Lecture | China Seminar
The Gradually Emerging Pacific - My Maritime History Studies
- Date
- Wednesday 9 October 2019
- Time
- Location
-
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- Vossius room
Abstract
The talk discusses Lin’s works in relation to the Pacific. Her socio-economic history research since 1976 has been related to Taiwan’s or China’s maritime trade. This talk shows that the maritime image, particularly a concrete Pacific image did not appear in her early works. Up to now, the global intellectual community still perceives the Atlantic as a central platform in analyzing historical changes to the point that even people living in areas bordering the Pacific tend to neglect the importance of this ocean for their own history. Findings in her latter research, particularly the one covering relations between Taiwan and Hong Kong, first published in Chinese in 2001, discovered the rise of the Pacific as an important shipping route to connect East Asia and the Western World during the first half of the 20th century.
Bio
Prof. Lin obtained her Ph.D. from History and East Asian Languages of Harvard University in 1989 and served as the president of Academia Historica of ROC/Taiwan from 2008 to 2010. Now she is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. Prof. Lin’s research focuses on economic history of East Asia from around 1600 till the present, which covers historical relations between Taiwan and China and that between Taiwan and US-Japan