History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth Review

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History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth ReviewCohen's book analyzes a particularly notorious (for Chinese and Western commentators) historical event--the Boxer Rebellion in North China (1899-1900) from an extremely fresh perspective. It is hardly poststructuralist to assert that people live history one day at a time, rather than according to some grand plan, and that is how Cohen treats the Boxer Rebellion. Most Western scholars merely see the Boxers as a manifestation of an irrational, bloodthirsty xenophobiba, while Chinese scholars seem to fall into two categories: (1) those like the early twentieth century modernizers who saw the Boxers as an embarrassment to the cause of national unity and freedom, and (2) those like Communist Chinese historians who see the Boxers as a precursor of their own victorious struggle in 1949. Cohen masterfully demythologizes the Boxers and puts them into the context of (gasp!) their own lives. Working from a combination of secondary and primary sources, Cohen reconstructs the domestic situation in China during the late nineteenth century and argues that domestic issues (particularly famine and floods) more than anything else prompted the Boxer uprising. This thesis, of course, turns on its head the idea that the Boxers were an instrument of the evil Dowager Empress Cixi in order to prevent Westerners from disturbing China's ancient and corrupt culture. Cohen is especially interesting in examining the mechanics and experience of mythmaking, applied in this case to the Boxers but which could be applied to just about any event or experience that has emotional or subjective importance for a group of people. This book is extremely useful for anyone, history students or otherwise, who are interested in Chinese history, or perhaps more fundamentally, how we reconstruct the past in order for it to make sense.History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth Overview

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