Since The Magic of Concepts came out, I have found myself constantly recommending it to friends and colleagues, and in particular to friends and colleagues who are not scholars of modern China. And not just because I assume all modern China specialists already pay attention to Rebecca Karl's work; rather, it is because she achieves in this book what historians often strive and fail to do, or at least fail to do well—to truly engage the global and the present from the specific geographical and chronological perspective of our chosen historical subjects. In The Magic of Concepts, Karl produces a very clearly argued critique of recent scholarship on Chinese and world history, whose goal and focus seem to be limited to the inclusion of China's unique, culturally determined path within the universal history of economic development. She explains how that inclusion only reinforces the tendency to naturalize widespread ideological assumptions about economic normativity as well as to foster China's cultural nationalism. And, even more importantly, she demonstrates how such an approach prevents us from thinking about the very concepts that inform our historical and political understanding, which we then end up accepting as ahistorical a priori: the economic, the global, development, the market, and probably, one could add, China itself.

The Magic of Concepts is, however, much more than spirited critique. In this book—structured as five related essays that combine to produce a cogent analysis of 1930s economic thought—Karl shows precisely how such a rethinking can be achieved from the perspective of an unexceptional but diverse China, and what enormous intellectual and political consequences such a rethinking can produce. In that, she provides an excellent example of how, by looking at what are basically two decades in the intellectual history of China's twentieth century—or rather, maybe by looking from those specific historical conjunctures—we can challenge not only and not so much how the specific history of China fits into the global history of capitalism, but rather how certain conceits have framed and still frame our scholarship and limit our political horizons. She puts forth a global but dialectical view, which, as she writes, “would turn China into a constitutive analytic for ‘the (modern capitalist) world’ rather than merely treating China as one more geographical space to be included in a ready-made purview of ‘the world’” (p. 27).

This analytical shift allows Karl to illuminate a series of issues that are fundamental in terms of not only historical scholarship but also our political consciousness today; in that, this is a very timely book. First and foremost, The Magic of Concepts traces a series of phenomena in the intellectual and political realm, in China and in the “global,” whose connections were always felt but never clear, at least to me: the seemingly irresistible ascent of the Austrian school of economics and the new economic history of Asia, the emergence of a transnational scholarship of “empires,” and the concomitant disappearance of imperialism as an analytical category; the postcolonial diktat of anti-eurocentrism and a resurgent Chinese nationalism; to these we should add the big unspoken one, the end of socialism and maybe of the age of revolutions itself. Karl is incredibly clear in dissecting these connections (be they voluntary or unconscious), pointing at epistemic echoes between, for example, the positioning of the post-Mao state and scholarly assumptions about what constitutes “normal” economic development. Here too China serves as a specific location from which one can highlight both the political danger and the intellectual misery of this universalized economic doxa.

Karl also offers us a way out of this contemporary universalist mess, and she does that by bringing us back to the 1930s and 1940s—proving, as an aside, that history is indeed politically useful. At least since the 1990s, we have been in a situation where concepts such as the state, the economic, the global, and culture have become purely transhistorical categories; they have become, in her words, “magical.” As a counter-example, Karl illustrates how in the 1930s thinkers and political actors, foremost among them the economist Wang Yanan, stubbornly refused to take those concepts as stable or fixed and argued instead that they were the products of the very historical conditions created by the violent expansion of capitalism in China (and by the change produced to colonial modernity by China's insertion in the capitalist global). In this sense, Wang and his obstinate unmasking of any magic—his insistence that the economic and the global could exist and therefore only be examined in dynamic relation to everyday materiality—represent a clarion call for us to deal with our own current magical thinking. In the 1930s, Wang argued that these ideological conceits were designed to and actually did “put people in thrall (yinren rumi)” (p. 89); and as Karl shows, we are, in the West as well as in China, still under the magical thrall of “the economic,” seen as “a historically non-specific mode of exchanges named the market” (p. 78).

Wang Yanan's analysis of the global as continuously reconstituted through the violent establishment of a necessary interdependence into capitalism is a point that, surprisingly, needs very much to be reiterated, especially among historians of China and the world. As Karl highlights, in recent years, we seem to have erased or at least forgotten decades of efforts to bring colonial exploitation and the continuous recreation of unevenness under capitalism to the center of our scholarly production. Those efforts have been pushed aside, in the name of the always-already globalized world in which China (or other players) can now simply claim their legitimate place. Wang's analysis, produced in a moment of colonial expansion and the crisis of capitalism, forces us to focus again on that process, on the historicized practices of capitalism and colonialism.

Finally, in Karl's analysis, Wang Yanan's understanding of the commodity form (the constitutive element of capitalism) as both a historical materiality and ideological effectivity is revelatory. Capitalism produced the transformation of and the domination over the socioeconomic structure but it also came with forms of knowledge, consciousness, and ideologies produced and reflective of the commodity form. Wang saw the Austrian school of economics as one of those ideologies, inseparable from and dependent on colonial capitalism. And that justified his call for a decolonization that went beyond eliminating the physical presence and socioeconomic domination of imperialists to break the much more pervasive influence of colonial and capitalist culture and ideological conceits. In many ways, mutatis mutandis, that kind of decolonization seems very much needed now. And not only in China.