First, we want to thank the past and current editors of the Journal of Asian Studies, Kenneth M. George and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, for creating this symposium and for recruiting the commentators. We regret that space does not permit us to respond to each in turn and to address all the stimulating issues that they raise. Rather, we try to focus on points and themes that appear in more than one of the comments or with which we have fundamental differences. This approach unavoidably entails engaging more with some commentators than others.
How best to do comparative history is a question that appears one way or another in all of the responses. We are delighted to have elicited this reaction because the aim of John Richards, Bin Wong, and Ken Pomeranz, who organized the “Chindia” conference at which the earliest iteration of this paper was presented, was precisely to stimulate...
