China's Island Frontier

China's Island Frontier
Author: Ronald G. Knapp
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2019-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824880048

Until the seventeenth century, Professor Knapp reminds us, Taiwan lay obscure off the southeast coast of China-an island cloaked in anonymity and inhabited principally by aborigines. Then, rather abruptly, the island was thrust into the maelstrom of European commercial expansion in East Asia, which in its wake drew Chinese peasant pioneers across the straits to Taiwan. This is the story, told from many viewpoints, of how Taiwan was transformed over a period of three centuries from a raw frontier to a stable entity with social and economic patterns similar to those found along the coastal mainland of southeastern China.

Asian Borderlands

Asian Borderlands
Author: Charles Patterson Giersch
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674021716

With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.

Taiwan’s Imagined Geography

Taiwan’s Imagined Geography
Author: Emma Jinhua Teng
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684173930

"Until 300 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a “land beyond the seas,” a “ball of mud” inhabited by “naked and tattooed savages.” The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. The annexation of Taiwan was only one incident in the much larger phenomenon of Qing expansionism into frontier areas that resulted in a doubling of the area controlled from Beijing and the creation of a multi-ethnic polity. The author argues that travelers’ accounts and pictures of frontiers such as Taiwan led to a change in the imagined geography of the empire. In representing distant lands and ethnically diverse peoples of the frontiers to audiences in China proper, these works transformed places once considered non-Chinese into familiar parts of the empire and thereby helped to naturalize Qing expansionism. By viewing Taiwan–China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism, the author contributes to our understanding of current political events in the region."

Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume III

Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume III
Author: Donald F. Lach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 756
Release: 1965
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780226467696

First systematic, inclusive study of the impact of the high civilizations of Asia on the development of modern Western civilization.

Uyghur Nation

Uyghur Nation
Author: David Brophy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674660374

Along the Russian-Qing frontier in the nineteenth century, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and revolution. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the Uyghur nation.

Sugar and Society in China

Sugar and Society in China
Author: Sucheta Mazumdar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 682
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684170257

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.

Taiwan: A New History

Taiwan: A New History
Author: Murray A. Rubinstein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 736
Release: 2024-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040295142

This book explores Taiwan's development from its formal beginnings as a political entity to a home for a Ming-loyalist regime, to a Ch'ing prefecture and province, to its half-century as a Japanese possession, and to fifty years as the home of the Kuomintang-controlled Republic of China.

The Prehistoric Maritime Frontier of Southeast China

The Prehistoric Maritime Frontier of Southeast China
Author: Chunming Wu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811640793

This open access book presents multidisciplinary research on the cultural history, ethnic connectivity, and oceanic transportation of the ancient Indigenous Bai Yue (百越) in the prehistoric maritime region of southeast China and southeast Asia. In this maritime Frontier of China, historical documents demonstrate the development of the “barbarian” Bai Yue and Island Yi (岛夷) and their cultural interaction with the northern Huaxia (华夏) in early Chinese civilization within the geopolitical order of the “Central State-Four Peripheries Barbarians-Four Seas”. Archaeological typologies of the prehistoric remains reveal a unique cultural tradition dominantly originating from the local Paleolithic age and continuing to early Neolithization across this border region. Further analysis of material culture from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age proves the stability and resilience of the indigenous cultures even with the migratory expansion of Huaxia and Han (汉) from north to south. Ethnographical investigations of aboriginal heritage highlight their native cultural context, seafaring technology and navigation techniques, and their interaction with Austronesian and other foreign maritime ethnicities. In a word, this manuscript presents a new perspective on the unique cultural landscape of indigenous ethnicities in southeast China with thousands of years’ stable tradition, a remarkable maritime orientation and overseas cultural hybridization in the coastal region of southeast China.

China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912

China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912
Author: Daniel McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000343456

This book explores new directions in the study of China’s borderlands. In addition to assessing the influential perspectives of other historians, it engages innovative approaches in the author’s own research. These studies probe regional accommodations, the intersections of borderland management, martial fortification, and imperial culture, as well as the role of governmental discourse in defining and preserving restive boundary regions. As the issue of China’s management of its borderlands grows more pressing, the work presents key information and insights into how that nation’s contested fringes have been governed in the past.