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This wide-ranging work, consisting of selected essays of Morris Rossabi, reflects the diverse interests of a leading scholar of China and Inner Asia. It encompasses the eras from the thirteenth century to the present, territories stretching from China to Mongolia to Central Asia and to the Middle East, and religions from Islam to Nestorian Christianity to Judaism and Confucianism in East, Central, and West Asia. Rossabi first challenged the conventional wisdom concerning traditional Chinese foreign relations by showing the pragmatism of Chinese officials who were not bound by Confucian strictures and stereotypes about foreigners and were actually knowledgeable about neighboring regions. His studies of the territories surrounding China led to the discovery of a major omission in historical writing—the lack of a biography of Khubilai Khan, one of the most renowned rulers in Eurasian history. His biography of Khubilai resulted in further studies of the Mongolian legacy on global history and of the significant role of women in the Mongolian empire. His repeated travels in Mongolia, in turn, stimulated an interest in modern Mongolia, especially the turbulence following the turbulence after the collapse of socialism in 1990, a subject he writes about in this book. The need for greater public knowledge and awareness of China, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Silk Roads, and Islam in Asia prompted Rossabi to write general, occasionally pedagogical, articles about these topics for a wider audience.
In these penetrating essays, Morris Rossabi offers pioneering studies of the often neglected regions and peoples around China. His narratives concerning both traditional and modern Mongolia, including significant analyses about the great Mongol Empire, and traditional Chinese foreign relations challenge the conventional wisdom. His writings about the Yuan and Ming dynasties of China, Islam in China, and Mongol women provide fresh insights into these rarely studied subjects. He also brings greater attention to the first attested traveller from China to reach and write about thirteenth-century Europe.
Pre-modern critical interactions of nature and society can best be studied during the so-called "Crisis of the 14th Century". While historiography has long ignored the environmental framing of historcial processes and scientists have over-emphasized nature's impact on the course of human history, this volume tries to describe the at times complex modes of the late-medieval relationship of man and nature. The idea of 'teleconnection', borrowed from the geosciences, describes the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns often over long distances. It seems that there were 'teleconnections' in society, too. So this volumes aims to examine man-environment interactions mainly in the 14th century from all over Europe and beyond. It integrates contributions from different disciplines on impact, perception and reaction of environmental change and natural extreme events on late Medieval societies. For humanists from all historical disciplines it offers an approach how to integrate written and even scientific evidence on environmental change in established and new fields of historical research. For scientists it demonstrates the contributions scholars from the humanities can provide for discussion on past environmental changes.
The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas 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 backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs 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.
Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies—including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank—for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. Modern Mongolia is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that the agencies providing grants and loans insisted on Mongolia's adherence to a set of policies that did not generally take into account the country's unique heritage and society. Though the sale of state assets, minimalist government, liberalization of trade and prices, a balanced budget, and austerity were supposed to yield marked economic growth, Mongolia—the world's fifth-largest per capita recipient of foreign aid—did not recover as expected. As he details this painful transition from a collective to a capitalist economy, Rossabi also analyzes the cultural effects of the sudden opening of Mongolia to democracy. He looks at the broader implications of Mongolia's international situation and considers its future, particularly in relation to China.
The essays in this volume dispel some of the myths concerning the Mongolians and other Inner Asian peoples. This remarkable volume edited by and dedicated to Morris Rossabi challenges the depictions of these mostly nomadic pastoral groups as barbaric plunderers and killers while not denying the destruction and loss of life they engendered. Several essays pioneer in consulting Mongolian and other Inner Asian rather than exclusively Chinese and Persian sources, offering new and different perspectives. Such research reveals the divisions among the Mongolians, which weakened them and led to the collapse of their Empire. Two essays dispel myths about modern Mongolia and reveal the country’s significance, even in an era of superpowers, two of which surround it. Contributors are: Christopher Atwood, Bettine Birge, Michael Brose, Pamela Crossley, Johan Elverskog, Jargalsaikhan Enkhsaikhan, Yuki Konagaya, James Millward, David Morgan, and David Robinson.
