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Comments from a South Asian Perspective: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Paul R. Greenough
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Extract

Western writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found it plausible to refer to India and China in the same breath as if they were species of a single genus, employing concepts like “Oriental despotism” and “the Asiatic mode of production.” No more. Indeed, modern language and area studies have so impressed upon us the historical uniqueness of these two societies that only infrequently will scholars cite an idea or event in the one to illuminate the experience of the other. Nonetheless, there is much to be gained by making comparisons when they cast light on particular problems or reflect upon the methods of scholarship. I thus vault the Himalayas and discuss below some contrasts in the approaches taken and the results achieved when students of historical India and China have examined the problems of subsistence. The three fine papers by James Lee, Peter Perdue, and R. Bin Wong, and the stimulating introduction by Lillian M. Li provide the pegs for these brief comments.

Type
Food, Famine, and the Chinese State—A Symposium
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , August 1982 , pp. 789 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1982

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