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Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of
studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and
strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical
problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex
empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It
highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing
variety of local governing environments in the management of
short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems
caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China
during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be
viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative
strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and
extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons,
Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and
its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of
professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock
illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students
of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.
The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810 exposes readers to the
little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to
nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of
documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese
piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the
world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of
Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources--some
translated for the first time--to illustrate the complexity and
variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents
include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and
victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal
residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed
down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role
that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and
cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An
historical perspective provides an important vantage point to
understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably
connected with the past.
History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes
the author provides glimpses into China's hidden past through the
native's point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary
people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary
people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their
communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical
consciousness as revealed in people's everyday lives and as
expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions,
language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences.
The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been
routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated
by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the
underworld of "rivers and lakes" (jianghu), a sociocultural
category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes.
To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting
field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely
used unconventional sources-folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and
hearsay-that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not
found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This
book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics
write history by offering alternative possibilities for China's
past.
History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes
the author provides glimpses into China's hidden past through the
native's point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary
people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary
people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their
communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical
consciousness as revealed in people's everyday lives and as
expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions,
language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences.
The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been
routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated
by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the
underworld of "rivers and lakes" (jianghu), a sociocultural
category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes.
To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting
field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely
used unconventional sources-folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and
hearsay-that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not
found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This
book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics
write history by offering alternative possibilities for China's
past.
The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810 exposes readers to the
little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to
nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of
documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese
piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the
world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of
Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources-some
translated for the first time-to illustrate the complexity and
variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents
include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and
victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal
residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed
down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role
that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and
cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An
historical perspective provides an important vantage point to
understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably
connected with the past.
Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of
studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and
strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical
problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex
empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It
highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing
variety of local governing environments in the management of
short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems
caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China
during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be
viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative
strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and
extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons,
Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and
its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of
professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock
illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students
of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.
Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global
East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways.
The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the
Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for
millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700),
the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese,
Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous
networks and maritime polities; they competed and cooperated with
one another and with powerful political and economic units, such as
the Manchu Qing, Tokugawa Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns,
and the Dutch East India Company. Maritime East Asia was a
contested and contradictory place, subject to multiple legal,
political, and religious jurisdictions, and a dizzying diversity of
cultures and ethnicities, with dozens of major languages and
countless dialects. Informal networks based on kinship ties or
patron-client relations coexisted uneasily with formal governmental
structures and bureaucratized merchant organizations.
Subsistence-based trade and plunder by destitute fishermen
complemented the grand dreams of sea-lords, profit-maximizing
entrepreneurs, and imperial contenders. Despite their shifting
identities, East Asia's mariners sought to anchor their activities
to stable legitimacies and diplomatic traditions found outside the
system, but outsiders, even those armed with the latest military
technology, could never fully impose their values or plans on these
often mercurial agents. With its multilateral perspective of a
world in flux, this volume offers fresh, wide-ranging narratives of
the "rise of the West" or "the Great Divergence." European
mariners, who have often been considered catalysts of
globalization, were certainly not the most important actors in East
and Southeast Asia. China's maritime traders carried more in volume
and value than any other nation, and the China Seas were key to
forging the connections of early globalization-as significant as
the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean basin. Today, as a
resurgent China begins to assert its status as a maritime power, it
is important to understand the deep history of maritime East Asia.
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