Amazon.com Review
A major preoccupation of this work by Princeton's highly respected professor emeritus,
Frederick W. Mote, is the interplay between China and Inner Asia, a region that includes Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. This is an important advance on previous broad examinations of imperial China, which have a distinct bias toward sinocentric dynastic politics. The year 907 marked the final breakdown of the Tang government and the establishment of a series of non-Chinese dynasties, from the Liao to the Qing, who ruled over all or much of Chinese territory for the next thousand years. Mote explains the impact on China of the Turkic and Mongol tribes to the north and west, a cultural influence that, for political reasons, is normally neglected by Chinese historians. The book's many excellent maps show how China's boundaries were constrained by powerful neighbors, a fact that also has political significance today. Economic questions are discussed, such as transportation systems and trade with the northern tribes. Environmental issues, such as the silting and flooding of the Yellow River, firmly insert geography into historical studies. Meanwhile, the next edition--and there will surely be another edition--will benefit from a standardized modern romanization of such languages as Mongolian.
Imperial China 900-1800 represents the distillation of a lifetime's study by a senior scholar steeped in Chinese history, yet it incorporates recent archaeological discoveries and is up to date, even radical, in its concepts. The author has the stature and confidence to avoid compulsive footnoting without losing credibility, which assists the easy unfolding of the book's narrative and analysis. This excellent work will stimulate the general reader and be an extremely useful text for the next generation of students of Chinese history. --John Stevenson
Review
A personal meditation on the later imperial history of China by an author who has studied and taught the subject all his life and whose knowledge of it is truly formidable. It is written in a readable, accessible style that attracts the reader's sustained attention. (John W. Dardess
University of Kansas )
A major contribution to our present literature on the general historiography of late Imperial China. Not only is it eminently accessible to a wide nonspecialized intellectual public, it also provides a major corrective within the field to some of the tendencies that have dominated the writing of Chinese history. Mote has highly cogent things to say about the nature of what has been called the 'gentry' in China and highly relevant questions to raise about the notion of a demographic explosion in eighteenth-century China, and he examines many of the prevailing abstract conceptions that dominate the field. Yet he vividly demonstrates how limited our effort has been to explore in depth the vast documentary materials available to us, which are supposed to provide the 'empirical data' for our models, paradigms, and structural theories. Mote's major contribution is his detailed account of the growing complexity of relations between the Chinese state and the surrounding East Asian world during the period 900-1800. (Benjamin I. Schwartz
Haravrd University )
This massive tome crowns the long, distinguished career of Frederick Mote, an influential scholar of Late Imperial China in the United States... He does a wonderful job of reconstructing the history of such historically neglected regimes as Khitan-Liao, Jurchen-Jin, and Tangut-Western Xia, from the perspective of the Other. What I find most praiseworthy is the lucid, elegant expository style of writing...The book is likely to leave a profound and lasting impact on the reader in areas it focuses on, which will in turn help him or her better understand a given period of Late Imperial China from a long-term perspective. (Victor Cunrui Xiong
Chinese Historical Review )
An outstanding feature that distinguishes this book from similar works is the author's effort to readdress the imbalance in traditional historiography with its lopsided focus on the political and geographic center of the realm. He does a wonderful job of reconstructing the history of such historically neglected regimes as Khitan-Liao, Jurchen-Jin, and Tangut-Western Xia, from the perspective of the Other...What I find most praiseworthy is the lucid, elegant expository style of writing. In spite of the wealth of knowledge the author clearly possesses about traditional China, he chooses to cover in depth a select number of topics--personages, events, institutions, etc.--in a language that is understandable to the average man in the street, without relying on opaque verbosity. Consequently, the book is likely to leave a profound and lasting impact on the reader in areas it focuses on. (Victor Cunrui Xiong
Chinese Historical Review )
