Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

The Vietnamese Le dynasty launched a massive invasion of its neighbor, Champa, in 1471. The invasion, which was the culmination of centuries of back and forth conflict, produced widespread Cham deaths, and the permanent weakening of the southern kingdom. The Vietnamese actions, resulting in at least 40,000 recorded deaths, may well have been genocidal, though the limited historical record is unclear. It does, though, reveal that the Vietnamese used beheading against many of the victims, an action that appears punitive rather than incidental to warfare, and uniquely applied to the Cham. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried out a project to rename geographical features in the Cham territories, suggesting a degree of cultural erasure while also substantially and permanently reducing the size of the Cham realm. Thus, although the evidence for genocide is ambiguous, it is clear that the Vietnamese actions in the late fifteenth century sought permanently to reduce the influence and threat posed by Champa via an overwhelming show of force.

Chinese late imperial urban civilization was made up of loose regional economies with a few large cities supported by lots of market towns. The Grand Canal remained its backbone, and China’s most prosperous cities were distributed along its length, and international maritime connections to the early modern global economy saw the growth of the Pearl River Delta. Elsewhere defence was important. Ming Dynasty coastal cities faced threats from pirates. Then as the Qing Dynasty expanded into the northwest, cities in the new province of Xinjiang developed around military garrisons. Walls remained a primary characteristic of Chinese urban form, and they surrounded large commercial and administrative cities, as well as those built for defensive purposes. All cities were now governed by a mixture of state and private interests, including the newly established merchant societies. The Ming and Qing Dynasties saw the flowering of late imperial urban culture. The cities of the Lower Yangzi Delta set the standards of style and taste, but the movement of gentry, merchants, and other urban residents brought this urban culture to the farthest corners of the empire. They produced travel guides, urban histories, prose, and poetry that recorded all aspects of urban life in minute detail.

During the Tang-Song transition, urbanization created regionally distinct hierarchical networks of large and small cities, market towns, and villages, which were closely connected in complex economic, social, and political relationships. The Lower Yangzi Delta was the most urbanized region of China, and remained linked to northern capitals via the Grand Canal. Within Chinese capitals, emperors, aristocrats, and officials remained enclosed within palace and imperial cities. Outside, the ward system broke down, and in many smaller cities there were no walls at all. Now commerce could be found along every street, and it also brought new forms of social organization and governance. Merchants organized different trades into guilds and took their place alongside the state and religious institutions in governing urban life. In capital cities, imperial families continued to assert their symbolic right to rule through participation in now well-established rituals. Elsewhere, people from all social classes were more invested in the urban life of their city, and distinct urban cultures emerged. Local gentry wrote urban histories and guides, bought and sold property, and invested in businesses or religious institutions. They describe lives of urban men and women in levels of detail that do not exist for earlier eras.

Traditional Chinese and English historiography regards 1644 as the year of the Qing conquest of China, though most historians regard this as a shorthand for collapsing the long and complex process by which the Ming empire in China disintegrated and the Qing empire in southern Manchuria expanded to include China. However, by dismantling the concept of the Qing conquest of China as an event, and instead looking at the coterminous processes affecting political coherence across Mongolia, Manchuria, and China, the Qing conquest of Ming China emerges as a reunification of historical Chinese territories that had been fragmented by various forces in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Though attention in examining the Ming–Qing transition is usually directed toward the China borders with Mongolia and Manchuria, this essay proposes that the best geographical theatre for tracing these changes lies in Yunnan province, in southwest China.

This chapter deals primarily with the Company commercial policy in East Asia and mainland Southeast Asia but also discusses extensively the first territorial Dutch colony in Taiwan. It highlights the crucial position of Japan where the Dutch could build on their exclusive trading rights in Deshima to procure the precious metals that were necessary for the India trade. The China trade is discussed in connection with the restrictive policies of the Ming and Qing states as well as in the context of the trading interests of the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. In conclusion, a comparison is made between the Dutch position in Mughal India and Qing China as well as between the Dutch Empire and other European empires in Asia.

Chapter 4 discusses the logic of order of the Chinese tributary system. It demonstrates that a shared set of collective beliefs, revolving around Confucian principles, and other norms, played an integral role in this political system. Understood as a complex of shared understanding and meaning, tributary relations acted as a lingua franca by creating a shared script, a common knowledge, that facilitated mutual understanding, which could entail benign or less benign relations but overall provided actors with a common frame of reference. The tributary system is an analytical framework for the historical study of Asian international relations, a concept that should be understood as a script that allowed for multiple and diverse interpretations by the participants themselves. The chapter further demonstrates how the Sinocentric system could accommodate great heterogeneity and multiple ethnicities and religions.

Where does the history of Jingdezhen’s porcelain start? Perhaps surprisingly, this is not generally considered to be a vexed question; most narratives begin with the bestowal of the name of the Northern Song reign period (Jingde, 1004–1007) on the town (zhen). Choosing that date as starting point for the history of Jingdezhen’s porcelain is, however, also misleading. It creates the teleological impression that from that point on, Jingdezhen travelled on a path that inevitably led to becoming the world’s preeminent site of ceramics production, and it suggests exceptionality where there is none. In its account of the period between 1000 and 1200, this chapter shows that the goods produced in Raozhou prefecture (where Jingdezhen was located) were not unique but competed with goods from numerous other sites. Moreover, the history of Jingdezhen’s porcelains is not the history of a single town, but the history of a web of connections that linked geographical spaces, natural resources, and human skills. The history of Jingdezhen’s porcelains should begin with the emergence of that web of connections: a network that made the production of Jingdezhen’s ceramics possible.

This chapter offers an overview of Chinese warfare, c. 1500–1800, with an emphasis upon the way in which state-sponsored violence was deployed to counter the multitude of strategic threats faced by the Ming and Qing dynasties. It highlights the role of violence in maintaining and extending the power and legitimacy of the imperial Chinese state. For even if Chinese dynasties were wont to extol Confucian values of benevolence and pacifism, the harsh reality was that state-sponsored violence was generally the key to maintaining authority, both domestically and in the broader East Asian world. The chapter shows how recent secondary studies have explored many dimensions of China’s martial culture and how these studies in turn illuminate the array of military challenges that faced all Chinese dynasties. It offers a typology of military threats and situates them specifically within the late imperial Chinese context. Central to this analysis is the massive size and ethnic diversity of the empire, which posed unique challenges to the rulers and their military establishments. The chapter also offers suggestions for future work and comparative studies.

Chapter 1 surveys Chinese migration during the early modern period, here defined as 1500 to 1740. The chapter introduces the concept of a trade diaspora and describes some important examples, Huizhou, Shanxi, and Hokkien. It introduces diasporic institutions important during the early modern era: lineages, native-place associations, temples, and various types of intermediaries. The chapter then describes the ways in which migration was gendered, focusing on male migration, split families, and intermarriage. The chapter ends with an example of one diasporic community, the Huizhou salt merchants who formed the upper tier of the socioeconomic elite in the city of Yangzhou.