The Nature and Linkages of China’s Tributary System under the Ming and Qing Dynasties

The current landscape of Global History literature appears dominated by a rather asymmetrical dichotomy between Eurocentric analyses of the cumulative emergence of the West and global history which reduces the significance of this transition by blending it into very long-term perspectives. This ‘synecdoche syndrome’ – whereby a part and the whole are often equated and compared – belies the real nature of human history, which, up to the XIX century at least, was grounded in the presence of a plurality of coexisting world-systems. Each of these systems revolved around a multilayered cultural, economic and political relationship between centre(s) and peripheries. It is through both a synchronic and diachronic comparative study of such systems that the theory of structural systemic transformations may be refined.[...]