¹ Zhang, Yongjin, ‘System, empire and state in Chinese International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 27:5 (2001), pp. 43–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kang, David C., East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Zhou, Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium analysis of the tributary system’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 4:2 (2011), pp. 147–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, Robert E., ‘A “Confucian long peace” in pre-Western East Asia?’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:3 (2012), pp. 407–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zhang, Yongjin and Buzan, Barry, ‘The tributary system as international society in theory and practice’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 5:1 (2012), pp. 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ringmar, Erik, ‘Performing international systems: Two East-Asian alternatives to the Westphalian order’, International Organization, 66:1 (2012), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joseph MacKay, ‘Rethinking the IR theory of empire in late Imperial China’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (forthcoming).

² Nomadic peoples generally have recently received attention in IR. Neumann, Iver B. and Wigen, Einar, ‘The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 16 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacKay, Joseph et al., ‘Before and after borders: The nomadic challenge to sovereign territoriality’, International Politics, 51:1 (2014), pp. 101–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The word is, of course, contentious. ‘Barbarian’ has been use to translate multiple Chinese terms that may usefully parallel the equivalent Greek root, a practice I follow here, for simplicity’s sake. An alternative usage is simply ‘foreigner’. For a detailed discussion of these translation issues, see Nicola Cosmo, Di, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 95–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, fn. 7.

⁴ Kang, , East Asia Before the West, p. 140Google Scholar.

⁵ The term is due to Fairbank, John K. (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Mitzen, Jennifer, ‘Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), p. 341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steele, Brent J., Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; Rumelili, Bahar (ed.), Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

⁷ Neumann, Iver B., ‘Self and other in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 2:2 (1996), pp. 139–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘Others’ have been associated with identity formation by philosophers and social scientists at least since Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. John Niemeyer Findlay, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

⁸ Rumelili, Bahar, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nor, as Abizadeh has recently argued, does identity building require an other. Abizadeh, Arash, ‘Does collective identity presuppose an other? On the alleged incoherence of global solidarity’, American Political Science Review, 99:1 (2005), pp. 45–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Johnston, Alastair Iain, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Ming China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Hui, Victoria Tin-bor, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wang, Yuan-Kang, Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The canonical account is Fairbank, The Chinese World Order. While historians increasingly question Fairbank’s framework, few doubt the system was usually hierarchical, and no alternative account has been widely accepted. For a survey of criticisms, see Hevia, James L., ‘Tribute, asymmetry, and imperial formations: Rethinking relations of power in East Asia’, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 16:1–2 (2009), pp. 69–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ This is not to say the regional order persisted for the entire imperial era – rather, it accrued gradually, as neighbouring states joined its Confucian value system. Kang describes it peaking during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Kang, East Asia Before the West.

¹² Pines, Yuri, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), p. 1Google Scholar.

¹³ Kang, David C., “Hierarchy and legitimacy in international systems: The tribute system in early modern East Asia’, Security Studies, 19:4 (2010), pp. 593CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 595. For a realist account, see Wang, Harmony and War.

¹⁴ East Asia Before the West, p. 140.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 10.

¹⁶ Kelly, ‘A “Confucian long peace” in pre-Western East Asia?’ The peace was nonetheless puzzling. In contrast, the same period in Europe (roughly the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries) included all the Reformationary wars, including the Thirty Years War, as well as the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. It was an extraordinarily bloody period. Alternately, the East Asian peace was more than ten times as long as, and considerably less violent than, the original ‘long peace’ – the Cold War.

¹⁷ This literature belongs to a broader trend toward conceptualising non-Western historical international systems. See especially English School accounts, including Watson, , The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 85–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buzan, Barry and Little, Richard, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 57–60Google Scholar. The subject has often arisen in the context of comparing international systems: Donnelly, Jack, ‘Rethinking political structures: From “ordering principles” to “vertical differentiation” – and beyond’, International Theory, 1:1 (2009), pp. 49–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Donnelly, Jack, ‘The elements of the structures of international systems’, International Organization, 66:4 (2012), pp. 609–643CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ringmar, ‘Performing international systems’. See also Hobson, John M., The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’; Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations.

