Chinese History in Geographical Perspective

8vo, br. ed. pp.vi-213. The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial states persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former "outer zones" in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of "all-under-heaven" to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.' About the Author: Yongtao Du is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include translocal practices in late imperial China and literati geographic consciousness in China during the Song through the Qing. He received a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. Jeff Kyong-McClain is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research explores the place of archeology in nation-building in modern China, Sino-Western interaction in China's borderlands, and urban transformations during the Republican era. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009.