This essay, written from the vantage point of a historian specialized in early modern Japan, asks if and in what capacity the history of knowledge offers an advantage for our understanding of the past compared to established historiographical forms. It accounts for the intellectual relevance of this genre of history and concludes with a strong endorsement of its self‐reflexive methodology. It also contends that historical research on East Asia is of inestimable value for this historiographical approach because of its resistance to uncritically universalizing Eurocentric terminology and because of its direct engagement with transcultural translation of both archival sources and heuristic apparatus. Historians working on knowledge production in East Asia or in other parts of the “non‐Western” world must constantly question the effects of their interpretive categories on the topics and archives they study; they are thus accustomed to the epistemological self‐reflection that this new approach seems to require. The essay concludes by advocating metaphorical comparison as a formal model that best expresses historians’ heuristic practices.

中文翻译：

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知识史的关键承诺：来自东亚研究的观点

这篇文章是从一位专门研究近代日本现代史的历史学家的角度出发而提出的，它问及与既定的史学形式相比，知识史是否以及以何种能力为我们对过去的理解提供了优势。它解释了这种历史流派的思想相关性，并以其自反性方法论得到了强有力的支持。它还认为，对东亚的历史研究对于这种史学方法具有不可估量的价值，这是因为它对欧洲中心术语的不加批判的抵制，以及它直接参与了档案资料和启发式工具的跨文化翻译。在东亚或“非西方”世界其他地区从事知识生产的历史学家必须不断质疑其解释性类别对他们研究的主题和档案的影响；因此，他们习惯于这种新方法似乎需要的认识论自我反思。本文最后通过提倡隐喻比较作为最能表达历史学家的启发式实践的形式模型来进行总结。