History Alum Daniel Knorr Published in Enterprise & Society

Published on March 31, 2022

UChicago alum in the Department of History, Daniel Knorr, recently wrote a piece entitled, "Profit and Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century China" in the journal, "Enterprise & Society," a forum for research on the historical relations between businesses and their larger political, cultural, institutional, social, and economic contexts.

Similarities between William Rowe’s Speaking of Profit and Peter Lavelle’s The Profits of Nature are not hard to find. Both are focused on the lives of elite men enmeshed in the political world of nineteenth-century China, explain and analyze their views of proper governance and their places in the intellectual milieu of the era, and cast an eye toward global comparisons. Both also feature the word “profit” in the title, and not by coincidence. However, their respective focuses lie on opposite ends of the momentous ruptures of China’s mid-nineteenth century, most notably the Opium (1839–1842) and Taiping (1850–1864) wars. Reading these two books together poses the provocative question of whether their similarities outweigh this considerable difference.

Click here to access and read the article.

Daniel Knorr received his PhD from the University of chicago and worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences in 2020.  He is currently Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.