Obiter’s Survey of Books on China Continues
At the heart of Canadian historian Timothy Brook’s new book, Great State: China and the World (Harper, 2020), is a desire to show that China’s interactions with the rest of the world—at least since the thirteenth century—have been varied and complex. Indeed, China did not exist in splendid isolation until being “opened up” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the West. Its exchanges with other places were not limited to trade in goods. They also encompassed the transfer of people, thought, language, and disease. In Great State, Brook shows that many features of the polity that we know today as China (including control over areas well beyond the domain of the Han) developed under “foreign” rule, during the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing.
Unfolding as a series of anecdotes, the book begins with “The Great Khan and His Portraitist”—an analysis of the circumstances surrounding Liu Guandao’s 1280 painting of Khubilai Khan—and concludes with the “The Collaborator and His Lawyer”, which charts the trial in 1946 of Liang Hongzhi, a Republican politician who threw in his lot with the occupying Japanese during the Second World War. Brook’s selection is tasteful, covering both better-known episodes (though never failing to shed new light on them) and obscure ones. Readers will have their favourites, but “The Plague” and “The Lama and the Prince” stood out to me for their blend of historical insights and contemporary resonances.
Notably, Brook skips over the entirety of the nineteenth century. His reasons for doing so are unclear, and the omission is all the more strange given the theme of the book and the breadth of its coverage. Perhaps Brook felt that the market for nineteenth-century Chinese history is oversaturated; it probably is. Nonetheless, although Brook’s observations on this period are missed in hindsight, the exclusion does not disturb the flow of the book.
Brook’s prose is rigorous but accessible. He is a sympathetic and perceptive critic of visual media. He draws parallels between China’s past and its present, but avoids presenting a teleological narrative. Most importantly, the book has something for both the seasoned student and the novice. For these reasons, I do not hesitate in recommending Great State. It is a fine contribution to the literature.