Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad (review)

Westad teaches international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He says he is not a China specialist, but credits Michael H. Hunt, his teacher, for creating in him an interest in Chinese history, sustained for more than twenty-five years. Dedicated to Michael and Paula Hunt, Restless Empire is about how Western ideas and institutions influenced and were incorporated into the Qing dynasty, beginning 250 years ago. As an empire, it was at its height in the year 1750. Designed largely by the Italian Jesuit missionary Giuseppe Castiglione, the Yuan Mingyuan gardens (five times bigger than the Forbidden City) were the concrete symbol of Qing power at its zenith. The magnificent gardens were totally destroyed, burned to the ground by the allied forces of seven Western nations plus Japan, in squelching the Boxer uprising against foreigners and Christians in 1900. Westad’s position is that despite the forceful entry of the West and Japan into China, resulting in it being semi-colonial, quite a bit of Western ways and lifestyles were nevertheless absorbed by China and the Chinese, but were expressed in different forms of hybridity. The notion of hybridity is used by Westad in several places in the book to show “China’s capacity to form hybrid or at least eclectic forms of social identities, and its propensity for internalizing worldviews created elsewhere” (p. 14).¹

Restless Empire is easy and interesting reading, enhanced by the fact that its many historical facets hang together coherently as one continuous story. The book is also entertaining. Westad is a careful historian, attested to by the detailed notes in the eleven chapters. He is a great storyteller, adorning his narrative with interesting tidbits of facts and information as well as actual names of significant players at different times and occasions. Many of his cited remarks or descriptions provide a touch of humor. In his acknowledgments, Westad states in bold letters, “I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED TO ALL THE SCHOLARS and writers whose work I draw on for this book of synthesis.” The book, he adds, “is primarily intended for a general reading public” (p. 477). Having read and reviewed several of the scholars from whom Westad has drawn, I find his use of secondary material skillful and imaginative in offering this informative volume to the reading public. As an artist in popularizing history, he by no means has compromised any of the scholarship of his sources.²

Westad’s use of one or two simple words (all with broad ramifications) to encapsulate each of his eleven chapters is ingenious. These are chapters: 1, “Metamorphosis” (China’s transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); 2, “Imperialism”; 3, “Japan”; 4, “Republic”; 5, “Foreigners”; 6, “Abroad”; 7, “War”; 8, “Communism”; 9, “China Alone”; 10, “China’s America”; and finally 11, “China’s Asia.” The chapters are sandwiched between his overview of the Qing by the two categories central to the book, “Empire” and “Modernities.” Having teased out the important antecedents of an outward-looking Qing (under Western and Japanese domination), Westad as historian makes no overt predictions, but leaves the task to his readers. His conviction, however, is that “[h]istory therefore influences Chinese ways of seeing the world in a more direct sense than in any other culture I know. . . . Although it is impossible to predict the future based on the past, it is necessary to understand it in order to have at least some means of navigation at hand” (p. 2). It is Westad’s view that by the first half of the twentieth century China had been internationalized, and that by the year 1940 it had become integrated into a capitalist world of expanding markets. His focus is not limited to state-to-state diplomatic relations; he also depicts the people-to-people relations and interaction that have helped to transform China and the Chinese. Despite much Chinese resistance, there were...