What China and India Once Were

A significant and welcome addition to the scholarship of the field. Students of early modern and modern China and India will find it valuable.

An important contribution to the reorienting of early modern studies away from its Eurocentric legacy.

A delight.

This important scholarly contribution is much more than an introductory textbook. It is extremely valuable for the questions that it raises and the example that it sets.

A useful counter to the tendency to project from one case to the universal...Many readers, furthermore, will probably come to this book with a greater knowledge of one place than the other, the side-by-side analysis puts the lesser-known of the two countries in a more familiar context.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashoka University:
This fascinating volume is the indispensable starting point for long range India-China comparisons. It is methodologically sophisticated, unfailingly intelligent in the historical insights it provides, broad in its coverage and generous in the range of its cultural sympathies. The distinguished group of contributors are all in top form. They draw on deep reservoirs of scholarship but wear their learning lightly and accessibly. It is a measure of the success of the volume that not only will India and China specialists learn about each other's area of scholarship, they will also learn much that is new about their own. It is a comparative history that is both acutely self aware of the challenges of the genre, but also restores a sense of enchantment to the enterprise.

Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia:
What China and India Once Were makes an admirably far-ranging effort to compare the thought, political creativity, and institutions and social practices of these two great civilizations, which are now reentering the ranks of global powers. This insightful book could not be more timely.

Rosalind O'Hanlon, St. Cross College:
Leading historians of early modern India and China come together in this volume to offer a series of wonderfully imaginative and sharply analytical studies of key aspects of these two large imperial formations. The result is a path-breaking volume which will be required reading for those interested in debates about ‘early modernity’ and their implications for understanding the origins of our own globalized world.

Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia:
In one stroke, What China and India Once Were opens up a new realm of knowledge. This bold experiment in comparative history not only exposes many contemporary ideas and assumptions about India and China as parochial. It equips anyone interested in political economy, gender relations, religion, art, and literature with intellectual tools of remarkable subtlety and precision—the means to a profound and holistic understanding of two major countries that would decisively shape the world’s future.