A visiting scholar will discuss aspects of imperial Chinese culture that tend to fascinate those unaccustomed to it during a talk at 3:30 p.m. Monday, March 21.
Kenneth Pomeranz will give a talk titled “Late Imperial Legacies: Land, Water and Long-Run Economic Development in China” in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of John C. Hodges Library. His lecture is free and open to the public.
Pomeranz is the University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Much of his work concerns the relationships between social, economic, environmental, and political change from the 18th century to the present, mostly in China, and often with reference to parallel or related processes elsewhere in the world.
In his lecture, Pomeranz will discuss one of the most striking features of later imperial China—the combination of a highly commercialized society with the strength of peasant land use rights and a very small share of the population dependent on wage earning. He will analyze some reasons for this occurrence and trace the consequences of the resulting system in terms of urbanization, internal trade, migration, environmental change, and fiscal policy.
The remaining UT Humanities Center visiting scholar lectures are:
March 28—Helmut Reimitz, professor of history, Princeton University, “On the Use and Abuse of the Roman Past in the Early Medieval West”
April 7—John Bryant, professor of English, Hofstra University, “Big Data, Small Data: Melville and the Humanities as Fluid Texts”
April 18—Barbara Savage, Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, “Merze Tate: Cosmopolitan Woman, Diplomatic Historian, World Traveler”
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CONTACT:
Joan Murray (865-974-4222, jmurra10@utk.edu)