Irmy Schweiger's review of Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600-1950, published in Comparative Literature and World Literature, Vol. 2, no. 1, 2017, pp. 72–75.
Minghui Hu and Johan Elverskog, eds. Cosmopolitanism in China 1600-1950 . Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2016. Cambria Sinophone World Series. ISBN 9781604979008. 332 pp. By Irmy Schweiger (Stockholm University) Cosmopolitanism in China 1600-1950 has its seeds in a conference held in 2012 at UC Santa Cruz that brought together scholars from the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica, Taiwan and scholars from universities in North America, mainly from the fields of history and religion. A selection of the fruits of the conference has now been polished and packaged in this handsome volume consisting of altogether eight research articles, organized chronologically and by topics, accompanied by a short introduction by the editors plus a useful index. The volume maintains two main points. The first is that cosmopolitanism in China is not a new phenomenon developed in the late nineteenth century when foreign ideas and theories were the focus of Chinese intellectuals’