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 of contemporary debates” while also including suggestions for further reading and a robust bibliography.Footnote ¹ Commissioned by a venerable commercial publisher, it is not priced to sell, at least in hard copy, logging a hefty retail tag of $195. But it is available via library subscription or as a much less costly e-book, suggesting that it should best be disaggregated and read selectively a la carte, rather than devoured in one sitting by a solitary diner overwhelmed by the smorgasbord.

The series imagines an audience of students and scholars within and beyond the subfield of each title, ideally perhaps, the instructor of a world history class who wants to add an au courant dash of, say, China to the syllabus. A Companion to Chinese History thus introduces the latest trends in the China field as constituted in China, Japan, Europe, and as positioned within the field of world history, before beginning a long march across China's long history and through various recently exciting thematic subfields in the Anglo-American scholarship. The best of its essays offer insights useful to the graduate student preparing for comprehensive examinations and thus trying to cram an overall impression of Chinese history as practiced in Japan or China over the twentieth century or at present, a first-time instructor developing a syllabus on medieval or contemporary China, or a scholar of modern European gender or economic history wondering what colleagues in China have to say on the same themes.

Articles in this volume are brief and for the most part accessible. Some authors offer a balance of historical and historiographical content, others (less successfully) tilt more to one side or the other. Taken together, they create a composite portrait of a field bursting its temporal and spatial banks, exploring new territories experimenting with scale, offering novel frames for comparison, and parsing chronologies in fresh and productive ways. The essays are placed into three categories: “States of the Field,” “Chronology,” and “Themes.”

The first group includes an essay by Endymion Wilkinson, seeking to answer its titular question “How Do We Know What We Know?” which offers a condensed overview of sources both archaeological and textual from earliest times to the present. The piece is quite informative for the specialist (or potentially for the nonspecialist wondering what kinds of materials China historians might use), but would benefit greatly from more robust introductory framing. May-bo Ching provides an overview of Chinese historiography since the 1980s, emphasizing the rise of social and interdisciplinary approaches. Like others in the volume, she highlights an increased emphasis in the scholarship on the local, the everyday, the commercial, and the fragmentary—and the resulting tension between reading the particular as representative or exceptional, especially in relation to a homogenizing political center, whether past or present. Shiba Yoshinobu takes a long view of Japanese scholarship on China, highlighting foundational work on legal and economic history even as he clarifies scholarly lineages and institutional affinities. Harriet Zurndorfer's article on Chinese history in Europe focuses on the structural factors shaping scholarship in the United Kingdom and on the continent since the 1990s. In a co-authored essay, editor Michael Szonyi and Geremie Barmé illuminate the ways in which official China produces a “useful” past highlighting post-humiliation revival that coexists, increasingly uncomfortably, with the past of personal memoirs, academic historians, artists, and authors. Finally, Gregory Blue provides a time-lapse portrait of China in works of global history from 1900 to the present, shedding light on the fraught origins of this subfield. His article suggests readings for today's global historians seeking to include China in their teaching and scholarly ambit, and ways in which recent work on China might productively be brought into other conversations.

With few exceptions, the essays on chronology defy previous approaches to periodization and spotlight the deficiencies of the dynasty as a unit of historical time. They also call into question conventional spatial mapping practices, repeatedly highlighting alternative local or transnational frames, and focus on the transformations wrought in the scholarship as a result of new archival and archaeological sources. Hence, we have, inter alia, Michael Puett's article on early China in Eurasian history, Charles Holcombe on the (hard to name) post-Han to Tang, Michal Biran on the non-Han dynasties, R. Kent Guy on the Song to Qing (an unconventional periodization, but sensible if one thinks of the ways in which the Song seems familiar to a scholar of the Qing), and Timothy Cheek on the reform era as history. Some of these pieces are more historical. R. Kent Guy's article, for example, offers an informative, textbook-style introduction to his freshly parsed period, of more use perhaps to the non-China specialist. By contrast, Paul Cohen's piece provides a first-person narrative of American scholarship on China's nineteenth century from the 1950s to the present. He spotlights the ways in which the century, like the dynasty, fits awkwardly around the events. He also reminds us how much the scholarship on this period has changed since the 1950s, and again since the 1980s. S. A. Smith's article on the Mao era will be of considerable use to graduate students, as it provides handy introductions to Chinese-language primary source genres, repositories, and databases while also narrating fundamental changes in the historiography since the 1960s. Some of the authors of these chronologically based pieces benefit from the vitality of recent scholarship on their assigned periods, which have been transformed by new sources and enlivened by many fresh faces. Others, not surprisingly, had to work much harder—the distribution of Anglophone scholarship across Chinese time remains quite uneven.

The third and final section consists of articles showcasing works on eleven themes and a territory. To spotlight several of these: Weijing Lu offers an overview of the history of gender, family, and sexuality in China based on recent scholarship in this vital field. Her article will be of interest especially to scholars working on the same theme with regard to other geographies. Two articles, by David Der-wei Wang and Graham Sanders respectively, introduce modern and premodern literature. Sanders provides a summary history in the style of a textbook overview, while Wang uses his article to make an argument about the relationship between modern literary practice and the rise of the Chinese nation-state. Much recent work treats ethnicity, nationalism, and/or identity, and Thomas Mullaney provides an able historiographical overview. The article on Chinese law by William Alford and Eric Schluessel explicates changes in the study of Chinese law since the nineteenth century, while Richard von Glahn focuses on paradigm shifts in the field of premodern economic history since the 1970s. The latter article especially connects contemporary change to the reinterpretation of history. It also offers a lucid introduction to a complex and important historiography. Shelley Rigger introduces the study of Taiwan history in a changing political and regional context while also providing a summary of the island's history from its first human settlers to the twenty-first century.

Szonyi has assembled a veritable dream team of sinological all-stars for this project. One might well be tempted to pay full price to have access to their collective wisdom in one's personal collection. Given the nature of the project and the somewhat uneven quality of the articles, savvy readers will find it more cost effective, and probably more satisfying, to browse their library's Wiley Blackwell database and choose the items that meet their immediate needs as they revise a syllabus, prepare for comprehensive exams, or dip a toe into the vital field of Chinese history from the outside.