In 1368, a new dynasty took power in China, opening a chapter of growth, exploration, and rising influence on the world stage. This book takes readers through that vibrant era and follows the story into the centuries that saw China’s fortunes shift from expansion to decline.
Excerpt:
When did China lose its innovative edge to powers like the United Kingdom and the United States? What is China’s future in the global manufacturing landscape that it now dominates? As China expands its economic place in the world, will the West pursue a new path to high-tech industrialization, or alternatively will it continue on the road of globalization and labor outsourcing adopted in the 1970s? Navigating these questions requires an understanding of how the twentieth-century world of globalization came into being. It requires understanding how western Europe first came to dominate an Asian economic landscape once oriented around China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. This book tells the story of China’s first modern global age, placing special emphasis on encounters between Beijing and the West since the Age of Exploration. From the start of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 to the end of the Qing in 1912, the making of modern China is also the story of the making of the modern world. In its origins, it is the story of how western European shipping came to bypass the once dominant Italian and Middle Eastern markets of the medieval world. By the end of the two Opium Wars (ca. 1839– 1842, 1856– 1860), western Europe’s “Age of Discoveries” in search of the so-called Far East trade transformed a once global China into something very different. In the words of Napoleon, China had become a “sleeping lion” across the seas and oceans where Ming treasure ships once sailed.
Who is this book for?
This book seeks to explain China’s long decline during the Ming and Qing dynasties, tracing a path that spans from the medieval into the early modern period. Readers interested in Chinese history will find it a compelling exploration, while medievalists will be especially drawn to the opening chapters, which focus on the bustling trade networks that carried goods westward.
“Two aspects of 1368 are especially admirable. The first is its prominent focus on how material artifacts, such as silk, porcelain, and tea, shaped the political dynamics of transcultural exchange during China’s first globalization. The book contains impressively detailed accounts of the production and use of these commodities. Another commendable aspect is 1368’s use of sources in several Asian languages to reconstruct what impressions Persians, Ottomans, and Malays formed of China, thus integrating perspectives that are often absent from Anglophone global histories, which tend to focus predominantly on connections between the West and “the rest.”” ~ review by Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Author
Ali Humayun Akhtar is American Professor of Global History and Islamic Arts at Akhawayn University in Ifrane. His area of his research is broadly the Asian and Islamic worlds. He is also the founder of Ali Roman & Co., a consulting company.
1368: China and the Making of the Modern World
By Ali Humayun Akhtar
Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9781503627475
In 1368, a new dynasty took power in China, opening a chapter of growth, exploration, and rising influence on the world stage. This book takes readers through that vibrant era and follows the story into the centuries that saw China’s fortunes shift from expansion to decline.
Excerpt:
When did China lose its innovative edge to powers like the United Kingdom and the United States? What is China’s future in the global manufacturing landscape that it now dominates? As China expands its economic place in the world, will the West pursue a new path to high-tech industrialization, or alternatively will it continue on the road of globalization and labor outsourcing adopted in the 1970s? Navigating these questions requires an understanding of how the twentieth-century world of globalization came into being. It requires understanding how western Europe first came to dominate an Asian economic landscape once oriented around China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. This book tells the story of China’s first modern global age, placing special emphasis on encounters between Beijing and the West since the Age of Exploration. From the start of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 to the end of the Qing in 1912, the making of modern China is also the story of the making of the modern world. In its origins, it is the story of how western European shipping came to bypass the once dominant Italian and Middle Eastern markets of the medieval world. By the end of the two Opium Wars (ca. 1839– 1842, 1856– 1860), western Europe’s “Age of Discoveries” in search of the so-called Far East trade transformed a once global China into something very different. In the words of Napoleon, China had become a “sleeping lion” across the seas and oceans where Ming treasure ships once sailed.
Who is this book for?
This book seeks to explain China’s long decline during the Ming and Qing dynasties, tracing a path that spans from the medieval into the early modern period. Readers interested in Chinese history will find it a compelling exploration, while medievalists will be especially drawn to the opening chapters, which focus on the bustling trade networks that carried goods westward.
“Two aspects of 1368 are especially admirable. The first is its prominent focus on how material artifacts, such as silk, porcelain, and tea, shaped the political dynamics of transcultural exchange during China’s first globalization. The book contains impressively detailed accounts of the production and use of these commodities. Another commendable aspect is 1368’s use of sources in several Asian languages to reconstruct what impressions Persians, Ottomans, and Malays formed of China, thus integrating perspectives that are often absent from Anglophone global histories, which tend to focus predominantly on connections between the West and “the rest.”” ~ review by Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Author
Ali Humayun Akhtar is American Professor of Global History and Islamic Arts at Akhawayn University in Ifrane. His area of his research is broadly the Asian and Islamic worlds. He is also the founder of Ali Roman & Co., a consulting company.
To learn more about this book, please visit the publisher’s website
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