In "Lost Modernities" Alexander Woodside offers a probing
revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial
China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and
administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long
experimentation with governments recruited in part through
meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their
transparent procedures.
The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that
good politics could be established through the "development of
people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries
before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world,
these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on
examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the
mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what
is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that
the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur
independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as
the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution.
A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both
their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes
modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a
unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history
and on global historical time.
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