Willard J. Peterson

This half-volume covers the Qing (Ch'ing) conquests of Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, along with provincial administration and aspects of intellectual and religious history ca 1644-1800. Part 1 covers the general political history of the Qing dynasty from Nurhaci's unification of the Jurchens ca 1600 through the conquest of China from 1644 to the dynasty's apogee in the late 18th century, as well as various aspects of social and economic history.

On the whole, this felt like it was aimed at a more scholarly readership than Part 1. Not only is the subjects dealt with probably of narrower interest than the general political history making up the bulk of Part 1, but greater familiarity with the subjects is expected of the reader; a greater number of terms and concepts were thrown around that I had to look up.

Something that seemed missing was a chapter on Buddhism. Taoism and Christianity rate one each, and Confucian scholars feature prominently in many, but Buddhists show up only as objects of dislike by Taoists and Confucians.… (mere)

This half-volume covers the general political history of the Qing (Ch'ing) dynasty from Nurhaci's unification of the Jurchens ca 1600 through the conquest of China from 1644 to the dynasty's apogee in the late 18th century, as well as various aspects of social and economic history. Part 2 covers the Qing conquests of Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, along with provincial administration and aspects of intellectual and religious history in the same period.

Each chapter being written by a different author, the book has something of the feel of a collection of papers, but Peterson has done a good job of getting them to use a consistent terminology. In a few cases they disagree on substance, e.g. the chapter on social change says that by the end of the period the economy was at least as commercialized as in western Europe, while that on economic history says it significantly lagged Europe. It's incidentally noteworthy that external comparisons almost exclusively are with Europe or parts thereof - one might have thought there were meaningful ones to be made with say Moghul India.

All in all I was very happy with it. The only complaint, really, is that I wish they'd used pinyin.… (mere)