The History of Others: Foreign Peoples in Early Chinese Historiography

Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, School of Historical Studies. This lecture will provide an overview of the production and characteristics of alien history in early China, while acknowledging and attempting to gauge the cultural influence of these accounts among the alien people themselves, as "consumers" of histories they did not produce, but were used politically and in other ways. These reflections may also serve as a first step towards a comparative discussion, across the historiographic traditions of literate civilizations, about the fundamental issues of who wrote alien histories, why, and for whom.