Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter offers an analytical account of how China as an idea, an unrivalled economic power, and an imperial polity became integral in the collective European imagination of the world. It provides critical evaluation of the way in which the changing European identity and the production of rationalist subjectivity of Europe were manifestly informed by its forged and precarious knowledge of the imperial Other at the opposite end of Eurasia. It contends that such encounters had transformative effects on Europe’s historical, cultural, and social formation and the construction of European modernity. It also interrogates changing European views of China towards the end of the 18th century principally through the eyes of Lord Macartney, which can be taken as a historically contingent precursor to the coming clash of Chinese world ordering and European world ordering in the mid-19th century.
This chapter looks at how ancient Chinese moral and philosophical ideas and concepts are appropriated, creatively constructed, and reinterpreted by Chinese International Relations (IR) scholars as they put the study of history of ideas of Chinese world ordering in conversation with ongoing IR theorization. Three ideas examined are respectively the conception of power and moral leadership inquired by Yan Xuetong, the concept of Tianxia fundamental to a global political philosophy proposed by Zhao Tingyang, and the idea of Zhongyong central to the construction of a relational theory of world politics by Qin Yaqing. Performing this archaeology of knowledge of concerning contending ideas of historical Chinese world ordering, it is argued, is a bold and determined attempt to bring Chinese ideas and knowledge to challenge as well as enrich existing IR theories. It also serves to reclaim international thought in ancient China as foundational to a global history of international thought.
In lieu of a concluding chapter, the Epilogue suggests three different ways in which studying Chinese world ordering before the West can help us reimagine the international for writing the future of the discipline of International Relations as a truly global enterprise.
This chapter provides an analytical account of European participation in, and their cultural, economic, and diplomatic encounter with, Pax Sinica in the three centuries before violent clashes between Imperial China and European imperial powers in the mid-19th century. This is a historical period when institutions and norms of the tribute system govern European participation in Chinese world ordering and when the two world orders, Chinese and Europe, manage to achieve a prolonged period of peaceful coexistence. European participation is, in other words, highly contingent on the Europeans accommodating, adapting to, and/or accepting norms, values, rules, and institutions prevailing in Pax Sinica. This participation, it is argued, plays a significant role in reinforcing the legitimacy and reproducing the hierarchical social structure of Pax Sinica.
Going beyond the tradition of Western political thought, this chapter looks at how thinkers and philosophers in Axial China deliberate and debate the idea of order. It examines why and how alternative visions of order are imagined and offered in antiquity and why world ordering becomes a moral and political quest in Axial China. Through this analysis, the chapter seeks to establish a broad claim that ancient Chinese political and philosophical deliberations are rich in international thought and to demonstrate why they are contemporaneous with us in search for global international thought firmly anchored in a pluralistic civilizational heritage.
This chapter offers a critical assessment of ‘the international turn’ in the studies of ancient Chinese history and philosophy. This international turn, it is noted, coincides fortuitously with and complements the international turn in intellectual history in trans-Atlantic International Relations, though there is little evidence that they are aware of each other. This renaissance in the history of international thought in the global setting raises three challenging questions to the construction of a truly global intellectual history of the international in the longue dureé: (1) What is international thought? (2) Why should longue dureé intellectual history of the international go beyond the Enlightenment and the Renaissance? (3) Where to look for international thought? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully sought through a conversation between these two international turns in search of a global foundation of international thought.
This introductory chapter sets out a compelling rationale for the book project to historicize Chinese world ordering from a civilizational and cultural perspective and outlines the contribution it seeks to make to scholarship. It also provides a brief description of the structure of the book and an outline of each chapter.