Discover the complexity of China’s past with this multi-faceted portrayal of the storied nation from a leading expert in the field The newly revised Second Edition of A History of China delivers a comprehensive treatment of the political, economic, social, and cultural history of China that covers all major events and trends that have shaped the country over the centuries. The book is written in a clear and uncomplicated style, sure to be of assistance to undergraduate students with little prior background knowledge in the subject matter. The text examines Chinese history through a global lens to better understand how foreign influences affected domestic policies and practices. It includes discussions of the roles played by non-Chinese ethnic groups in China, like the Tibetans and Uyghurs, and the Mongol and Manchu rulers who held power in China for several centuries. The distinguished author takes pains to incorporate the perspectives and narratives of people traditionally left out of Chinese history, including women, peasants, merchants, and artisans. Readers will also enjoy the inclusion of: A thorough introduction to early and ancient Chinese history, including classical China, the first Chinese empires, and religious and political responses to the period between 220 and 581 CE An exploration of the restoration of Empire under Sui and Tang, as well as post-Tang society and Glorious Song A discussion of China and the Mongol world, including Mongol rule in China and the isolationism and involvement on the global stage of the Ming dynasty A treatment of China in global history, including the Qing era, the Republican period, and the Communist era Perfect for undergraduate students of courses on Chinese history and Central Asian History, the Second Edition of A History of China will also earn a place in the libraries of students studying global history and related classes in history departments and departments of Asian studies. The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.
In Voyager from Xanadu, a distinguished historian tells the little-known story of the life and travels of the first person from China ever to reach Europe. Portraying one of the most remarkable early encounters between East and West, Morris Rossabi also brings to life the intriguing and turbulent era of the Mongol Empire and the last Crusades. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, at about the time Marco Polo arrived in China, a Christian monk, Rabban Sauma, left it, embarking on a journey that would prove more momentous than he could have dreamed. What began as a religious pilgrimage to the Middle East (supported by the Mongol Emperor, Khubilai Khan) ultimately became an extraordinary diplomatic mission. After several years' eventful stay in Persia, Sauma was dispatched to Europe by Persia's Mongol ruler, the Ilkhan. The monk's task: to persuade the Pope and the Kings of France and England to ally with the Ilkhan and launch a Crusade against their common enemy, the Muslim dynasty that controlled the Holy Land. The mission was a striking early instance of geopolitics on a modern scale. Voyager from Xanadu vividly conjures up the places Sauma visited as he crossed two continents, meeting with monarchs and prelates and seeing everything from a battle to a volcanic eruption to countless grisly relics of long-dead saints. It provides a clear and penetrating analysis of the volatile international situation of the era and its impact on Sauma's embassy. And, of course, Voyager from Xanadu traces the life of an exceptional man, from his comfortable youth, through his unique adventures, to his death far from the land of his birth.
The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories--of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator--serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.
The Mongol Century explores the visual world of China's Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the spectacular but relatively short-lived regime founded by Khubilai Khan, regarded as the pre-eminent khanate of the Mongol empire. This book illuminates the Yuan era – full of conflicts and complex interactions between Mongol power and Chinese heritage – by delving into the visual history of its culture, considering how Mongol governance and values imposed a new order on China's culture and how a sedentary, agrarian China posed specific challenges to the Mongols' militarist and nomadic lifestyle. Shane McCausland explores how an unusual range of expectations and pressures were placed on Yuan culture: the idea that visual culture could create cohesion across a diverse yet hierarchical society, while balancing Mongol desires for novelty and display with Chinese concerns about posterity. Although in recent years exhibitions have begun to open up the inherent paradoxes of Yuan culture, this is the first book in English to adopt a comprehensive approach. It incorporates a broad range of visual media of the East Asia region to reconsider the impact Mongol culture had in China, from urban architecture and design to tomb murals and porcelain, and from calligraphy and printed paper money to stone sculpture. Fresh and invigorating, The Mongol Century explores, in fascinating detail, the visual culture of this brief but captivating era of East Asian history.