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The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. By lydia h. liu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 334 pp. $54.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
In this elegant and compelling monograph, Lydia Liu makes interesting contributions to two central and ongoing discussions in the historiography of empire and the modern world. Her more specific subject,the "clash" between the British and Qing empires in the nineteenth century, allows Liu to reflect on the nature of the Sino-British diplomatic and military battles that were long cast, albeit in many different ways, as resulting from an utter incommensurability between China and "the West." This book joins those of other China historians who, in recent years, have argued against the "clash of civilizations" thesis, but Liu takes the old conversation in a promising new direction by discussing the centrality to Sino-British relations of the very attempt to create commensurability between the two. Armed with her detailed study of the Sino-British example, Liu grapples with a larger theoretical trend in the scholarship on colonialism and empire: the critique of sovereign thinking. Engaging with political philosophers who have attempted to deconstruct the "naturalness" of the sovereign will, Liu argues that a focus on language reveals particular insights about the construction of one of modernity's central "truths." Demonstrating that "the battle of words and translations" was "central, not peripheral, to the sovereign will that had driven the Opium Wars," Liu probes the notions of universality and commensurability that underlie...