Although different in methodology, approach, and periodization, Timothy Brook's Great State: China and the World and Rebecca E. Karl's China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History make for stimulating companions. Together, they tell the story of China and the world from the thirteenth century to the present. The two authors share similar goals. Brook, who focuses primarily on the Mongols, the Ming, and the Qing, seeks to “exemplify how the world has mattered to China, how China has mattered to the world, and how China has always been in the world” (Brook, p. 9). Karl, who analyzes China's revolutions from the nineteenth century to the present, argues that “while modern revolutions in China have of course always been Chinese, they always have been global as well” (Karl, p. 2). What is perhaps most interesting about these books is the way the authors use China's relationship with the world to understand what it has meant to be Chinese. Brook invokes the idea of the Great State: “part of knowing that you were Chinese was knowing that you stood under the canopy of the Great State” (Brook, p. 9). Karl, meanwhile, sees the Chinese experience as fundamentally rooted in the country's revolutionary tradition and in the search for ways to respond to Western capitalism and colonialism. Did being Chinese mean living in a Christian state? A capitalist or socialist nation? Were any of these systems capable of restoring Chinese sovereignty? These were the central questions that animated China's revolutions for more than a century.

Despite these similarities, Karl and Brook approach “the world” and “the global” differently. For Brook, the world was made of objects, travelers, diplomats, commodities, missionaries, germs, and maps. In short, China and the world were brought into a relationship through movement, contact, and exchange. For Karl, global connections were constituted through the proliferation of modern ideologies and systems, particularly global capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. China's response to these larger structures of power prompted a series of modern revolutionary movements in the country and, according to Karl, redounded outwardly and shaped the modern world.

In his analysis of the Great State, Brook presents thirteen case studies of Chinese people or objects that directly interacted with the outside world. All of these interactions were, according to Brook, mediated through the concept of the Great State. The Mongol Khans first introduced the idea of the Great State to China, Brook argues. More than a foreign policy, the idea of the Great State was a type of disposition or mentality that framed China's relationship with the world and guided the state's view of itself and its seemingly limitless authority. At the core of this Great State mentality was the belief that “there is nothing natural about the boundaries of a political territory” and that “the goal of rulership is to enlarge the realm through conquest” (Brook, p. 8).

These two poles of the Great State did not always function simultaneously or in concert. It so happens that the Yuan and the Qing, China's two non-Han dynasties, both rejected political boundaries and enlarged their realms through conquest, whereas the Ming believed more in the former but did not often engage in the latter. Brook's study of the Great State also helps us understand the contours of each dynasty, particularly as it entered into a period of decline. When the Ming and the Qing became moribund, for instance, they were less capable of operating the levers of Great State power. Two chapters—one on the Ming's failure to respond to Spanish and Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia and the other on Chinese laborers working under horrible conditions in South African mines in 1905—demonstrate this point and reflect the mutability of the Great State concept.

Brook is, unsurprisingly, at his best when describing the Ming Great State. Brook challenges the idea that the Ming was a conservative autarky, particularly when it came to the court's dealings with Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century. He offers an especially illuminating analysis of the debates that took place at the Ming court over whether to admit the Portuguese as nontribute traders. The Ming Great State, Brook argues, was not inherently hostile to foreign trade. Rather, officials saw foreign trade as an extension of diplomacy and therefore were wary of any trade occurring outside official diplomatic channels. Brook thus portrays the Great State not as a fixed or rigid foreign policy but as an idea that existed within specific Chinese contexts and was constantly being debated and negotiated at court. The Great State concept, moreover, was not the sole province of the Chinese, as one chapter on a Korean envoy named Ch'oe Pu demonstrates. In his dealing with Ming officials and traders, Ch'oe claimed that he, too, operated under the Ming Great State's umbrella and should not be treated as an outsider. The idea of the Great State, in other words, had purchase beyond the Chinese people.

