Early Modern China and Northeast Asia
Cross-Border Perspectives
Asian Connections Series

In this revisionist history of early modern China, Evelyn Rawski challenges the notion of Chinese history as a linear narrative of dynasties dominated by the Central Plains and Hans Chinese culture from a unique, peripheral perspective. Rawski argues that China has been shaped by its relations with Japan, Korea, the Jurchen/Manchu and Mongol States, and must therefore be viewed both within the context of a regional framework, and as part of a global maritime network of trade. Drawing on a rich variety of Japanese, Korean, Manchu and Chinese archival sources, Rawski analyses the conflicts and regime changes that accompanied the region's integration into the world economy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern China and Northeast Asia places Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese relations within the context of northeast Asian geopolitics, surveying complex relations which continue to this day.

Acknowledgements; Note on transcription and other conventions; Introduction; Part I. China in Regional and World History: 1. The northeast frontier in Chinese history; 2. Transformations in early modern northeast Asia; Part II. Cultural Negotiations: 3. Unity and diversity in state rituals; 4. Kinship and succession in China, Japan and Korea; 5. Identity issues: the civilized/barbarian discourse; Conclusion; Epilogue: drawing boundaries in northeast Asia; Bibliography; Index.

Evelyn S. Rawski is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a PhD in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University, Massachusetts in 1968. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1990, she served as president of the Association for Asian Studies from 1995–6. She is the author of Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China (1972), Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China (1979), and The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (1998).