Commercial publishers, including the trade arms of academic presses, seem to be producing an ever-expanding number of handbooks, companions, and guides. Such works often line up scholarly luminaries as editors and writers and purport to capture the latest academic trends for an imagined audience of scholars and students within the field or discipline and beyond. The book under review here is a prime example of this type: positioned as part of the “Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History” series, it features a multi-generational constellation of experts who have provided brief introductions to Chinese history or historiography—or both—in relation to an assigned subfield, period, or theme. The work occupies a niche in a series: it, like its siblings, is intended to “provide sophisticated overviews of key topics, periods, figures and genres across a wide variety of subjects,” and “present authoritative and engaging surveys of current scholarship, and lucid and provocative synopses...

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