The Fall of Imperial China

This colorful social history of China describes the domestic sources of conflict and change which influenced China's response to the coming of the West. From the beginnings of the Manchu rise to power in the sixteenth century to the republican revolution in the twentieth, the author traces the development of pre-modern China from the viewpoint of the major social classes - the peasants, merchants, and gentry. He shows how their changing roles and their interactions with Japanese and European imperialism, culminated in the breakdown of the imperial state.