Sea and Empire: Ming and Qing Era

"The History of China" is a gift for the 100th anniversary of Kodansha Japan. It is a general history of China written by Japanese historians for the public. The series covers a large amount of content from ancient times to modern times. The authors are all representative Japanese scholars in this field. Most of the works are ingenious in conception, easy to write, novel in viewpoint, and rich in insight. At the same time, they have absorbed many academic achievements in recent years and made use of the latest unearthed historical materials. It is a set of blockbuster historical works that are both readable and serious. The author of this book vividly demonstrates the history of the ocean and the five-hundred-year history of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and provides a rigorous and in-depth explanation of the Ming and Qing dynasties, a pair of eras that spanned the Middle Ages to modern times and continued to undergo rapid changes in modern times. In the past, the mainstream view, both at home and abroad, was that the Ming and Qing Dynasties (before the Opium War) were a period of stagnation; China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties was regarded as a period of "isolation", a period without access to the ocean. In the past 20 to 30 years, international academic circles have vigorously criticized the above statement, arguing that China's economy developed greatly during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and society and culture also experienced profound changes. China's ties with the outside world were far stronger than before, thus playing a very important role in international trade. This book adopts new insights from international academic circles on these major issues, so it is very innovative in terms of historical perspective.