From “National Seclusion” to Open Societies: Movement of Knowledge and Skills Across Eurasia
Jaymin Kim, Seonmin Kim, Kyoungjin Bae, H. H. Kang, Lina Nie
“National seclusion,” which sees “premodern” Asian societies as being isolated from the world before their incorporation into the modern world by nineteenth-century Western empires, remains a powerful paradigm in historiography on Asia. Although scholars have recently debunked this myth of isolation, their revisionist accounts are limited by methodological nationalism and fall short of developing a regional perspective. Moreover, recent scholarship on interactions across East Asia tends to focus on the material and textual interactions of elite Confucian literati.
In this panel, we widen our scope by employing sources from multiple contexts and explore how knowledge and skills moved across Asia. Lina Nie examines how diverse players in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries used pirates as a diplomatic weapon competing for power. H. H. Kang’s paper traces how the Jesuit science of machines was translated, reinvented, and localized across China and Korea between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, showing that Korean thinkers benefited from the productive distance to reimagine and reinvent it. Jaymin Kim compares legal codes in Chosŏn, Qing, and Nguyễn states, highlighting the complex processes of translation and negotiation that sustained Sinitic law as a regional legal system. By looking at migrant Cantonese woodworkers between Guangdong and Bengal during the nineteenth century, Kyoungjin Bae argues this vernacular craft culture generated a spectacular globality through mobility and adaptation. Together, these papers show that intra- and inter-regional mobility continued across our conventional premodern-modern division.