Owen Lattimore collection

5b95f4e9-7baa-4979-ab5b-4f5e9d660251

Collection

Interviews and publications reflecting the work of Owen Lattimore.

Owen Lattimore (July 29, 1900 – May 31, 1989) was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England.

Lattimore’s “lifetime intellectual project”, notes one recent scholar, was to “develop a ‘scientific’ model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along ‘frontiers’.” He eclectically absorbed and often abandoned influential theories of his day that dealt with the great themes of history. These included the ecological determinism of Ellsworth Huntington; biological racism, though only to the extent of seeing characteristics which grew out of ecology; the economic geography and location theory; and some aspects of Marxist modes of production and stages of history, especially through the influence of Karl August Wittfogel. The most important and lasting influence, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died. Lattimore’s most influential book, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940), used these theories to explain the history of East Asia not as the history of China and its influence on its neighbors, but as the interaction between two types of civilizations, settled farming and pastoral, each of which had its role in changing the other. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Lattimore)