Review

Reviewed Work(s): China's Last Empire: The Great Qing. History of Imperial China by
William T. ROWE
Review by: Pamela Kyle Crossley
Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 54, No. 5 (2011), pp.
811-813
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41445737
Accessed: 17-10-2019 17:48 UTC

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 Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (2011) 790-813 8 1 1

William T. ROWE, Chinas Last Empire : The Great Qing. History of

Imperial China. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2009. viii + 360 pp. ISBN: 978-0-674-03612-3 (hbk.).
$35.00/ £25.95 / €31.50.

Synthesis is serious work in the right hands. In the course of a stellar career
William T. Rowe has shown himself a master of several genres, though
no one can mistake his overriding preoccupation with serious, systematic,
disciplined social history. Chinas Last Empire is Rowes first venture into
synthetic survey history, and it is remarkable. In a trim volume he has man-
aged not only to produce an effective survey narrative, but also to provide
a rich flow of historiographical commentary. The result is a book neither
wholly committed to narrative nor to analysis. It balances deftly between,
making it both provocative for specialists in Qing history and accessible to
those undergraduates who may still prefer text to graphics.
In a very short introduction, Rowe reviews the major trends in the writ-
ing of the history of the Qing, refreshingly beginning not with John King
Fairbank but with the 'dynastic cycle concept inherited from Chinese
historiography. The flow from Fairbanks 'traditional'/ 'modern divide of
1842, Paul Cohens 'discovering history in China, Jonathan Spence and
Frederic Wakemans 'Ming-Qing' and 'late imperial' innovations, and an
'Inner Asian turn to a contemporary 'Eurasian turn is succinctly sketched.
The threshold established in the book is an essential one for any reader, as
Rowe makes it clear that his intention is to enter the field as one writing in
a discursive field in which 'sinicization is no longer regarded as an impor-
tant tool for understanding the progress of Chinas cultural, social, and
political history, and in which the military expansion of successive empires
based in China is no longer seen through the somewhat charismatic haze
that earlier historians had cast over it. Quite apart from its content, the
introduction sets the tone for the book, which allows a historiographical
meta-story to develop in the canopy of a more straightforward, utilitar-
ian narrative. In the text as well as in footnotes, Rowe allows the reader
to overhear the conversation of historians - from Chen Zilong and Gu
Yanwu to contemporary historians from within and without China - on
causes and effects, on paradigms and contingencies. Even Rowes own pre-
vious findings are subject to modification in the developing colloquy.
More than being a work circumscribed by the conventions of our current
state of revisionism, however, Chinas Last Empire is a synthesis based upon
Rowes own commitment to making Chinas history intelligible through
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 201 1 DOI: 10.1 163/15685201 1X614136

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8 1 2 Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (2011) 790-813

the standard terms of modern social history, and it very reasonably fea-
tures much of Rowe's own work on trade, on commerce and urban life, on
guilds, on land and law, on crime and corruption. Though readers are not
force-fed new interpretations of the periods history, certain explanations
are implied. The source of much of Qing instability, Rowe suggests, was
the underfunded and undersized state in relation to the growing number
of hungry combinations of officials, merchants, farmers, and criminals as
well as the eighteenth-century Qing appetite for continuing conquests in
Central and Inner Asia; the cause of the small state size, apparently, was the
Kangxi emperors freezing of the land taxation rate in 1713.
On the first point Rowe is correct; on the second point, however, a more
expansive view would yield other explanations. While Rowe consistently
narrates the weak state's vulnerability to manipulation and challenge by
rising organizations with a local or particularistic orientation, the degree
to which the state as designed in the Kangxi years was dependent upon
local cohesion and, to some degree, initiative is not a strong thread in
the story. Rebellion is, partly as a consequence, treated as the product of
a failed plan of government, not of a plan that may have succeeded too
well. There is no typology of rebellions, all being narrated from a shared
explanatory template. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) goes by in a
comparative flash, which one fears will not permit students to understand
the profound significance of this long and almost uniquely destructive civil
war. And the aftermath of the war is perhaps the most enigmatic portion
of the book. In Rowes narrative, the Qing empire survived, in a substan-
tial sense, the Taiping war and went on to a meaningful 'restoration'. The
empire dissolves under the pressures of imperialism (including Japanese),
and nativism.
Many readers will be perplexed by a framing of Qing history that leads
with fresh concepts of imperial construction and the creation of a long-term
conquest state, then invokes venerable paradigms such as 'secular change'
and cyclical decline' in analysis of the crowding of difficulties in the late
Qianlong and early Jiaqing years, and concludes with narrative tropes that
would seem more probable in the hands of Fairbank or Mary Wright.1 Part
of the explanation lies in Rowe's judicious approach to revisionism overall;
he is not one to judge the credibility of an interpretation by its vintage. In

u Mary Clabaugh Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The Tung-chich Resto-
ration, 1862-1874. Stanford Studies in History, Economics, and Political Science 13. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1957.

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 Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (201 1) 790-813 8 1 3

his conclusion, he tantalizingly offers a menu of analytical approaches to

the great questions of Qing history - the early proficiency in conquering
and governing China, the late vulnerability to foreign encroachment and
native rebellion, even the degree to which the date of the Qing demise was
determined by objective factors - without committing himself to any.
His narrative, however, commits him to more than a few propositions.
First, Qing history is Chinese history, and cannot be sensibly narrated as
anything else (certainly not a historical object in its own right). Second,
social and economic history are the motors of change, and in the Qing
case the engine is located squarely in China proper, in fact squarely in the
Yangtze basin. The sources of Qing strength and weakness are found in
the development of economy and society in China proper, and in the frag-
ile relationship between Chinese society and the state. The empires huge
appendages in the Northeast, in Mongolia, in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan
are not completely absent from the narrative, but are largely incidental;
they are not factors in the character or the fate of the empire. Historical
influences such as culture and the environment, which have enjoyed a
large part of the burden of recent scholarship, are also not neglected, but
do not intrude heavily on Rowe s steady focus on the economy and society
of central China.
Overall, Chinas Last Empire is an extended meditation on the subjects
that have riveted Rowe's attention over the course of his career, here pre-
sented as a narrative that is conscientiously attentive (to the degree possi-
ble) to the contributions of his colleagues. Its historiographical ruminations
will be valuable to students of all levels, and may inspire colleagues to tem-
per their enthusiasm for some recent revisionist fashions. The maps are of
very high quality and the illustrations are wisely selected. Unfortunately
the very useful sub-headings within chapters are not present in the table of
contents, and the index is so thrifty with cross-references that some readers
will have difficulty finding the material they want. These shortcomings,
however, represent very minor defects in a book that is disciplined, chal-
lenging, and informative all at once.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Dartmouth College

Email: crossley@dartmouth.edu

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