I’ve been waiting to write this post as I just wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say. Sadly, Professor G. William Skinner passed away on October 26, 2008.
There were students who knew Professor Skinner better than I did, his teaching career spanned over half a century, but I had the privilege to be a student in the last few seminars taught by this giant in the field of Chinese history and anthropology. Giant. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot when talking of the great figures in a particular field, but in the case of Professor Skinner one wonders if the word is a bit limiting.
Bill Skinner (literally) changed the way we look at China. Daniel Little at The China Beat has a solid and comprehensive review of Professor Skinner’s many and lasting scholarly contributions which I won’t repeat here. Suffice to say, Professor Skinner’s work on marketing systems and urban hierarchies provided historians with a new approach to thinking about China in terms of spatial relationships. His research into the economic orientation of China’s macroregions redrew the map (how many of us will ever be able to say that?) and created new ways of organizing data and