We have organized a reading seminar in cooperation with Prof. Wenkai He, where we discussed his book Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China on April 4th at 10:00 AM.
Wenkai He (Ph.D., MIT, 2007) is an Associate Professor of Social Science at the Division of Social Science at HKUST. Before joining HKUST, he was An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. In the 2016-2017 academic year, he was a Radcliffe/Yenching Fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include comparative historical analysis in social science, political economy of state formation, and the political and economic history of China. His manuscript, The Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: Early Modern England, Meiji Japan, and Qing China, is published by the Harvard University Press in 2013. His current research project, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC), is a comparative study about legitimation of state power through social policies such as plague prevention, famine relief and river works in early modern England and 18-19th century Japan and China.
Required Reading:
Wenkai He, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), Introduction, Ch.1, and Ch.3. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525