Strangers at the Gate; Social Disorder in South China 1839-1861

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. [14], 276, [2] pages. Frontis map. Maps. Figures. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Glossary (includes Chinese characters). Index. DJ has wear, tears, chips, soiling, and is price clipped. Some cover wear and soiling. Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (December 12, 1937 - September 14, 2006) was an American scholar of East Asian history. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years." He was the author of ten books. His first monograph, published in 1966 and based on his doctoral dissertation, was Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861. Strangers at the Gate focused on social disorder in the Pearl River Delta in the aftermath of the First Opium War and extensively utilized documents seized by the British from the Guangdong-Guangxi Governor-General's office. With History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought. in 1973 he turned to philosophical and contemporary themes, and in 1975 returned to Qing dynasty China in The Fall of Imperial China. The most extensive and voluminous of Wakeman's works on the Qing is the two volume The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in the 17th Century (1985), which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for 1987. This pioneering work examines one of the most controversial periods in Chinese history: the relationship between the Chinese civil and military authorities and the British trading community in Guangdong province on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, one the most calamitous events in Chinese history. Wakeman shows how prevailing rural discontent, urban riots, secret society activity, and the imbalance of class and clan affected the mechanisms of regional power and gentry control, demonstrating the progression of rebellion and the historical inevitability of revolution.