This book is one in a series on the History of Imperial China under the general editorship of Timothy Brook. In it, William T. Rowe, a distinguished historian of late imperial China, presents a general history of a period that in specialist studies tends to be treated in bite-sized pieces: early Qing, High Qing, the Opium Wars, the 1911 Revolution, and so on. Since historiographical issues tend to vary according to period, a unified history of the Qing written from a fixed standpoint would be a difficult thing to produce, and Rowe has not attempted to write one. Rather, he introduces the dynasty from several different viewpoints, in the course of a journey that ends at a point quite distant from the point of departure—like a journey from the English Civil War to the end of the Edwardian era, which covers a time span comparable to that of the Qing...

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