Scattered across the maps and paintings that Brook invokes, his 13 encounters take in pirates, merchants, soldiers, traders, explorers, emperors and spiritual leaders – characters in China’s complex trade, military, spiritual and political relationships down the centuries. Brook unravels the threads of these relationships across a canvas of war, friendship, savage struggles for power, lethal epidemic disease, triumph and calamity. It is a dizzying and exhilarating journey ... China is not the first or the only big state to refuse to obey the rules that it has signed up to, but it offers perhaps the most important challenge to the postwar global order, in particular to the UN system, since its foundation. Understanding how China sees itself and how it justifies its actions is critical to understanding today’s world. Great State offers some compelling lessons for today, and for all our futures.
Mr. Brook...has written a work that is less a history of China than a kaleidoscope of fragmentary images conjured from equally fragmentary historical sources ... The structure of Mr. Brook’s book requires a certain amount of patience from the reader. Great State can meander and take its time; it can follow tangents that don’t always turn up answers. But Mr. Brook is an elegant, thoughtful writer and an engaging and interesting guide, even if it’s not always clear where he is taking us ... an elliptic, allusive book like this one has its place. And Great State is a delight to read ... These sections can be entrancing, and there is something wonderfully dizzying about the image of China that emerges ... Despite appearances, this is not a book about how China’s past shapes its present; it is a book about China’s past. Readers looking for connections to today must find them for themselves.
...excellent ... The power of this book lies partly in the fact that Brook, a professor at the University of British Columbia...does not overstate his case. While he does not seek to claim that China’s current actions are prefigured by the past, an attentive reader cannot fail to notice extraordinary parallels ... His book also recognises that the attitude of the Chinese state toward foreigners is complex and often contradictory. In perhaps his most powerful chapter, Brook sets out a scintillating argument between two senior Ming dynasty officials over whether Jesuit missionaries represented a boon or a bane to the Great State.
These days, historians of China and foreign correspondents usually focus on a particular period or a single figure. What a pleasure to read a significant, original book that covers millennia of Chinese history in an informal, often chatty, but always learned style ... Brook contends that China has always been part of the larger world ... When the now-victorious Han republicans set about establishing their new Chinese state, they quickly discovered, according to Brook, that they had not created a new Great State. It is that huge weakness that the Chinese, from the time of Mao Zedong to that of Xi Jinping, have sought to remedy, from Central Asia and across the seas far from their shores – the policy that, as Brook skilfully makes clear, greatly alarms us today.
Brook...has an impressive grasp of the sources, and he is at his best when delivering intermittent side swipes at popular misconceptions of Chinese history and China’s recent foreign policy ... it basically skips the nineteenth century. This is a serious issue for a book about China and the world that suggests contemporary implications. A great deal of the country’s current attitude to the world is a result of its nineteenth- century history ... Perhaps Great State might be best read alongside the novelist Amitav Ghosh’s wonderfully researched Ibis trilogy...which tells the story of the opium trade from India to China and the war Britain fought to protect it.
Demand evokes supply, and Timothy Brook has supplied his Great State, in which his solid Sinological scholarship is complemented by a very effective use of maps...to illustrate his uncontroversial depiction of China as entangled in world affairs since early antiquity, but also his unconventional view of the true origins of today’s Chinese state ... When it comes to assessing Brook’s fundamental thesis, there are exceptions to every bold conclusion that one might reach.
In this academic yet mostly accessible work, Brook makes two significant revisionist arguments about China and its history ... With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country.
