Imperial China, 900–1800

In this history of China for the 900-year span of the late imperial period, Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. Generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization.

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 examines many of the prevailing abstract conceptions which dominate the field. Yet, he vividly demonstrated 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, Harvard University

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