Cynthia Brokaw
Professor of History
There’s no shortage of scholars who study the beautiful, elite texts of late imperial China, but Cynthia Brokaw is not one of them. Brokaw is interested in how small, independent publishers and sellers of woodblock books created a culture of literature and literacy in the rural peasant classes in isolated areas of China.
“Many Chinese scholars are frankly puzzled by what I’m doing,” she says. “But my interest is really in discovering at what time in China books [were] filtering down to the peasants and petty merchants, and when they and their children were beginning to read.” Brokaw specializes in the history of the book, but her goal is to learn how books affected social change in society — particularly at the lower levels.
Brokaw comes to Brown as a professor of history after seven years at Ohio State University. She did her graduate work at Harvard in history and East Asian languages. Her life-long relationship with Chinese history began when she was an undergraduate at Wellesley College and needed to take one requirement outside her concentration in European medieval history. “Of course I was somewhat naïve about the difficulties of the language when I started. It took years to master — if one can ever master the Chinese language.”
Her recent book Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods is the product of laborious but fascinating fieldwork in rural China.
Brokaw was able to follow two lineages of families who were the dominant publishers and sellers in the area. They produced educational texts, primers, rhyming books, medical texts and Confucian classics, among others. Itinerant book peddlers traveled the rural area on foot, often carrying books between shoulder poles. By combing through towns in a poor, mountainous region of southeastern China, she discovered genealogies and other records of the publishing families, including business records and many examples of the woodblock books themselves.
“I was a curiosity, really, and many people did not quite understand what I was doing,” Brokaw said. But she found the people who shared information and documents with her to be “generous and kind.”
The Department of History should prove equally welcoming. “Our students will have the opportunity to study with one of the foremost scholars of late Imperial China. Innovative and deeply learned, Professor Brokaw is at the same time accessible and eager to share her knowledge and ideas with our community,” says Omer Bartov, department chair.
Brokaw remembers being in a loft in rural China, examining an old basket of books belonging to the descendants of one of the publishers she was researching. “As I lifted up the first book, it crumbled in my hand — poof! — just bits of paper. I dug down further though, and was able to find some whole pages, and eventually full books.” With them, she was able to piece together a little more history.
At Brown, she hopes to guide her students on discoveries of their own.