Böcker av S. A. M. Adshead

First Published in 1984 Province and Politics in Late Imperial China presents analysis of one of the regional governments of China, the administration of the Szechwan governor-general from its apogee at the end of the nineteenth century to its nadir in the revolution of 1911.

This is a study of Central Asian history from Chinggis to the present, with reference to relations with China, Russia, India and Western Europe and to wider themes of world history. The following chapters relate Central Asian history to the eight world institutions, whose development, it is argued, constitute world history in the proper sense.

This book presents a picture focused on the T'ang period, one of China's acknowledged golden ages. Within a looser web of globalization, the T'ang period and its dynamics offers a distant mirror of our own time. An argument in world history may thus cast light on issues in contemporary politics.

In particular it traces China's relationship since the thirteenth century to the emergent world order and the various world institutions of which that order is composed. Each chapter discusses China's comparative place in the world, the avenues of contact between China and other civilizations, and who and what passed along those channels.

This book sets out to place the particular histories of salt in a global perspective and write the history of a human commodity as a theme in world history. The author shows how a history of salt cannot be separated from the histories of commerce, medicine, diet, cooking, taxation, invention and war.