HIST 150. Introduction to Historical Thinking: The Art of Warning (1). Imagine a management text with advice that has been tested through the ages—one that can make readers better students, employees, and employers. Imagine a book that will guide financial thinking, relationships, and even teach how to manage your boss. Jam-packed with management advice from China, every emperor read it, right up until the end of the imperial era. Moreover, influential people from all political persuasions kept on reading it. Mao Zedong read it on the back of a donkey during the Communist Party’s Long March in the mid-1930s. It was rated the most influential work of history in all of Chinese history by a recent poll of Chinese historians, and almost no one outside of East Asia has ever even heard of it. This course will introduce Sima Guang’s Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling, arguably the most important management textbook in history. It takes the lessons of Sunzi’s Art of War and brings them to a new level, one that would teach readers to run the most complex enterprise in the premodern world, the Chinese empire. The Art of War deals with a small world of contending kingdoms. What we will call The Art of Warning integrates those lessons and extends them to the complexity of a multi-faceted bureaucracy and enormous expenditures that parallel the challenges of today’s corporations. Everyone in China knows this book; almost no one in the West does. This course will introduce it, along with lessons that will bring advantages in the global marketplace that almost no peers can match. (5T) Topics course. Offered each semester.