Despite having existed in ongoing processes of historical change for at least the last 2500 years, the intellectual traditions of East Asia are often discussed with relatively little attention to historical method and theory. These four sessions focus on applying historical method to the history of East Asian intellectual tradition, and notably Confucianism. The first session focuses on contemporary approaches to global history, engaging with issues like periodization, early modernization, multiple modernities and post-colonial historiography, in terms of how they might affect our thinking on East Asian thought. The second session focuses more directly on how these methods might be applied to the study of East Asian political thought, using the transnational history of Confucianism to bring paradigms from East Asian thought like the identity of the gentry, into dialogue with modern historiographical concepts like the formation of civil society, the birth of publicness, the industrious and industrial revolutions, etc. The contents of these first two sessions draw on my current writing for the Cambridge History of Confucianism.

The final two sessions take the topic of Democracy as a case study where we then attempt to apply historical methodologies to one particularly politicized aspect of political thought. In the third session I use my forthcoming chapter about early modern Japan in the Cambridge History of Democracy to demonstrate the application of this historical method to one political concept in the history of one particular place and period. In the fourth session, the workshop, I invite participants to join me in similarly considering the role of East Asian thought in democratic thinking in other places and periods in East Asia, including Taiwan. I would hope in this session to draw attention to the utility of postcolonial approaches to history in thinking about East Asian thought. The overarching aim is to illustrate the analytic power that more recent historical methodology gives to considerations of political thought.