Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 was published in 2015. She has published articles in The American Historical Review, Nature, and other leading journals in history, history of science, and Asian Studies.
Wu applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Birth of the Geopolitical Age at the Stanford University Press website.A wide range of intellectuals including Annales historians like Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, writers Thomas Henry Huxley, Ellsworth Huntington, Oswald Spengler, and Karl August Wittfogel shared with Semple a common interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries to find universal laws of historical development.Page 99 of my book gives a reasonably good idea of what the book is about although the reader would need more context to fully understand the page. On page 99, I discuss the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932), one of the founders and first female president of the American Geographical Association. Semple had studied with the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who coined the term Lebensraum – a concept about the necessary territorial size that a state needs to survive and prosper. She was the only woman among the 500 students in Ratzel’s economic geography seminar at the University of Leipzig and later helped to disseminate Ratzel’s geographical ideas in the United States. As a White woman from a privileged background, Semple’s career demonstrates both the opportunities and constraints for women of her time. Later in the book, I also discuss the Chinese translation of Semple’s work in the 1930s and its role in the growing interest in geopolitics in Asia.
Throughout the book I apply insights from network science to show how the geopolitical idea emerged in the twentieth century from influences in the sciences and social sciences. Semple is one example of how I use multiple and intersecting biographies as a global history method to break down the flattening effect of larger historical narratives into the individual trajectories of lived lives along with all their associated messiness, triumphs, and reversals of fortune. Individual lives give texture to broader concepts of “empires,” “frontiers,” and “nations” and cross the temporal and spatial boundaries we have created in the professionalization of modern history writing. Geopolitics is not just about moving people like chess pieces in a great power competition—it also extracted a steep human cost.
--Marshal Zeringue
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