Early Modern China and Northeast Asia

The goal of the work, to “de-center” China and see “what would Chinese history look like” if one looks at it from the perspective of the periphery is admirable and the work offers some gestures in that direction but I don't know if a new perspective on “Chinese history” is either the core of the work nor did it need to be. I think instead this work reaches in multiple directions at once: opening with a dense but very helpful summary of a massive amount of secondary historical research on the frontiers and interactions between the “central plains” states and other states and peoples around it, especially the peoples of the northeast of the continent, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago. The second half of the book are three case studies: state rituals, succession, and civilized-barbian discourses that take us on a tour of how these practices and discourse were connected, similar, or unique in the early modern states of northeast Asia. Again, the strength throughout is massive synthesis of the secondary literature, and lots of integration of Korean language scholarship in particular. Was pretty shocked, however, to find that a book with hundreds of toponyms has two barely labeled maps - simply unacceptable.