Arthur Waldron is an American historian. Since 1997 he has been the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He works chiefly on Asia, China in particular, often with a focus on the origins and development of nationalism, and the study of war and violence in general.
Early life
Waldron was born in Boston on December 13, 1948. Waldron studied at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut and Winchester College in England. He attended Harvard College from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1971, receiving the Sophia Freund Prize, given to the student ranked academically highest in his class. In 1981 he received a Ph.D. in history, also from Harvard.
Waldron studied Ming Dynasty history at Harvard, during which he focused on why the relationship between the sedentary Ming and the nomadic Mongols who lived to the north often turned hostile. This led him to study the two debates over the recovery of the northwest loop of the Yellow River, known as the Ordos Loop. The debates are called in Chinese fu tao yi and were the topic of his Ph.D dissertation. After additional research, mostly undertaken at Princeton, this thesis culminated in his first book, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, which drew upon extensive documentary research to show that although multiple walls had been built at various times, the Ming Wall had given rise to the idea of the "Great Wall"—which turned out to be a constantly evolving compound of fact and myth, as well in recent times as a potent patriotic symbol. According to Waldron's book, actual wall building was best understood as an aspect of larger frontier strategy, never a single grand project in itself. Also while at Princeton Waldron began working on the history and diplomacy of the early Republican period in China. A major source was the papers of John Van Antwerp MacMurray, who served as U.S. minister to China in the 1920s until his 1929 resignation. In 1992, Waldron published MacMurray's memorandum of 1935, which foresaw the coming of conflict between the United States and Japan and was greatly esteemed by such later diplomats as George F. Kennan, with introduction and notes. Parallel research on China during the same period—that of the "Warlords" or junfa, a term often taken as indigenous but that Waldron has demonstrated is borrowed from Japanese Marxist writings —produced his third book, From War to Nationalism, in 1995. This presents a novel argument showing how the large-scale but almost entirely unstudied Second Zhili-Fengtian War of 1924 so utterly disrupted the existing political and power structures of China as to create a vacuum, along with the conditions for the emergence, in the following year, of the radical nationalist May Thirtieth Movement. That war brought the demise of much that had been standard in Chinese politics and international relations, often since the nineteenth century, while opening the way for the mass, strongly leftist, and nationalist politics that becomes increasingly strong thereafter, ultimately bringing Communist rule in 1949. Building on his War College experience, Waldron has continued at the University of Pennsylvania to research and teach comparative warfare and strategic analysis, ranging the world and recorded history, while also, in keeping with Sinological training, offering seemingly more conventional courses on Asian and Chinese history and culture, often dealing with the complex webs of causes that produce nationalism and related phenomena. His most recent publications have dealt with issues of Chinese patriotism, national identity, and military tactics in the Second World War. Waldron's current research interests include twentieth century Chinese history, China's policies toward and conflicts with her neighbors, and Asian international relations.
Personal life
In 1988, Waldron married Xiaowei Yu; he and his wife have two sons.
