The Troubled Empire : China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties : 5

十九世紀七十年代的蒙古收購改變了中國歷史的進程。儒家帝國 - 一千五百年的製作過程 - 突然被外國占領所衝擊。 1279年元朝統一之前的中國已經不再是未來的樣子了。

四個世紀之後，另一波草原侵略者將用另一個外國占領取代明朝。 “困境帝國”探討了這兩次戲劇性入侵之間發生的事情。如果有任何事情定義了這個時期的複雜動態，那就是天氣的變化。

在這個背景下 - 中國在這個時期的第一個連貫的生態史 - Brook探索專制的增長，社會復雜性和商業化，特別關注中國納入更大的南中國海經濟。這些變化不僅塑造了中國將成為現代世界的形成的原因，而且對形成早期的現代世界作出了貢獻。

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.

 Timothy Brook  (Autor) 

Publisher:Harvard University Press 

ISBN:    978-0674046023 

 原價   US 35 台幣價 NT$:1225