Although the Great State guided China's foreign policy for many centuries, it proved incompatible with the nineteenth-century world. For this and many other reasons, China entered a period of entropy, which precipitated a series of revolutions. This is where Karl's book begins. Karl's conceptualization of revolution is especially interesting. For Karl, revolutions are contested over the authority to reread the past and reimagine the future. Karl uses this framework to weave together China's modern revolutions in a cohesive narrative. However, Karl is also wary of teleological state narratives that see revolutions as the building blocks of the present, and therefore as inevitably leading from one historical moment to the next. Instead, revolution was a process of ever-deepening contestation, rather than a series of continuous or discontinuous events. Chinese revolutionaries often took cues from their predecessors but also incorporated new ideas into their politics and opened new avenues of critique.

What Karl's reading of modern Chinese history shows us is that revolutionaries across multiple generations were bound together by their attempt to translate the past into the idiom of their current revolutionary moment. In 1911, revolutionaries portrayed the Manchus as conquerors. In 1919, intellectuals criticized the oppressive traditions of Confucianism. In 1949, Communists foregrounded the legacy of class struggle in China. In 1989, students demanded that the Party live up to its past socialist promises. In each of these cases, revolutionaries re-narrated the past to compose their ideologies and make demands on those in power.

Karl is at her most effective when discussing 1949. She describes the Communist revolution as “an ethical hope and an imposed responsibility,” thus giving credence to the aspirations of socialist revolutionaries while also acknowledging the violent and coercive methods that they often used (Karl, p. 133). Karl sees the Communist revolution as a response to international power structures that fostered inequality, rather than a purely nationalist pursuit. Although yoked to China, the goals of the Communist revolution were therefore global in scope and represented a significant challenge to the capitalist system of the twentieth century. In fact, all of China's modern revolutions “locally challenged and globally contested the normative nature of the emerging and maturing process of global capitalization” and “took ‘the world’ as a malleable revolutionary opportunity rather than a settled normative principle” (Karl, pp. 205, 208). And yet, the Communist Party of the twenty-first century has largely excised the global challenge that 1949 represented, instead reframing the revolution as a story of how the Party took power and transformed China. By rejecting these historicist approaches, Karl's work reminds us that China's modern revolutions are not an aperture through which we can glimpse the present, but deeply contested and often violent events in which historical actors laid claim to the past in order to defy the inevitability of global capitalism and Western hegemony.

My critiques of these two books again align symmetrically. While Brook is excellent on the Mongols, Ming, and early Qing, he is not as clear on how Qing officials reconciled Great State mentalities with the crisis of the nineteenth century. I am especially curious about how the Great State became a nation-state, a question that occupied Chinese reformers and revolutionaries for more than a century, but Brook does not really consider that. On the other hand, Karl's framing of “the world” as mediated through structural phenomena is, at times, limiting. Karl only mentions the Vietnam and Korean Wars, the Bandung Conference, or Third World internationalism briefly. Her focus on Euro-American colonialism and capitalism means that this book about China and the world sometimes reads instead as a book about China and the West.

These critiques aside, these two books, particularly when read together, offer a rich and dynamic history of China's interaction with and understanding of the world over several centuries. They will also, inevitably, prompt readers to consider China's place in the twenty-first century. Both the era of the Great State and the revolutionary state seem to be foreclosed (at least for now), thus suggesting that China's relationship with the world is entering a new stage. Brook calls this stage “Chinese neo-hegemony,” which he sees as a restructuring of the international order that rejects the principle of equality and noninterference. Karl, meanwhile, borrows (but does not endorse) the Chinese phrase “years of ascendancy and prosperity” to describe the present moment. Both authors also criticize People's Republic of China policy: Brook because Chinese neo-hegemony relies on authoritarianism and debt dependency in foreign countries, and Karl because of the tremendous social toll prosperity has exacted and because not everyone in China is willing to accept passively the country's ascendancy (Hong Kong in particular). However China's relationship with the world evolves, it will surely borrow from the Great State legacy and from the country's revolutionary tradition and will only come into sharper relief as the twenty-first century continues.