In his book War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China, Ulrich Theobald shows how the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) overcame the tyranny of logistics and successfully enlarged the territory of its empire. A detailed analysis of the long and expensive second Jinchuan war (1771 - 1776) in Eastern Tibet demonstrates that the Chinese state ordered its civilian officials as well as the common people, merchant associations, and different ethnic groups to fulfil and to foot the bill for the "common cause." With increasing military success the state gradually withdrew from its...

Money in Asia examines two chronic problems that faced early modern monetary economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia: The inability to provide sufficient amounts of small currencies to facilitate local economic transactions and to control currency depreciation. The studies in this volume analyze the social and economic consequences of small currency scarcity and devaluation on various Asian economies and show how various regimes tried to manage these ever-present challenges. They reveal that those regimes that dealt most successfully with these two issues were those with an...

The book Southwest China in Regional and Global Perspectives (c. 1600-1911) is dedicated to important issues in society, trade, and local policy in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan during the late phase of the Qing period. It combines the methods of various disciplines to bring more light into the neglected history of a region that witnessed a faster population growth than any other region in China during that age. The contributions to the volume analyse conflicts and arrangements in immigrant societies, problems of environmental change, the economic significance of...