The Discourse Politics of Empire: The Formation of the Modern World Order from the Perspective of Sino-Western Conflict in Modern Times/帝国的话语政治：从近代中西冲突看现代世界秩序的形成

This book focuses on the "imperial collision" between the Qing Dynasty and Britain in the late 19th century, and conducts a cross-cultural historical study of the "empire" issue. Centering on the imagination of sovereignty, the author focuses on analyzing intellectual traditions and discursive politics in law, diplomacy, religion, linguistics, and visual texts. Crawling through relevant historical archives and documents, the author deals with a wide variety of texts and historical events, such as international law, semiotics, gift exchanges between empires, missionary translations, grammar books, and even colonial photography , and all of this is run through by the main thread of the discursive politics of empire related to desire and the imagination of sovereignty. The author's core concern is to look at the formation of the modern world order from the perspective of the conflict between China and the West in modern times, and how China, as an ancient empire, was "shaped" into a modern nation-state by the discourse politics of the empire.

本书聚焦于19世纪晚期大清朝与英国之间的“帝国碰撞”，对“帝国”问题进行了跨文化的历史研究。作者以主权想象为中心，着重分析法律、外交、宗教、语言学及视觉文本中的知识传统和话语政治。通过爬疏相关的历史档案和文献资料，作者处理了大量不同种类的文本和历史事件，如国际法、符号学、帝国之间的礼物交换、传教士的翻译、语法书，甚至还有殖民摄影术，而这一切都由与欲望和主权想象有关的帝国的话语政治这条主线贯穿起来。作者的核心关怀是从近代中西冲突看现代世界秩序的形成，以及中国作为一个古老帝国是如何被帝国的话语政治“塑造”成为现代民族国家的。