China's Last Empire: The Great Qing pdf

威廉·罗是一位研究现代中国的社会史学家，从“社会”和“现代”两个词的广泛意义上讲，他的工作也集中在文化、知识、经济和政治史方面。 他的前两本书涉及中国一个主要内陆贸易城市的 19 世纪历史； 第二个获得了城市历史协会令人印象深刻的奖项，并让他参与了“公民社会”和“公共领域”问题的辩论。 他还撰写了关于相对繁荣的 18 世纪清朝统治精英的意识以及七个世纪以来在饱受战争蹂躏的中国省份惯常发生的农业暴力模式的书籍。 最近，他写了一部清朝的一般释经史，题为《中国最后的帝国》。

China's Last Empire: The Great Qing pdf 威廉·罗

In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues—were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a “universal” empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of Taiwan. Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of “small government” worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would follow. This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.