The Troubled Empire

The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empire - a millennium and a half in the making - was suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. "The Troubled Empire" explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this background - the first coherent ecological history of China in this period - Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to China's incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.

ISBN 0674046021   Pages 336 ISBN13 9780674046023 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 658 Publisher Harvard University Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass. Imprint The Belknap Press   Series title History of Imperial China Format Hardback   Height (mm) 235 Publication date 08 Jun 2010   Width (mm) 155 DEWEY 951.02   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General

		Introduction		1
1		Dragon Spotting		6
2		Scale		24
3		The Nine Sloughs		50
4		Khan and Emperor		79
5		Economy and Ecology		106
6		Families		134
7		Beliefs		161
8		The Business of Things		186
9		The South China Sea		213
10		Collapse		238
		Conclusion		260
		Temperature and Precipitation Extremes		269
		The Nine Sloughs		270
		Succession of Emperors		271
		Pronunciation Guide		273
		Notes		274
		Bibliography		297
		Acknowledgments		317
		Index		318

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