1368
China and the Making of the Modern World
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world.
The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. 1368 maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Ali Humayun Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today.
Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses arriving in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China, which the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes.
But during the British Industrial Revolution, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions to propel them into the twentieth century.
What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with both the West and a resurgent Asia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bates College medievalist Akhtar (Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs) examines in this granular history the period between the rise of China's Great Ming dynasty in 1368 and the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Focusing on China's global influence, Akhtar documents explorer Zheng He's state-sponsored travels (and trade) through Southeast Asia and as far away as the Arabian Peninsula, and analyzes the Ming dynasty's patron-client relationship with Thailand and strong cultural influence on Korea and Japan. Elsewhere, Akhtar explains how blue-and-white porcelain designs that originated in China were heavily imitated in Iran and eventually became critical to the 17th-century Dutch economy, and notes the appearance of silk clothing with dragon motifs in 15th-century Persian-language texts and the ubiquity of tea consumption across the British empire. He also details how Portuguese Jesuits learned Chinese to spread Christianity, but also transmitted Chinese innovations in mathematics and mapmaking back to Europe, and outlines how Western economies eventually surpassed China in technological innovation, leading to reforms within China and contributing to the fall of the Edo shogunate in Japan. Akhtar packs a lot of valuable information into the dense narrative, though his pinpointing of 1368 as the beginning of the "modern world" shortchanges other geopolitical developments. Still, this is an enlightening look into a vital historical era that has been understudied in the West.
