Announcing the Toynbee Prize Foundation panel at AHA25: China in Twentieth-Century and Earlier World Orders

The Toynbee Prize Foundation is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a panel at the American Historical Association's Annual Meeting on January 3rd, 2025. Please find the AHA25 program link here.

China in Twentieth-Century and Earlier World Orders

Chair: Dominic Sachsenmaier (Georg-August-University Goettingen)

This panel features former Toynbee Prize-winner Kenneth L. Pomeranz (University of Chicago) in conversation with Tobie S. Meyer-Fong (Johns Hopkins University), Andrew Liu (Villanova University), and Shoufu Yin (University of British Columbia).

China’s role in the “world order” – however we think of that very ambiguous term – was at a low ebb in 1900, in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising; today, it plays a central role.  However, only in the last 40 years has it been possible to trace anything like a linear “rise of China,” both for domestic reasons and because those years offered a relatively stable global system for China to adapt to.  As that system unravels, China will play a greater role in determining what comes next than it has had at any point since the onset of globalization. In wondering how that might work, it is worth looking back at how globalization functioned in previous periods in which there was less stability, both within China and in the larger world. The panel will discuss important facets of the 20th-century experience and situate them within broader, partly comparative perspectives, offering reflections on themes like globally circulating notions of liberty, 19th-century China in late imperial contexts, and China and the histories of global political economy (classical and neoliberals forms).