¹⁹ Mitzen, , ‘Ontological security in world politics’, p. 346Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 353–63.

²¹ Steele, Brent J., ‘Ontological security and the power of self-identity: British neutrality and the American Civil War’, Review of International Studies, 31:3 (2005), pp. 519–540CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Jelena Subotić, ‘Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change’, Foreign Policy Analysis (2015). See also research by social psychologists – for example, Kinnvall, Catarina, ‘Globalization and religious nationalism: Self, identity, and the search for ontological security’, Political Psychology, 25:5 (2004), pp. 741–767CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Mitzen treats ontological (in)security as a property of states as unitary actors. Others, such a Krolikowski, are sceptical. I focus on Chinese elite individual efforts to construct a collective identity, eliding the methodological problem of treating states as unitary, but nonetheless focusing on the collective identity of the state. Subotic adopts a similar approach. Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’; Krolikowski, Alanna, ‘State personhood in ontological security theories of International Relations and Chinese nationalism: A sceptical view’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2:1 (2008), pp. 109–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subotić, ‘Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change’.

²⁴ Neumann, ‘Self and other in International Relations’, p. 165, emphasis in original. The article also reviews self/other logics in IR and social theory. See also Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

²⁵ See, for example, Rumelili, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia.

²⁶ Steele, , Ontological Security in International Relations, p. 40Google Scholar.

²⁷ Not all ontological security frameworks in IR emphasise self/other relations. While Mitzen makes no direct reference to it, the concept is important to Steele’s account. Ibid., pp. 26–7, 30–2.

²⁸ Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 218–219Google Scholar.

²⁹ As Neumann and Wigen have recently argued, steppe societies have been ‘roundly neglected’ in IR, in terms of understanding relations both between steppe polities, and between steppe and settled peoples. Neumann and Wigen, ‘The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of International Relations’.

³⁰ Lewis, Mark Edward, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 1Google Scholar.

³¹ Ibid., p. 2.

³² Pines, Yuri, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 34Google Scholar.

³³ Lewis, , The Early Chinese Empires, pp. 135–136Google Scholar, emphasis added.

³⁴ Quoted in Lewis, Mark, ‘The Han abolition of universal military service’, in Hans van de Ven, Warfare in Chinese History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), pp. 45–46Google Scholar. The passage is from a biography of Chao in the Han shu or Book of Han, by the historian and court official Ban Gu.

³⁵ Qian, Sima, ‘The world beyond China’, in Patricia Buckley Ebrey (ed.), Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (2nd edn, New York, NY: Free Press, 1993), p. 55Google Scholar.

³⁶ Qian, Sima, Records of the Grand Historian of China, trans. Burton Watson (Hong Kong: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 12Google Scholar. Sima Qian’s account of the nomadic other had historical parallels, including the Greek view of the Scythians, found in Herodotus. Stuurman, Siep, ‘Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the anthropological turn in Ancient Greece and Han China’, Journal of World History, 19:1 (2008), pp. 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Cosmo, Di, Ancient China and Its Enemies, pp. 196–199Google Scholar.

³⁸ The tian-xia concept has been revived as a normative political-theoretic programme by the Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang (‘Rethinking empire from a Chinese concept “all-under-heaven” (tian-xia),” Social Identities, 12:1 (2006), pp. 29–41; ‘A political world philosophy in terms of all-under-heaven (tian-xia)’, Diogenes, 56:1 (2009), pp. 5–18.) For critique, see Callahan, William A., ‘Chinese visions of world order: Post-hegemonic or a new hegemony?’, International Studies Review, 10:4 (2008), pp. 749–761CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a defence, see Ren, Xiao, ‘Traditional Chinese theory and practice of foreign relations’, in Yongnian Zheng (ed.), China and International Relations: The Chinese View and the Contribution of Wang Gungwu (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 102–116Google Scholar.

³⁹ Pines, Yuri, ‘Changing views of Tianxia in pre-imperial discourse’, Oriens Extremus, 43 (2002), pp. 101–116Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Pines, Yuri, ‘Beasts or humans: Pre-imperial origins of sino-barbarian dichotomy’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 90–91Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Lewis, , The Early Chinese Empires, p. 2Google Scholar.

