Albert Feuerwerker

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Albert Feuerwerker (November 6, 1927 – April 27, 2013) was a historian of modern China specializing in economic history and long time member of the University of Michigan faculty. He was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1991.

Career

On the national scene, Feuerwerker was one of the generation of Cold War scholars who established the field of Area Studies. At the University of Michigan, Feuerwerker was a key organizer of the field of Chinese studies. He served as first director of the Center for Chinese Studies, 1961–1967, and again from 1972 to 1983.[1]

Among his national positions was the presidency of the

China Quarterly
.

He died in Ann Arbor, 2013, survived by his wife, Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, herself a widely published historian of modern Chinese Literature, and his children, Alison and Paul.[2]

Scholarly interests

Feuerwerker's doctoral dissertation was published as the first volume in the Harvard University Press East Asian series, China's Early Industrialization; Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Harvard, 1958), which explored the difficulties of a Confucian government in taking on the tasks of

Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China critiques Feuerwerker's point of view.[3] Feuerwerker returned to this theme in his Presidential Address to the Association for Asian Studies, "Presidential Address: Questions About China's Early Modern Economic History That I Wish I Could Answer," [4]

His criticisms and analysis of Marxist historiography of China are represented in articles such as "China's History in Marxian Dress," [5] and "The Ideology of Scholarship: China's New Historiography," with Harold A Kahn.[6] In his edited volume of articles, History in Communist China originally published in China Quarterly,[7] scholars critically analyzed the work of historians in the People's Republic of China on a wide range of topics.

He was editor or co-editor of a number of volumes, including Albert Feuerwerker, Rhoads Murphey, and Mary Wright, eds., Approaches to Modern Chinese History. (Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1967), a collection of essays by fellow students of Fairbank, and volumes of "The Cambridge History of China", a series in which he published several chapters.[8]

Major Publications

  • China's Early Industrialization; Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
  • The Chinese Economy, 1912–1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968 online
  • History in Communist China, MIT Press, 1968 (as editor of 17 essays, 2 his own)
  • The Chinese Economy, Ca. 1870–1911 (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies No. 5), University of Michigan, 1969 online
  • Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese History, with Sally Cheng, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970 Google Books. Lists and annotates 500 items.
  • Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century China, (Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies), Center for Chinese Studies, 1975
  • The Foreign Establishment in China in the Early Twentieth Century, Ann Arbor (Michigan), 1976
  • State and Society in Eighteenth-Century China: The Ch'ing Empire in Its Glory, (Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies), 1976
  • Economic trends in the Republic of China, 1912–1949, (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies 31), University of Michigan. Center for Chinese Studies, Ann Arbor, 1977
  • Chinese Social and Economic History From the Song to 1900: Report of the American Delegation to a Sino-American Symposium, Beijing, 26 October-1 Nov., by Sino-American Symposium On Chinese Social And Economic History, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1982
  • "The state and the economy in late imperial China." Theory and Society 13.3 (1984): 297-326 online.
  • "Economic trends in the late Ch’ing empire, 1870–1911." in The Cambridge History of China 11.part 2 (1980): 1–69.

Notes

  1. ^ CCS Mourns the Passing of Albert Feuerwerker Archived 2013-07-20 at the Wayback Machine Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan
  2. ^ CCS Mourns the Passing of Albert Feuerwerker Archived 2013-07-20 at the Wayback Machine Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan
  3. ^ Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, London:: Columbia University Press, 1984 2010, with a New Introduction by the Author), pp. 79–80.
  4. ^ Journal of Asian Studies 51.4 (1992): 757–769.
  5. ^ The American Historical Review 66.2 (1961): 323–353.
  6. ^ The China Quarterly 22 (1965): 1–13.
  7. ^ (Cambridge,: M.I.T. Press, 1968)
  8. ^ Albert Feuerwerker papers, 1968–1992 Michigan Historical Collections Bentley Historical Library University of Michigan.

External links