Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia.

• Author: Kim, Kwangmin
• Position: Book review

Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia. Edited by GEOFF WADE. Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia, vol. 9. Abingdon: ROUTLEDGE, 2015. Pp. xii + 259. S145.

Asian Expansions, a collection of ten articles, explores the motivations, processes, and dynamics of expansion of Asian states and empires from 1400 to 1900. Examining the case of China and four Southeast-Asian countries (Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, to use the modern names), the articles collectively ask how Asian states or empires expanded their territorial domain, equipped with a relatively coherent culture from 1400 to 1900 despite the kaleidoscopic ethnic, cultural, and political diversity prevalent in previous centuries.

In answering this question, most if not all of the articles highlight state initiative and agendas for political expansion: how these Asian states established a primarily Chinese-style central bureaucracy, appropriated revenue from foreign and domestic trade, exploited forced labor to expand state projects, and propagated the homogenous literary culture from the center to the peripheries. They also ask whether environmental, economic, and social backgrounds helped the states achieve the goal of expansion.

First, Peter Perdue examines the causes and limitations of Chinese imperial expansion and border making in overland Eurasia during the Ming-Qing period (1368-1911), and shows that the contingent dynamic of frontier interaction between the Mongols and the Qing (1644-1911) was responsible for the Qing expansion in the eighteenth century. Various contingent developments on the inner Asian frontier of China during the eighteenth century contributed to the Qing expansion: the clash of personalities between the Qing and Mongol rulers, the Manchu Qing ruler's inner-Asianness, the unexpected division of the Qing's archenemy, the Zunghar Mongol tribe.

Tonio Andrade surveys the Ming-Qing policy toward overseas expansion from 1500 to 1700 and reconfirms the scholarly consensus that the Asian states and empire were land-oriented polities. Focusing on the Chinese conflict with the Dutch on Taiwan, Andrade points out that although the Chinese were capable of fending off the European overseas empires, they were indifferent to the idea of overseas expansion because their primary revenue came from agriculture rather than sea trade. This was the major reason why Europeans were successful in their overseas colonial venture in Asia...