⁴² Fiskesjö, Magnus, ‘On the “raw” and the “cooked” barbarians of Imperial China’, Inner Asia, 1:2 (1999), pp. 139–168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Quoted in ibid., p. 143. ‘Li’ refers in general to uncivilised peoples of non-Chinese origin. Ibid., p. 158.

⁴⁴ A Song dynasty historian took an analogous view of steppe peoples: ‘Let us not seek victory over them … They are like unto all manner of insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards. How could we “receive them with courtesy and deference”?’ quoted in Wright, David C., ‘The northern frontier’, in David Andrew Graff and Robin D. S. Higham (eds), A Military History of China (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 57Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ This view was not limited to the steppe – it applied to multiple peripheral peoples. See Scott’s account of imperial relations with Southeast Asian hill tribes. Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed. Tellingly, Scott references Barfield’s ‘shadow empires’ in framing his account. Barfield, Thomas J., ‘The shadow empires: Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier’, in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Only the steppe both received this rhetorical treatment and presented a military threat. Exceptionally, Ming and Qing authorities had difficulty dealing with pirate polities on the Chinese coast. Being relatively short-lived, institutionally adaptable, and opposed to Chinese rule, they had striking parallels with the steppe. MacKay, Joseph, ‘Pirate nations: Maritime pirates as escape societies in late Imperial China’, Social Science History, 37:4 (2013), pp. 551–573Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Even during the Yuan and later Qing nomadic conquest dynasties, the bureaucratic elites of the empire remained ethnically Chinese, passing through the meritocratic selection process of civil service exams. Nomads joined the imperial elite only through conquest. While nomads occasionally served in China’s northern armies, they did not lead them.

⁴⁷ By this time, the states were states, in the sense of being centralised and bureaucratised. For example, civil service exams dated from the Han dynasty, and were formalised during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Woodside, Alexander, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 1–2Google Scholar. East Asian state consolidation thus predates equivalent processes in Europe. It occurred in China, Korea, and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in Japan, where a feudal warrior aristocracy persisted. Kang, , East Asia Before the West, pp. 25–53Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Quoted in Wang, Gungwu, ‘Ming foreign relations: Southeast Asia’, in Denis C. Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds), The Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 12Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Brook, Timothy, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8.

⁵⁰ Rossabi, Morris, ‘The Ming and Inner Asia’, in Denis C. Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds), The Cambridge History of China Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 222–223Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Quoted in Brook, , The Troubled Empire, p. 29Google Scholar.

⁵² Huang, Siu-chi, Essentials of Neo-Confucianism: Eight Major Philosophers of the Song and Ming Periods (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 4Google Scholar.

⁵³ Brook, , The Troubled Empire, pp. 182–185Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Fairbank, The Chinese World Order.

⁵⁵ Mackinder viewed nomads as akin to natural disasters occasionally visited upon sedentary civilisations. Mackinder, H. J., ‘The geographical pivot of history’, The Geographical Journal, 23:4 (1904), pp. 421–437CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lattimore, while more nuanced, sharply distinguished between settled and steppe peoples, emphasising environmental factors. Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York, NY: American Geographical Society, 1940)Google Scholar. For recent discussion, see Rogers, J. Daniel, ‘Inner Asian states and empires: Theories and synthesis’, Journal of Archaeological Research, 20:3 (2012), pp. 209CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 215–16; Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. xxi–xxv.

⁵⁶ Barfield, Thomas J., The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar; Barfield, ‘The shadow empires: Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier’.

⁵⁷ For a critical review of dependency, see Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’, pp. 214–217Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Chiefly Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian of China.

