|
Showing 1 - 25 of
68 matches in All Departments
How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history’s
mighty empires In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative
stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many
historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China,
but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse provides
an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of
China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming
rule. The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of
the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and
world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of
grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous
years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade
networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have
affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid
grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of
the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold
and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the
Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime.
A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs
the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of
unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to
calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between
an empire and the climate that turned against it.
China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its
approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty
in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial
dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries
since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their
power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained
China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and
Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful
people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been
alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the
steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and
imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight
centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's
relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by
following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people
navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world.
Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates,
emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and visionaries:
this is a history of China as no one has told it before.
In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would
become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest,
this vast domain depended for its political survival on a
fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative
book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order
whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and
Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history-a role
played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis
highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and
scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and
diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to
transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the
invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the
establishment of a common script for communication and a
state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the
flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local
society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship
structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of
non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging
Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history
of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many
formative events in China's long history of imperialism-events
whose residual influence can still be discerned today.
"Elegant and quietly important...Brook does more than merely sketch
the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that
brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely
reminder of humanity's interdependence."--"Seattle Times
"A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room,
talking to a laughing girl. I n another, a woman at a window weighs
pieces of silver. Vermeer's images captivate us with their beauty
and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered
moments? As T imothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so
intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding
world. Moving outward from Vermeer's studio, Brook traces the web
of trade that was spreading across the globe. "Vermeer's Hat "shows
how the urge to acquire foreign goods was refashioning the world
more powerfully than we have yet understood.
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a period of commercial expansion and
cultural innovation, fashioned the relationship between the present
day state and society in China. This unique collection of reworked
and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of
Chinese history, re-examines this relationship and argues that
contrary to previous scholarship, it was radical responses within
society that led to a 'constitution', not periods of fluctuation
within the dynasty itself. Brook's outstanding scholarship
demonstrates that it was changes in commercial relations and social
networks that were actually responsible for the development of a
stable society. This imaginative reconsidering of existing
scholarship on the history of China will be fascinating reading for
scholars and students interested in China's development.
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a period of commercial expansion and
cultural innovation, fashioned the relationship between the present
day state and society in China. This unique collection of reworked
and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of
Chinese history, re-examines this relationship and argues that
contrary to previous scholarship, it was radical responses within
society that led to a 'constitution', not periods of fluctuation
within the dynasty itself. Brook's outstanding scholarship
demonstrates that it was changes in commercial relations and social
networks that were actually responsible for the development of a
stable society. This imaginative reconsidering of existing
scholarship on the history of China will be fascinating reading for
scholars and students interested in China's development.
The concept of "civil society" was borrowed from eighteenth-century
Europe to provide a framework for understanding the transition to
post-authoritarian regimes in Latin America and postcommunist
regimes elsewhere. In China, the Democracy Movement forced the
concept onto the intellectual agenda during the struggle to come to
terms with the growth of dissent and the failure of student
activism to find a secure foothold. The question that drives this
book is whether this concept is useful for analyzing China, and if
so, in what ways and within what limits.
The concept of "civil society" was borrowed from eighteenth-century
Europe to provide a framework for understanding the transition to
post-authoritarian regimes in Latin America and postcommunist
regimes elsewhere. In China, the Democracy Movement forced the
concept onto the intellectual agenda during the struggle to come to
terms with the growth of dissent and the failure of student
activism to find a secure foothold. The question that drives this
book is whether this concept is useful for analyzing China, and if
so, in what ways and within what limits.
In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London
business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP and the
city's first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in
the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive
reader. When Timothy Brook saw it in 2009, he realised that the
Selden Map was 'a puzzle that had to be solved': an exceptional
artefact, so unsettlingly modern-looking it could almost be a
forgery. But it was genuine, and what it has to tell us is
astonishing. It shows China, not cut off from the world, but a
participant in the embryonic networks of global trade that fuelled
the rise of Europe - and which now power China's ascent. And it
raises as many question as it answers: how did John Selden acquire
it? Where did it come from? Who re-imagined the world in this way?
And most importantly - what can it tell us about the world at that
time? Brook, like a cartographic detective, has provided answers -
including a surprising last-minute revelation of authorship. From
the Gobi Desert to the Philippines, from Java to Tibet and into
China itself, Brook uses the map (actually a schematic
representation of China's relation to astrological heaven) to tease
out the varied elements that defined this crucial period in China's
history.
