COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
forth, will be forced sooner or later to face squarely some basic aspects of
historical explanation. For as Engels made clear in his attacks on the
wretched Duhring, any notion that violence is an independent historical
actor, and not yoked to the larger workings of économies, threatens the
whole basis of économie and sociological interprétations of history.
In the body of his text Perdue has already scattered occasional
références to the variety of possibilities that history présents at any time.
We hâve mentioned his unwillingness to explain the Qing conquest of
Central Asia by invoking économie, political, or social forces alone. The
conquest is above ail a décision by a human being, who faced other
possibilities and might hâve made other choices. Perdue also spéculâtes a
bit about alternate courses in Mongol history. Some joined the Chinese,
others the Russians. The former hâve disappeared as a distinct group. The
latter hâve their own republic in the Russian Fédération, with a population
of 300 000 (p. 298-299).
In his conclusion Perdue surveys much of the scholarship that was
popular when he was in graduate school, as well as some that his own
génération has produced, evaluating both in light of what his study has
established. In ail cases he shows a refreshing and fully justified distrust of
overly mechanical, deterministic, or theoretical approaches. None of the
comprehensive théories of nomadic-settled interactions entirely satisfy
him. Nor does world System theory. Nor do attempts to attribute China's
difficulties in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries to factor endowments
or global historical processes.
Perdue makes sensé of history not by invoking some exogenous System
of explanation, but rather by fully exploring events he narrâtes, fïnding
their many causes, tracing their interconnections, and setting them in
as complète as possible a context. Just as the completion of a circuit will
lead a long string of bulbs to light up, so the successful linking together of
historical causes and effects can create new illumination. This is what
good historians do. Even for the well-documented events of Europe and
America the task is not easy. For Central Asia, Russia, and the Qing, the
task can appear close to impossible. With Peter Perdue we never know
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