Great State: China and the World

Timothy Brook

mar 2020 · HarperCollins

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The author of Vermeer’s Hat shares “a dizzying and exhilarating journey” through 800 years of Chinese history and national identity (New Statesman).

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century and has maintained them ever since—through the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. Yet China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders as well as foreign traders and imperialists. Its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese.

China became a mega-state not by conquering others, Timothy Brook contends, but rather by being conquered by others and then claiming right of succession to the empires of those Great States. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic, and the People’s Republic, have perpetuated. Yet the idea of a naturally Chinese ‘fatherland’ persists to this day.

In The Great State, Brook examines China’s relationship with the world at large for the first time, from the Yuan through to the present, by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met, and continues to meet, the world.

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Timothy Brook is a professor and writer on Chinese and world history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A native of Toronto and graduate of the University of Toronto, Brook moved from Toronto to become principal of St. John’s College at UBC in 2004, where he was named to the Republic of China Chair. Brook previously held positions at the University of Alberta, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford, where he was Shaw Professor of Chinese from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of several books, including Vermeer's Hat and Confusions of Pleasure.