Sublime

may be able to reconfigure the absolute sovereignty of nations;

Three developments in the present century frame my study: the rise of Asia – in particular, China; the crisis of planetary sustainability; and the decline of transcendent and universalist ideals. To what extent are Chinese and Indian intellectuals and activists beginning to address these issues? I

The third category is methodological and conceptual. My goal as a scholar is to replace the still dominant ‘national-modernization’ model with the paradigm of ‘sustainable modernity’ for the humanistic disciplines.

While the period of this study covers the last hundred years or so, I range back in time to better understand these responses in our present moment that is characterized by three global changes: (1) the rise of non-Western powers; (2) the loss of authoritative sources of transcendence (e.g., Marxism or religion); and (3) the looming crisis of plane

While Zhao acknowledges that the post-Qin ideal of tianxia is transformed, his conception continues to offer a top-down method of political ordering as the essence of the tianxia system. I submit that I have trouble with this model.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

The current era has not merely reterritorialized cores and peripheries away from groups of nations to those within and across nations but has also respatialized this division beyond geography (e.g., cyber-divisions and groupings).

Modern historians, in contrast, evaluate past events in their contemporary spatial and relational context and regard their archival remains in another time as ‘anachronisms’ or sources to interpret the past.

However, the conceptualization and larger implications of foregrounding circulatory histories over linear and bounded national or civilizational histories are yet to be elaborated, and my early chapters represent a preliminary effort in this direction.