. She argued that historians should observe these differences in order to retain an understanding of the relationships of identity to power (pro or con) and to follow the processes by which some groups gain or lose power, transforming their identities and the way they are represented. The groups Crossley described as "ethnic" in 1990 correspond to the groups she later saw as "contingent".. She particularly compares the condition of various Muslim groups in eighteenth century China (who she regards as "ethnic") to the Manchus of eighteenth century China (who she regards as culturally distinct but not "ethnic"). In Orphan Warriors she argued that Manchus were not "ethnic" in the eighteenth century, but had become "ethnic" by the end of the nineteenth century. Possibly because of her association of ethnicity with disadvantaging and oppression, several historians claim that Crossley sees all identities as concocted by imperial states. In her works, however, Crossley instead argues that while cultural differences are real, their positioning with respect to state power is essential to a modern assumption that some identities are "objective" while others are subjective.

"Qing Studies" and "New Qing History"

Crossley is noted for arguing that the Qing empire was not "sinicized," but combined Chinese values with those of Northeast Asia and Mongolia. She pointed out that Manchu language, religion, documents, and customs remained of great importance to the Qing until the middle nineteenth century. She disagreed with earlier scholars that Manchus had been" sinicized," but she did not argue that Manchu culture in modern China was the traditional culture of Manchuria. Rather, it was a new culture of individual Manchu communities in China, what she called "the sense of difference that has no outward sign"

Crossley's book Orphan Warriors was the first book to present a revisionist interpretation of the history of the Manchus under the Qing dynasty, and for this reason and others many historians such as Joanna Waley-Cohen have named Crossley as related to the "New Qing History" school. It seems that Crossley has never used this term to describe either her work or her affiliations. In publications in Korea and China since 2008 she has written that there are two trends that are often confused together, one a "Manchu-centered" school (some historians call it an "Altaic school") and another group who view the Qing empire as a "historical object" in its own right (not a phase in Chinese history). She criticized the "Manchu-centered" school for romanticism and a reliance upon disproved theories about "Altaic" language and history. On the other hand she seems to have included herself in the Qing empire school, which she calls "Qing Studies." She sees the Qing empire not as a Manchu empire but as a "simultaneous" system in which the rulership is not subordinate to any single culture, not even Chinese. William T. Rowe's book China's Last Empire: The Great Qing'' (2009) describes Crossley as the "pioneer" of these new ways of thinking about Qing history. Earlier, political commentator Charles Horner pointed to Crossley as one of the most important current historians in the reconceptualization of the Qing period and its significance.

Global History

Crossley's work on global history is controversial. She was a co-author of The Earth and its Peoples, was a revolutionary text in 1997. Some reports have suggested that there were creative differences between Crossley and the editors as the book moved away from its original non-regional approach. She was invited to write What is Global History? in a Polity Press series of short texts introducing historical genres to undergraduates. The book, which has been translated into several languages, is a study of "narrative strategies" used by historians from many cultures, over history, to attempt to tell "a story without a center." Most reviewers liked the book's accessibility and short length; one described it as "a crisp summary of many major works in the area along with the intervening glittering insight of the author herself" and Giorgio Riello described it as "dense but illuminating." However, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto slammed the book in The Journal of Global History, complaining that it was too short and also lacked comprehensive coverage and accusingly citing Crossley's own statement that she had omitted "ninety-nine out of a hundred" items because of the book's length. Fernandez-Armesto also disliked Crossley's use of "divergence" and "convergence" to describe narrative archetypes rather than the more conventional use, to mean actual historical phenomena. He contradicts her picture of Strabo and José de Acosta and claims the book's final chapter is "hectoring." Whether positive or negative, most reviewers complain that the book focuses on major theoretical contributions of the twentieth century and says little about the most recent trends. Crossley actually agreed, and wrote, "Cutting-edge directions in global history get pretty brief mention in the book, mostly because I was convinced that by the time the book came out, whatever I described would have been superseded by something I would then wish I had described instead."

In her own research work in the field of world or global history Crossley is known primarily for arguing, in agreement with a certain number of other historians of China, that not only material but also cultural and political trends produced an "early modern" period across Eurasia from about 1500 to about 1800. She seems to see the period of Mongol empires in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as when culture change occurred that brought in a Eurasian "early modernity". She has commented that while a Eurasian chronology that could be used for teaching is possible (as in the example of early modernity), it is not "global" since it would bring together Chinese and European history but isolate the histories of Africa, Australia, and North and South America. She suggests that a global chronology would be more useful, but is also more difficult to construct.

Crossley is also a historian of the horse in Eurasia. She has been the first to describe a major change in saddle use and horsemanship that accounts for the strengths and weaknesses of both the Mongol and the Manchu cavalry. This has been reported at a major conference in Beijing as well as in presentations at University of Newcastle, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Willamette University, Bogazici Universiti (Istanbul) and University of Hawaii.

Software development

Crossley is a software author, and has created applications for Tonseth House Software Development for use by teachers, professors, community organizers to manage web pages. The free applications are specially designed for display of all "horizontally-written" scripts, and integrate functions needed for instant web page management. A widely-used app aids students in study and memorization of the Chinese classic Daxue 大學.

On November 22, 2008, the software interface written by Crossley for Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period got public debut. At that time Crossley remarked that she began using computer programming to help her read, as she is dyslexic and still has many problems reading printed pages. The software makes this famous reference work used by students who do not know the Wade-Giles system accessible, and also integrates to Harvard University GIS database. It is available to the public both as a web interface and as a desktop internet application. A revision with faster Wade-Giles to pinyin conversion is expected by October 2010.

Recently it was announced that a desktop application will be available in summer 2011 for use together with The Wobbling Pivot which will provide enhanced maps and graphics, teaching aids, communication channels and the ability to create independent communications with students. The device will available free and can be used by all instructors in China history courses, whether or not they use The Wobbling Pivot as textbook. Crossley is the author of this software. A version of the software is already available for subscribers to The Faculty Project.

External links

• On Internet Dialogue with Chinese Historians in China
• Crossley's Errata Page
• The Faculty Project
• Crossley, "China's Century Long Identity Crisis, in the Wall Street Journal, 10.10.2011
• The Wobbling Pivot home page
• Maura Dykstra, "Reflections on Qing History"
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom: 5 China books to look forward to in 2010
• The China Beat, Coming Distractions
• History News Network, "Historians in the News"
• James A. Millward review of A Translucent Mirror in History Cooperative
• Xiaowei Zheng, "Sinicization vs. Manchuness: The Success of Manchu Rule"
• Crossley, "The Late Qing Empire in Global History" in Association for Asian Studies,Education about Asia, Fall 2008
• Crossley on Mongolian Art at Thorne-Sagendorph
• 2001 Joseph Levenson Book Prize
• Justin Tighe, Review of Crossley, The Manchus
• Yougoubian, David N., review of G.R. Garthwaite, The Persians in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 38, No.3, pp.489-491.
• Giorgio Riello review of What is Global History? in Journal of World History
• Iftekhar Iqbali review of What is Global History? with Crossley response, IHR Reviews in History
• Felipe Fernandez-Armesto review of What is Global History?
• Liu Wenming, "Memoir of translating What is Global History? (in Chinese)'
• Peter Wood review of The Wobbling Pivot in Asian Review of Books
• Paul A. Cohen review of The Wobbling Pivot in China Journal
• Crossley profile in Dartmouth Life 2011
• Academic device download for Daxue and Lexicon
• Tonseth House Software Development
• Software interface for Eminent Chinese