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 dynasty.

The target readership for the series appears to be broad, embracing the informed reading public as well as China specialists and students of Chinese history. The opening paragraph of the volume helps relate the Qing to its successor state, the People's Republic of China. Contemporary China's major legacy from the Qing, its vast land mass, is established. The formation of the state, the institutions of government, and the operations of the bureaucracy are introduced, alongside the workings of the economy—considered largely as commerce—in relationship to the vast terrain in all its diversity, from the prosperous, highly urbanized, densely populated lower Yangzi valley to the exotic south-west where a mining boom transformed the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou in the first half of the eighteenth century. A fine discussion of the gentry (pp. 110–14) alerts the reader to comparable diversity in China's powerful literati stratum, laying foundations for understanding the eventual drift of the gentry away from the dynasty's side (or rather, from under its feet), depriving the monarchy of the foundations it had skillfully established in the second half of the seventeenth century. The world context is kept in view: New World crops contributed to population growth (p. 91); international trade was much more than a matter of tribute (pp. 133–8); and material culture showed the effects of vogues in Europe (p. 84). When the Qing empire expired in 1911, it did so “just about on time,” writes Rowe, and he means in world time, for its passing anticipated by only a few years the end of the other “early modern land-based Eurasian [empires]” —the Romanov, the Ottoman (p. 285).

This book pays close attention to some recently elaborated historical themes in Qing history, including gender relations and ethnicity. The first chapter begins with a story about the acquisition of Manchu “ethnicity” by a Chinese bannerman in the late seventeenth century. This story strategically situates the book in a field of history almost transformed in recent years by the emergence of a formidable body of scholarship on the Manchus and a shift of focus from coastal to Inner Asian China. Rowe himself is perhaps too much at home in the Yangzi valley to present a definitively “new Qing history” view of the empire in this period, but he does not allow us to forget that this was the era of Manchu ascendancy. Manchuria itself remains in view. By the 1880s the carefully cultivated homeland of the Aisin Gioro (p. 114) had become the site of concentrated Han settlement, as the court sought to build up its frontiers against the threat of Russia's eastward expansion (p. 211).

Qing history is a notoriously broken-backed beast. Textbook accounts generally feature a shift of focus from state and society in the first century and a half of the dynasty, to war and international relations in the later decades, with the Opium War of 1839–42 serving as a point of rupture. Rowe does not entirely sidestep this beast: chapters called Governance, Society, High Qing, and Commerce in the first half of the book are succeeded by chapters on Rebellion, Restoration and Imperialism in the second. But he explicitly rejects the classic point of rupture, arguing that the Sino-Japanese war was “a major watershed in Chinese imperial history” (p. 230). Following Akira Iriye in defining imperialism in “more political and military than economic” terms (p. 231), he dates the beginning of the age of imperialism in China “rather precisely” to April 1895, and the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Although this makes sense in the context of the history of imperialism as a multilateral phenomenon, it also leaves the Japanese in the vanguard of imperialism in China and readers wondering how to think about earlier foreign wars and treaties.

The book as a whole is not so provocative. Changing historical perspectives and alternative interpretative frameworks are presented for the edification of readers rather than used for strongly developed positional arguments. Its own blurb advertises the book as “revisionist,” challenging the “standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West.” It would be more correct to describe it as synthesizing a body of scholarship—including Rowe's own work—that has effected this revision over the period of the author's scholarly lifetime. “We now know” is a mantra in the book, suggesting a strong consensus of opinion among mostly American scholars on major issues in Chinese history in the Qing period. For the revelation of serious disagreements about Qing history, we must await the Chinese translation of this book, if there is one, to see what is left out or modified.