⁵⁹ Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’. For a useful review of archaeological literature on the region, see Philip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For a systematic account of China’s interaction with these polities, see Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies. For a review of recent archaeological evidence, see Hanks, Bryan K., ‘Archaeology of the Eurasian steppes and Mongolia’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39:1 (2010), pp. 469–486CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For additional synthesis on Mongol hierarchy during the period, see Kradin, Nicolay N., ‘Heterarchy and hierarchy among the ancient Mongolian nomads’, Social Evolution & History, 10:1 (2011), pp. 187–214Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Houle, Jean-Luc, ‘Socially integrative facilities and the emergence of societal complexity on the Mongolian steppe’, in Bryan K. Hanks and Katheryn M. Linduff (eds), Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals and Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 371Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Shelach, Gideon, ‘Violence on the frontiers? Sources of power and socio-political change at the easternmost parts of the Eurasian steppe during the late second and early first millennia BCE’, in Bryan K. Hanks and Katheryn M. Linduff (eds), Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals and Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 241–271CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Frachetti, Michael D., ‘Multiregional emergence of mobile pastoralism and nonuniform institutional complexity across Eurasia’, Current Anthropology, 53:1 (2012), pp. 2–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Murphy, Eileen M. et al., ‘Iron Age pastoral nomadism and agriculture in the Eastern Eurasian steppe: Implications from dental palaeopathology and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 40:5 (2013), pp. 2547–2560CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Numbers vary with the nebulous borders of Inner Eurasia as a region, and with the definition of ‘empire’. Rogers finds 15 large-scale steppe polities. Turchin finds 13 Central and Inner Asian ‘“mega” empires’, although not all were consistently nomadic. Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’, p. 208Google Scholar; Turchin, Peter, ‘A theory for formation of large empires’, Journal of Global History, 4:2 (2009), p. 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Cosmo, Nicola Di, ‘State formation and periodization in Inner Asian history’, Journal of World History, 10:1 (1999), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies.

⁶⁶ Honeychurch, William, ‘The nomad as state builder: Historical theory and material evidence from Mongolia’, Journal of World Prehistory, 26:4 (2013), p. 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Quoted in Golden, Peter B., Central Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 28Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Honeychurch, , ‘The nomad as state builder’, pp. 313–314Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Hansen, Valerie, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co, 2000), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’, p. 208Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Carneiro, Robert L., ‘A theory of the origin of the state’, Science, 169:3947 (1970), p. 735CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁷² Barfield, , The Perilous Frontier, pp. 24–26Google Scholar.

⁷³ Sneath, David, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, & Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’, p. 213Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Honeychurch, William, ‘Alternative complexities: The archaeology of pastoral nomadic states’, Journal of Archaeological Research, 22:4 (2014), p. 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many innovations were technological, including horse riding and the chariot. Anthony, David W., The Horse, the Wheel and Language : How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Murphy et al., ‘Iron Age pastoral nomadism and agriculture in the Eastern Eurasian steppe’; Honeychurch, , ‘Alternative complexities’, p. 304Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Barfield, The Perilous Frontier.

⁷⁸ Honeychurch, , ‘Alternative complexities’, pp. 292Google Scholar, 294, 310.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 306.

⁸⁰ Sneath, The Headless State, pp. 23, 181.

⁸¹ Roads plural – multiple routes intersected, overlapped, and varied over time. Parzinger, Hermann, ‘The “Silk Roads” concept reconsidered: About transfers, transportation and transcontinental interactions in prehistory’, The Silk Road, 5:2 (2008), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁸² Honeychurch, , ‘Alternative complexities’, pp. 295Google Scholar, 307–8; Honeychurch, William, Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire: Archaeology, Mobility, and Culture Contact (New York, NY: Springer, 2015), pp. 277–278Google Scholar; see also Beckwith, , Empires of the Silk Road, pp. 26–28Google Scholar.

⁸³ Morgan, David, The Mongols (2nd edn, London: Blackwell, 2007), p. 5Google Scholar. Mongol Imperial historiography presents unique research challenges, including ‘a bewildering array of languages, of which Chinese and Persian are undeniably the most important but which also include Latin, Greek, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Syriac, Tibetan, Korean and even (to some extent) Mongolian.’ Jackson, Peter, ‘The Mongol Empire, 1986–1999’, Journal of Medieval History, 26:2 (2000), p. 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jackson nonetheless usefully reviews recent research. The key primary source concerning the empire itself is Urgunge Onon, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan (London: Routledge, 2011). It’s historical accuracy remains disputed. Morgan, The Mongols.