Brook (history, U. of Toronto) surveys the history of the concept
of the AMP (a concept formulated by Karl Marx in the 1850s) in
China in relation to debates elsewhere, and examines the particular
issues raised in recent Chinese discussions. Annotation copyright
Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE,
China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the
changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period
that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with
the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments
in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new
religions.
The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of
the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to
depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the
garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of
self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite,
moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified
mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that
toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered
every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and
the economy.
By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce,
the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power
had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were
incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods
and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The
centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and
permanent impact on the Chinese world.
The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese
history. The Confucian empire-a millennium and a half in the
making-was suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had
been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no
longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later,
another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with
yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what
happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything
defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the
weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as
temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved
south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a
century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second
blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than
the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders.
Against this background-the first coherent ecological history of
China in this period-Timothy Brook explores the growth of
autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special
attention to China's incorporation into the larger South China Sea
economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but
contributed to the formation of the early modern world.
This is a riveting, day-by-day, hour-by-hour reconstruction of the
massacre in Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989, as well as of the
crucial events in Beijing during the previous weeks that largely
precipitated the massacre. The author focuses on the army-the
People's Liberation Army-which, with its motto "Serve the People,"
had always prided itself on its close ties to the civilian
population. What were the intentions of the Chinese government in
mobilizing the army against civilians? Why did the troops act as
they did, and what does this say about how the army would act on
the next such occasion? How does the military suppression of the
democracy movement help us to understand China's current
predicament over democratization and human rights?
China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its
approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in
the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to
the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even
the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not
move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the
Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism.
But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the
Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world.
It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges
posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the
majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese.
Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the
Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and
extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets
the world. Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers,
pirates, emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and
visionaries: this is a history of China as no one has told it before.
Just over a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty emerged as the
most advanced civilization on earth. Within two centuries, China
was home to nearly half of all humankind. In this concise history,
we learn why the inventiveness of this era has been favorably
compared with the European Renaissance, which in many ways the Song
transformation surpassed.
With the chaotic dissolution of the Tang dynasty, the old
aristocratic families vanished. A new class of
scholar-officials--products of a meritocratic examination
system--took up the task of reshaping Chinese tradition by adapting
the precepts of Confucianism to a rapidly changing world. Through
fiscal reforms, these elites liberalized the economy, eased the tax
burden, and put paper money into circulation. Their redesigned
capitals buzzed with traders, while the education system offered
advancement to talented men of modest means. Their rationalist
approach led to inventions in printing, shipbuilding, weaving,
ceramics manufacture, mining, and agriculture. With a realist's
eye, they studied the natural world and applied their observations
in art and science. And with the souls of diplomats, they chose
peace over war with the aggressors on their borders. Yet persistent
military threats from these nomadic tribes--which the Chinese
scorned as their cultural inferiors--redefined China's
understanding of its place in the world and solidified a sense of
what it meant to be Chinese.
"The Age of Confucian Rule" is an essential introduction to
this transformative era. "A scholar should congratulate himself
that he has been born in such a time" (Zhao Ruyu, 1194).
In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang
Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the
last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by
Western observers "death by a thousand cuts" or "death by slicing,"
this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial
China.
A unique interdisciplinary history, "Death by a Thousand Cuts"
is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal
contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century
until lingchi's abolition in 1905. The authors then turn their
attention to an in-depth investigation of "oriental" tortures in
the Western imagination. While early modern Europeans often
depicted Chinese institutions as rational, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century readers consumed pictures of lingchi executions
as titillating curiosities and evidence of moral inferiority. By
examining these works in light of European conventions associated
with despotic government, Christian martyrdom, and ecstatic
suffering, the authors unpack the stereotype of innate Chinese
cruelty and explore the mixture of fascination and revulsion that
has long characterized the West's encounter with "other"
civilizations.
Compelling and thought-provoking, "Death by a Thousand Cuts"
questions the logic by which states justify tormenting individuals
and the varied ways by which human beings have exploited the
symbolism of bodily degradation for political aims.
|
You may like...
Aladdin
Robin Williams, Scott Weinger, …
Blu-ray disc
R206
Discovery Miles 2 060
|