Sima Qian's Ambition and Needham's Vision: A Comment on The History Manifesto from China's Perspective.

Abstract

he History Manifesto is of considerable significance to historians of science in China, which since 1978 has seen great changes and rapid economic development. Yet in the shadows of the tremendous advances lurks crisis. It has been observed that “many important nonconsistent issues in economic performances and policies appeared repeatedly in the past, and may very likely recur in the future. . . . A reason for the crisis in current economics is that many economists do not take history seriously.” Take regional economic imbalances, for example: the wealthiest regions in eighteenth-century China are still the wealthiest today, while most of the regions that were poorest then continue to be plagued by poverty. Some causes of this wealth discrepancy can be found in the policies of the past thirty-eight years, but the root of the problem may be traced to the “Great Divergence” over two centuries earlier, at which time the economy of the southern regions of the Yangtze River rivaled that of England, as Kenneth Pomeranz has pointed out.7 China has a long-standing tradition in historiography. Sima Qian’s (Ssu-ma Ch’ien; ca. 145– ca. 86 b.c.) expressed aspiration—“to examine all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of the past and present”—is considered the pinnacle for historians.8 The Institute for the History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences uses Sima’s adage as its motto. His Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian] was pioneering in including as part of the official history tradition (i.e., dynastic history) literature on astronomy and calendar making, music and acoustics, geography, metrology, hydraulic engineering, and economics. The study of climate change in China, spanning five millennia, by Zhu Kezhen (Zhu Ko-chen) and the compilation by Xi Zezong of nova and supernova records in Chinese history are examples that show earlier Chinese historians of science studying nature using historical accounts accumulated over a long period.9 Some of the criticism leveled at Jo Guldi and David Armitage centers on their overemphasis on the longue durée. In my opinion, however, the main argument in The History Manifesto does not pertain to a comparison between the merits of the long term and the short term; rather, the manifesto appeals to contemporary historians to have a broad vision and to write history from a macro-historical perspective, so as to arouse public interest in history and encourage historians to play a more active role in political decisions and public affairs. I believe