⁸⁴ Skrynnikova, Tatyana D., ‘Relations of domination and submission: Political practice in the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan’, in David Sneath (ed.), Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 86Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Allsen, Thomas T., ‘Technologies of governance in the Mongolian empire: A geographic overview’, in David Sneath (ed.), Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 123Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Sneath, David (ed.), ‘Imperial statecraft: Arts of power on the steppe’, Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 19Google Scholar; Allsen, , ‘Imperial statecraft’, pp. 37–38Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Darwin, John, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 4–6Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Rogers, , ‘Inner Asian states and empires’, pp. 236–237Google Scholar; Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Atwood, Christopher P., ‘Titles, appanages, marriages, and officials: A comparison of political forms in the Zünghar and thirteenth-century Mongol Empires’, in David Sneath (ed.), Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 209Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ On Qing conquest, see Perdue, , China Marches West. On late steppe political structures, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, ‘The 1640 Great Code: An Inner Asian parallel to the treaty of Westphalia’, Central Asian Survey, 29:3 (2010), pp. 269–288Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Thus, for example, Honeychurch cites positively elements of Lattimore’s and Barfield’s arguments.

⁹² These new accounts have not been accepted without debate. Golden, Peter B., ‘Review of the headless state: Aristocratic orders, kinship society, and misrepesentations of nomadic Inner Asia. By David Sneath’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 68:1 (2009), pp. 293–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹³ A strong variant of the revisionist account appears in Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road. Beckwith posits long historical cycles of conflict between Central Eurasia and polities at their continental peripheries, in Europe and East Asia. Inner Asian empires, he argues, created economic exchange networks that benefitted core and peripheries alike (the Silk Road being the most famous), but which were periodically destroyed by conquering peripheral empires. He thus offers not an account of Inner Asian history alone, so much as a geographical theory of world history – or, at least, a large part of it. It is thus not necessarily conducive to assessing the specifics of China-steppe relations. His synthesis has also been somewhat controversial – even proponents of the revisionist view do not wholly follow it. (See, for example, Cosmo, Nicola Di, ‘Empires of the Silk Road: A history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present, by Christopher I. Beckwith’, Journal of Global History, 4:3 (2009), pp. 510–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) I follow some of Beckwith’s specific observations, but not his general theory.

⁹⁴ Neumann and Wigen, ‘The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of International Relations’; Neumann, Iver B., ‘The steppe and early European state formation’, Uluslararasi Iliskiler / International Relations, 8:30 (2011), pp. 3–12Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Wright, , ‘The northern frontier’, pp. 64–66Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Lewis, Mark Edward, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 147–148Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Brook, , The Troubled Empire, p. 27Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Allsen, Thomas T., ‘The rise of the Mongolian empire and Mongolian rule in North China’, in Denis C. Twitchett, Herbert Franke, and John King Fairbank (eds), The Cambridge History of China: Volume 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 710–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Morgan, The Mongols.

⁹⁹ Brook, , The Troubled Empire, p. 27Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 81.

¹⁰¹ Rossabi, , ‘The Ming and Inner Asia’, p. 275Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Bol, Peter K., Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), p. 216Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Rawski, Evelyn S., ‘Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The significance of the Qing period in Chinese history’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55:4 (1996), pp. 829–850CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Crossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Elliott, Mark C., The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (1st edn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For a sceptical view, see Ho, Ping-Ti, ‘In defense of sinicization: A rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s “Reenvisioning the Qing”’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 57:1 (1998), pp. 123–155Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Nexon, Daniel H. and Wright, Thomas, ‘What’s at stake in the American Empire debate’, American Political Science Review, 101:2 (2007), p. 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ Waley-Cohen, Joanna, ‘The new Qing history’, Radical History Review, 88:1 (2004), pp. 194–195Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 199.

¹⁰⁷ Millward, James, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 97–101Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Quoted in Newby, Laura, The Empire And the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations With Khoqand c1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 29Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ Perdue, Peter C., ‘China and other colonial empires’, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 16:1–2 (2009), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁰ Larsen, Kirk W., ‘The Qing empire (China), imperialism, and the modern world’, History Compass, 9:6 (2011), p. 499CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹¹ Perdue, China Marches West.

¹¹² Waldron, Arthur, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 6Google Scholar.