Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition

"Time is basic to human consciousness and action, yet paradoxically historians rarely ask how time is understood, manipulated, recorded, or lived. Cataclysmic events in particular disrupt and realign the dynamics of temporality among people. For historians, these temporal effects are especially significant on large polities such as empires - the power projections of which always involve the dictation of time." "This volume is an investigation of precisely such temporal effects, focusing on the northern and eastern regions of the Asian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, when the polity at the core of East Asian civilization, Ming-dynasty China, collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. The consequences of this change were far-reaching for the temporal sensibility and historical outlook of not only the Chinese and Manchus, but also peoples directly affected by their respective fortunes: the Koreans and the Mongols. At the same time, to the southeast in China, European missionaries were groping for compromises between the temporal demands of the Confucian and Catholic worlds." "Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition not only expands our knowledge of a turning point in Asian history, but also suggests how a new perspective on the dynamics of social time in universal time can heighten our understanding of the human condition past and present."--BOOK JACKET.