Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing political entities, and distinguishing social or ethnic groups - constitute an essential aspect of historical investigation.
It is especially with regard to disciplinary pluralism and historical breadth that this book most clearly departs and distinguishes itself from other works on Chinese boundaries and ethnicity. In addition to history, the disciplines represented in this book include anthropology (particularly ethnography), religion, art history, and literary studies. Each of the authors focuses on a distinct period, beginning with the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BCE) and ending with the early centuries after the Manchu conquest (c. CE 1800) - resulting in a chronological sweep of nearly three millennia.

This book presents an annotated translation of the only known military diary in pre-modern Chinese history, providing fresh and extensive information on the inner workings of the Ch'ing army. The personal experience of the author, a young Manchu officer fighting in inhospitable south-western China, takes us close to the 'face of the battle' in seventeenth-century China, and enriches our general knowledge of military history.

Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing political entities, and distinguishing social or ethnic groups - constitute an essential aspect of historical investigation.
It is especially with regard to disciplinary pluralism and historical breadth that this book most clearly departs and distinguishes itself from other works on Chinese boundaries and ethnicity. In addition to history, the disciplines represented in this book include anthropology (particularly ethnography), religion, art history, and literary studies. Each of the authors focuses on a distinct period, beginning with the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BCE) and ending with the early centuries after the Manchu conquest (c. CE 1800) - resulting in a chronological sweep of nearly three millennia.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history. By investigating the formation of nomadic cultures, by analyzing the evolution of patterns of interaction along China's frontiers, and by exploring how this interaction was recorded in historiography, this looks at the origins of the cultural and political tensions between these two civilizations through the first millennium BC. The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of 'others' as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this 2002 book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien.

Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history, reaching particularly dramatic dimensions with the Mongol (1279-1368) and Manchu (1644-1912) conquests. Nicola Di Cosmo's study is part of a wave of new, revisionist scholarship made possible by important recent archaeological findings in China, Mongolia, and Central Asia that can now be compared to the historical record. In Ancient China and Its Nomadic Enemies, Di Cosmo explores the origins of the cultural and political tensions along China's northern frontiers through the first millennium B.C. Di Cosmo places the rise of pastoral nomadism to the North of China within the context of a larger phenomenon rising from the steppes of Central Asia. In doing so, he analyzes the ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese and considers the cultural perceptions of "others" within a historical context. Di Cosmo assesses the work of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the "Grand Historian" who wrote the first narrative of the northern nomads in Chinese history, by scrutinizing his motives, methods, and interpretation. Ancient China and Its Nomadic Enemies's new interpretation of well-known historical events will intrigue ancient history scholars, China historians, and archaeologists. Nicola Di Cosmo is Lecturer of Chinese History at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Until recently, he was Associate Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He has published articles in a number of academic journals and is the Book Review Editor for the Inner Asia section of the Journal of Asian Studies and Editor in Charge of the Inner Asian section of the Journal of East Asian Archaeology.

Providing original insights into Chinese military history, Nicola Di Cosmo gives an annotated translation of the only known military diary in pre-modern Chinese history, providing fresh and extensive information on the inner workings of the Ch'ing army. The personal experience of the author, a young Manchu officer fighting in inhospitable South-Western China, take us close to the 'face of the battle' in seventeenth-century China, and enriches our general knowledge of military history.

This volume centres on the history and legacy of the Mongol World Empire founded by Chinggis Khan and his sons, including its impact upon the modern world. An international team of scholars examines the political and cultural history of the Mongol empire, its Chinggisid successor states, and the non-Chinggisid dynasties that came to dominate Inner Asia in its wake. Geographically, it focuses on the continental region from East Asia to Eastern Europe. Beginning in the twelfth century, the volume moves through to the establishment of Chinese and Russian political hegemony in Inner Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Contributors use recent research and new approaches that have revitalized Inner Asian studies to highlight the world-historical importance of the regimes and states formed during and after the Mongol conquest. Their conclusions testify to the importance of a region whose modern fate has been overshadowed by Russia and China.

This volume explores the relationship between culture and the military in Chinese society from early China to the Qing empire, with contributions by eminent scholars aiming to reexamine the relationship between military matters and law, government, historiography, art, philosophy, literature, and politics.

The book critically investigates the perception that, due to the influence of Confucianism, Chinese culture has systematically devalued military matters. There was nothing inherently pacifist about the Chinese governments views of war, and pragmatic approaches even aggressive and expansionist projects often prevailed.

Though it has changed in form, a military elite has existed in China from the beginning of its history, and military service included a large proportion of the population at any given time. Popular literature praised the martial ethos of fighting men. Civil officials attended constantly to military matters on the administrative and financial ends. The seven military classics produced in antiquity continued to be read even into the modern period.

These original essays explore the ways in which intellectual, civilian, and literary elements helped shape the nature of military institutions, theory, and the culture of war. This important contribution bridges two literatures, military and cultural, that seldom appear together in the study of China, and deepens our understanding of war and society in Chinese history.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

As a pervasive occurrence in the contemporary world, wars and their economic sources are defining social and political processes in a variety of national and transnational contexts. Rebel Economies: Warlords, Insurgents, Humanitarians explores historical, anthropological and political dimensions of war economies by non-state actors across different periods and regions, while presenting their multiple manifestations as a unified, congruent phenomenon. Through a variety of conceptual and disciplinary approaches, the authors investigate, in the past and present and across three continents, the nexuses between economy, war, social transformation and state-building, revealing in the process differences and similarities that would otherwise remain hidden. Through this broad-gauge approach, the book aims, first, to rethink much of the debate around "non-state war economies," and, secondly, to expand the conversation by consciously treating this theme as a conspicuous and distinct aspect of both economy and war. This is not just a different approach but a fundamental departure from the ways in which current discussions over the economy of wars, civil conflicts, and revolutions, have informed research orientations over several decades.

As a pervasive occurrence in the contemporary world, wars and their economic sources are defining social and political processes in a variety of national and transnational contexts. Rebel Economies: Warlords, Insurgents, Humanitarians explores historical, anthropological and political dimensions of war economies by non-state actors across different periods and regions, while presenting their multiple manifestations as a unified, congruent phenomenon. Through a variety of conceptual and disciplinary approaches, the authors investigate, in the past and present and across three continents, the nexuses between economy, war, social transformation and state-building, revealing in the process differences and similarities that would otherwise remain hidden. Through this broad-gauge approach, the book aims, first, to rethink much of the debate around "non-state war economies," and, secondly, to expand the conversation by consciously treating this theme as a conspicuous and distinct aspect of both economy and war. This is not just a different approach but a fundamental departure from the ways in which current discussions over the economy of wars, civil conflicts, and revolutions, have informed research orientations over several decades.

This volume centres on the history and legacy of the Mongol World Empire founded by Chinggis Khan and his sons, including its impact upon the modern world. An international team of scholars examines the political and cultural history of the Mongol empire, its Chinggisid successor states, and the non-Chinggisid dynasties that came to dominate Inner Asia in its wake. Geographically, it focuses on the continental region from East Asia to Eastern Europe. Beginning in the twelfth century, the volume moves through to the establishment of Chinese and Russian political hegemony in Inner Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Contributors use recent research and new approaches that have revitalized Inner Asian studies to highlight the world-historical importance of the regimes and states formed during and after the Mongol conquest. Their conclusions testify to the importance of a region whose modern fate has been overshadowed by Russia and China.