This volume, a part of the “History of Imperial China” series edited by Timothy Brook, is a welcome addition to what is still a rather sparse collection of general histories of the late imperial period. Brook manages, as he always does, to write with an attention to the particular while making large general points. The reader whose eyes might glaze over with abstractions about the changing legal status of maritime trade, for example, will remember the figure of the castaway Guan Fangzhou and the way he was caught in the labyrinth of regulations about maritime trade (pp. 213–15).

One of the pleasures of this book, which makes it ideal for classroom use, is the variety of sources it uses: shipwreck records (to trace developments in porcelain), law codes, what Brook calls commonplace books (biji), and so on. The book suggests to students (and to the rest of us) the wide range of sources that are available to construct histories. But this is not just a book that is useful in classrooms; it contributes in fundamental ways to our thinking about the late imperial period in three ways—periodization, climate, and connections to the outside world.

The first two contributions are linked. Brook tells us that he did not intend to write a history that placed the Yuan and Ming in one era, but when he began collecting data on weather, disasters, and dragon sightings (which were, it seems, quite common during the Yuan and Ming), it seemed logical to locate the two dynasties in one time period, which corresponds to the Little Ice Age noted by historians of other parts of the world (pp. 1–2). While he does not efface the differences between the Yuan and Ming, he suggests that a number of aspects of late imperial China have their foundations in the Ming. What is significant about this, I think, is not the details of the argument, which will doubtless be debated and refined, but rather that Brook quite seriously uses climate as a way of periodizing Chinese history. To be sure, the units he uses are still dynastic, but in this analysis, he places two dynasties together in one “epoch” and notes nine “sloughs” during the period, when the weather was colder than normal or when there were widespread floods, droughts, famines, or epidemics. This is not a gimmick; his analysis is informed by the periodicity of the sloughs. This framing is the most interesting part of the book, and one that is likely to provoke the most controversy.

The third signal contribution of the book lies in its integration of China into the world. Although most scholars of the period acknowledge that the Ming interacted in various ways with the rest of the world, we still encounter all too often an undifferentiated rhetoric of closure in discussions of the Ming. The emphasis on the openness of the empire is facilitated by beginning the book with the Yuan; some things about the Ming (such as the voyages of Zheng He) make more sense if connected to Yuan cosmopolitanism. Brook foregrounds two texts that will surely play a larger role in the way even specialists look at the Ming as a result of his discussions: the Laud rutter and the Selden map, which is reproduced (albeit rather badly) in the text (pp. 216–19). (A better reproduction, which is certainly more usable for teaching, is available online at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/OrCollsDigital_Chinese.htm). Both the rutter (a gift to Archbishop Laud from a Jesuit in 1639) and the map (bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by John Selden [1584–1654]) confirm that China was more connected to the outside world than earlier narratives assumed.

Finally, Brook in his title makes a bold rhetorical move to foreground the continuities between the Yuan and the Ming by referring to this period as “The Troubled Empire.” I wonder whether the move is not a bit too bold. There are surely many ways in which the Yuan and the Ming were very different kinds of empire, and the ways in which they found and made trouble are also different. And one also must ask, what is it that troubles the empire? The weather, perhaps? Bad emperors? A burgeoning commercial society that outstrips the capacity of the government to deal with it? All of these are instances of trouble, but surely those moments of trouble are historically specific and are not durable for the whole of both dynasties.

Nonetheless, Timothy Brook has written a lively and thoughtful book, which we can use in our classrooms and argue about among ourselves.