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.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Qing empire’s invasion of what is now Xinjiang resulted in the destruction of Zünghar Mongol society and their almost complete extermination as a people. The policy of mass killing represented the failure of the first Qing military campaigns into the steppe to incorporate the fragmenting Zünghar polity. Continuing violence, exacerbated by famine and disease, drove the Qianlong emperor to issue instructions to exterminate the ‘mahachin’, i.e. Zünghar Mongols who had sought refuge from the invasion and/or were still holding out. This chapter charts the historical background to this conflict, situates it in a wider Inner Asian context, and offers a close analysis of the events and imperial decrees that triggered the descent into indiscriminate killing. Despite the ferocity of the campaign, the Zünghars were not entirely wiped out, and I conclude by discussing the resettlement of survivors and their fate during the remainder of the Qing Dynasty.

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.

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.

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 establishes the foundation upon which the dialectical debates about fangyan and nation building were built by discussing conceptions of Chinese local languages before the twentieth century. It begins by summarizing the two primary ways oral languages were studied and rendered in Qing China: first, as phonologies categorized in rime tables and dictionaries that supported philological studies of classical texts; and second, as representatives of localized vernaculars in songbooks, theater, or fictional writings. The second half of this chapter turns to Western sojourners granted access to the Qing’s interiors through Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars (1842 and 1860). Protestant missionaries, who studied local languages so as to proselytize to non-elites, filtered the Qing’s linguistic landscape through their own histories: they branded the written classical as a Latin-like dead language, and reframed local languages as “dialects” or “vernaculars.” By offering their own theories on the origin of a Chinese language, these missionaries simultaneously highlighted the lack of a standardized Chinese national language and made dialects a central point of access for finding or inventing one.

Chapter 2 covers the years from 1740 to 1840, a period that some scholars refer to as the “Chinese century” in Southeast Asia and a period that partially overlaps with what Chinese historians call the High Qing and was known to contemporaries as the “prosperous age.” The chapter demonstrates that migration across the Qing frontiers and to destinations abroad was linked to the extraction of resources in Inner Asia and Southeast Asia for the Chinese market. This was a period in which Chinese laborers – miners and farmers – became distinct types of migrants. The chapter introduces a new diasporic trajectory, that of Hakkas to Borneo and other areas in Southeast Asia. It traces the development of such diasporic institutions as native-place associations, or huiguan, and the emergence of others, such as revenue farms, brotherhoods, and kongsi. It also further explores the issues of split families, maintained through remittances, and of unmarriageable men for whom migration became a means of ascending the marriage ladder. The chapter ends with an example of another diasporic community, the Chinese mestizos in the Philippine town of Malabon.

This chapter compares the diversity regimes of the Qing Empire and twentieth-century Chinese republics to argue that evocations of 'traditional' Chinese diversity regime and interpolity relations frequent in the literature are based on a mistaken model of the Chinese past, one involving the 'tributary system' and 'Confucian peace' or tianxia concepts, largely derived from John King Fairbank’s descriptions of the 'traditional Chinese world order.'After critiquing the Fairbankian model, the chapter introduces the findings of more recent scholarship on the Qing period which reveal the flexible Qing approach to domestic diversity and interpolity relations, here called 'imperial pluralism.' The formal diversity regime of the People’s Republic of China towards its 56 minzu (nationalities, ethnicities) echoes Qing imperial pluralism as well as the nationalities system of the Soviet Union. Since the 2010s, however, the PRC has shifted from centralized pluralism towards a Han assimilationist approach. The author cautiously suggests that aspects of Chinese centralized pluralism – and not a vain quest for a homogeneous national population – would provide a more successful model, while remaining true to Chinese traditions.