Volume 16, Number 3 · February 25, 1971
From Peking to Rome
By J.H. Plumb
Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley
edited by Ivan Morris
Walker & Co, 403 pp., $12.50
Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864
by Philip A. Kuhn
East Asian Series, Harvard, 225 pp., $8.50
The Rise of Modern China
by Immanuel C.Y. Hsü
Oxford, 830 pp., $14.50
The China Reader, Vol I, Imperial China
by Franz Schurmann, by Orville Schell
Random House, 322 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The China Reader, Vol II, Republican China
by Franz Schurmann, by Orville Schell
Random House, 394 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The China Reader, Vol III, Communist China
by Franz Schurmann, by Orville Schell
Random House, 667 pp., $2.45 (paper)
The Religions of the Roman Empire
by John Ferguson
Cornell, 296 pp., $8.50
Constantine
by Ramsay MacMullen
Crosscurrents in World History Series, Dial, 272 pp., $7.95
Rome: The Center of Power
by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli
Arts of Mankind Series, Braziller, 450, 451 illustrations with 91 color plates pp., $30.00
One of the most astonishing facts about the history of China is the immense length of time that elapsed before it became the disinterested study of Western intellectuals—and even now Sinologists are only beginning to grope with some of the fundamental questions posed by the immensity of China's past. At first sight this seems in marked contrast to Rome on whose history myriads of scholars have swarmed like ants these last 400 years; editing, translating, collecting, commenting on everything from the text of Livy to a denarius unearthed in Kirkcudbrightshire. And yet some of the most fundamental problems, particularly those which relate to the consequences of Rome's decline and fall, have not made much progress since the days of Edward Gibbon. But what is perhaps more surprising still, in these days of comparative history, hardly a scholar has ventured to compare these two great Iron Age empires, Rome and China; the two most formidable, most accomplished, most sophisticated that the pre-industrial world was to know.
Review, 2922 words
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