We are in need of more reading on the period from 1790 to 1840, and this is an engaging addition. The author is not necessarily out to tell us things we did not already know about the period (even though we do not know enough yet), but to offer an analytical approach that will allow us to see the period in a new way.

At the heart of the book are chapters based on original documents as well as broad secondary reading. First they put the White Lotus origins and roughly coterminous piracy assaults of the Guangdong and Fujian coasts into the contexts of environmental deterioration, popular ideological trends, and the breakdown of central control over not only parts of China but also important bordering arenas—particularly Vietnam, with pirate activity and failed efforts to suppress it put against the background of the Tay Son defeat of the Qing invasion and the rise of the Nguyen dynasty. Then follows a detailed narrative contrasting the attempts of the Qianlong and Jiaqing courts to deal with these crises. The author points out, without quite putting it this way, that discipline—like matter—is neither created nor destroyed. As central control recedes or devolves, local control of some kind of other—by lineages, economic communities, religious associations, gangs, or pirate networks—will effloresce. It was partly on the basis of this persisting index of coherence that the Jiaqing emperor was able to use a light touch in reestablishing civil order, reviving some sectors of the local economy, and restoring to Manchu elites their previous edge in staffing and influencing the inner-most government—the latter of which the author, following Michael Chang, regards as an “ethno-dynastic” (p. 122) imperative. Some of the narrative is rich in detail, and there is a very absorbing treatment of financial questions related to the campaigns against the White Lotus rebels. On other subjects, the integrated narrative can tend toward the inclusive but flighty, though almost always helpfully pointing in the direction of extended reading. The serial topical treatment within chapters makes the accessibility of the text exemplary, though there is a certain cost in terms of textured integration of the many strands the author weaves together.

The central contribution here is flanked by theoretical interventions. Instead of Qing “decline” after the 1780s, or certainly after 1795, the author suggests that we mark the Jiaqing period in particular as one of a recouping of resources and redesign of imperial administrative strategy. The narrative burden identifies sources of social and economic disorder (on land and sea) from late Qianlong to Daoguang, and marks the points at which state responses generated new political and occasionally economic resources, efficiency, and a search for fresh talent. To put it into the author's own terms, reaching the limits of environmental and economic development in the late eighteenth century presented the state with challenges that at the time overwhelmed its talent reservoir and organizational reach; this was an “era of political debt” (in the text, italicized, p. 9 and elsewhere). But the Jiaqing responses of retrenchment, recruitment, and a certain amount of decentralization created an “era of political dividend” (italicized again, p. 8 and elsewhere). Much of the inspiration, if not the direct content, of these analyses are drawn from political science and, ostensibly, anthropology; this implies a comparative obligation that is only lightly met with an allusion to Wang Anshi's reforms during the Song to Southern Song transition.

The analytical project is ambitious, with many branchings and switchbacks. Some of it is founded on rather familiar brittle conceits that get little qualification or dissection, such as the “Sino-centric tributary system” or ascribed “Confucian” notions of borders and legitimacy (pp. 37–39 and elsewhere); in other instances, novel brittle conceits such as “all-encompassing contentious crises” (p. 11 and elsewhere) are introduced. The idea that the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns were not part of an inexorable downward slide in government efficacy and social coherence, but evince effective reform, is not new. The author gives credit to earlier scholars who have explored this still-shaded period to illuminate early nineteenth-century reform and revival. But he protests that there is still too much emphasis upon the troubles that arose and not enough upon official response; conventional wisdom seeing in these diffuse disorders of the earlier nineteenth century the roots of later catastrophes has not, in his view, been sufficiently challenged.