This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia's densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the objectification of cultural identities marked by language and faith, which created a mutual encouragement of cultural and political change. As religious and social hierarchies weakened, political centralization and militarization advanced. But in the spheres of religion and philosophy, iconoclasm enjoyed a new life. The changes cumulatively defined a threshold of the modern world, beyond which lay early nationalism, imperialism, and the novel divisions of Eurasia into "East" and "West." Synthesizing new interpretive approaches and grand themes of world history from 1000 to 1500, Crossley reveals the unique importance of Turkic and Mongol regimes in shaping Eurasia's economic, technological, and political evolution toward our modern world.

In the mid-1600s, Manchu bannermen spearheaded the military force that conquered China and founded the Qing Empire, which endured until 1912. By the end of the Taiping War in 1864, however, the descendants of these conquering people were coming to terms with a loss of legal definition, an ever-steeper decline in living standards, and a sense of abandonment by the Qing court. Focusing on three generations of a Manchu family (from 1750 to the 1930s), Orphan Warriors is the first attempt to understand the social and cultural life of the bannermen within the context of the decay of the Qing regime. The book reveals that the Manchus were not "sinicized," but that they were growing in consciousness of their separate ethnicity in response to changes in their own position and in Chinese attitudes toward them. Pamela Kyle Crossley's treatment of the Suwan Guwalgiya family of Hangzhou is hinged upon Jinliang (1878-1962), who was viewed at various times as a progressive reformer, a promising scholar, a bureaucratic hack, a traitor, and a relic. The author sees reflected in the ambiguities of his persona much of the plight of other Manchus as they were transformed from a conquering caste to an ethnic minority. Throughout Crossley explores the relationships between cultural decline and cultural survival, polity and identity, ethnicity and the disintegration of empires, all of which frame much of our understanding of the origins of the modern world.

In a provocative study on comparative empire, noted historians identify periods of transition across history that reveal how and why empires emerge. Loren J. Samons on Athens and Arthur Eckstein on Rome examine classical Western empires. Nicholas Canny discusses the British experience, Paul Bushkovitch analyzes the case of imperial Russia, and Pamela Kyle Crossley studies Qing China s beginnings. Frank Ninkovich tackles the actions of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, which many view as imperial behavior.

What were the critical characteristics that distinguished the imperial period of the state from its pre-imperial period? When did the state develop those characteristics sufficiently to be called an empire? The authors indicate the domestic political, social, economic, or military institutions that made empire formation possible and address how intentional the transition to empire was. They investigate the actions that drove imperial consolidation and consider the international environment in which the empire formed. Kimberly Kagan provides a concluding essay that probes the historical cases for insights into policymaking and the nature of imperial power.

In this landmark exploration of the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the ways in which a large, early modern empire of Eurasia, the Qing (1636-1912), incorporated neighboring, but disparate, political traditions into a new style of emperorship. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, including Manchu, Korean, and Chinese archival materials, Crossley argues that distortions introduced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical records have blinded scholars to the actual course of events in the early years of the dynasty. This groundbreaking study examines the relationship between the increasingly abstract ideology of the centralizing emperorship of the Qing and the establishment of concepts of identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the advent of nationalism in China. Concluding with a broad-ranging postscript on the implications of her research for studies of nationalism and nation-building throughout modern Chinese history, A Translucent Mirror combines a readable narrative with a sophisticated, revisionary look at China's history. Crossley's book will alter current understandings of the Qing emperorship, the evolution of concepts of ethnicity, and the legacy of Qing rule for modern Chinese nationalism.