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"In the typical narrative of modern Sino-European relations, George Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role. His failure to open China to trade and diplomatic relations with Britain sets the stage for a long and bitter clash of cultures that led to the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and perhaps even to the mistrust that still pervades relations today. In this book, Tonio Andrade draws on a wealth of neglected archival material to tell a very different story: that of the last European delegation that was ever received in the traditional Chinese court, the Dutch mission of 1794-95"--

This paper examines two prominent recent attempts to explain the phenomenon of the "rise of the West," Ian Morris's model of "Social Development" and Philipp Hoffman's model of military power (Morris 2010, Morris 2013, Hoffman 2012, Hoffman 2015). Whereas most recent scholarship on the rise of the West has focused on economics, Morris and Hoffman widen the scope of comparison to other areas, in particular focusing on the measurement and explanation of divergences in military effectiveness. By drawing on recent work in China's military history, the author shows that both models – but particularly that of Morris – are inadequate, falling back on older narratives of Western military superiority that have been challenged or disproven by recent scholarship in global military history. The article suggests, however, that the two models – and especially that of Hoffman – do raise significant new questions for future research, and it concludes by noting that what social scientists need more than new models at present is a closer attention to the rapid and ever increasing proliferation of scholarship in non-Western countries, and in particular that of the Sinophone world.

Military historians have argued that the emergence in Europe of the musketry volley fire technique and the concurrent development of systematic infantry drill was of epochal importance for world history, a key part of the famous "military revolution" that underlay Europeans' purported military advantage over other peoples. This article shows that the arquebus volley technique was described in the writings of the famous Chinese military thinker Qi Jiguang by 1560, well before the most commonly accepted date for the technique's introduction in Europe. Qi Jiguang's drilling techniques were part of a long and unbroken military tradition stretching back to China's Tang dynasty and beyond, in which drill—and the volley technique itself—played a central role. The implications for our understanding of global military history are profound. As we learn more about Asian military history we will increasingly question standard narratives of our global military past.

Over the past few years, this journal has hosted a debate central to world history and historical sociology: Joseph M. Bryant's bold assault on the revisionist model of global history and the revisionists' equally trenchant defense. A key point of disagreement concerns Europeans' relative military advantages vis-a-vis Asians. Both sides cite literature from historians' Military Revolution Model, but each takes different lessons from that literature. The revisionists see a slight military imbalance in favor of Europe but deny that it reflects a general European technological lead. Bryant believes that the European technological lead is significant and reflects a more general modernizing trend. This article tries to resolve the disagreement by appealing to data from East Asia. First, it argues that recent work in Asian history points to what we can call a Chinese Military Revolution, which compels us to place the European Military Revolution in a larger, Eurasian context: not just western European but also East Asian societies were undergoing rapid military change and modernization during the gunpowder age. Second, it adduces evidence from a new study of the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1668 (a war that both Bryant and the revisionists cite, each, again, taking divergent lessons) to come to a more precise evaluation of the military balance between China and western Europe in the early modern period: western cannons and muskets didn't provide a discernible advantage, but western war ships and renaissance forts did. The article concludes that the revisionists are correct in their belief that Asian societies were undergoing rapid changes in military technology and practices along the lines of those taking place in western Europe and that the standard model Bryant defends is incorrect because it presumes that Asian societies are more stagnant than is warranted by the evidence. At the same time, the article argues that counter-revisionists like Bryant are correct in their belief that military modernization was proceeding more quickly in Europe than that in Asia, which may indicate that the counter-revisionists are correct on a basic point: there was an early divergence between the west and the rest of Eurasia. At first this divergence was slight – so slight, indeed, that it probably left little clear evidence in the noisy and poor early modern data we have available. But the divergence increased over time. Thus, we can speak of a small but accelerating divergence.

This study, based on Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese sources, examines the
rise and fall of Dutch Taiwan in the light of a model of European expansion first
sketched (separately) by historians John E.Wills Jr. and Michael N. Pearson. According
to the Wills-Pearson model, Europeans were successful in colonization attempts
because they received support from European states, whereas Asian states were less
likely to support overseas adventurism. The case of Taiwan strongly supports the
model—not just the establishment of a Dutch colony on Taiwan, but also the loss of
that colony to the Chinese military leader Zheng Chenggong, who ousted the Dutch
in 1662, because Zheng's state was similar to many western European states in its
dependence upon revenue from seaborne commerce and its concomitant willingness to
undertake overseas expansion. The article concludes by urging scholars to learn more
about non-Western colonization, suggesting several possible avenues of research.

When the Dutch arrived in East Asia in the early seventeenth century, they had trouble persuading Chinese officials to grant them trade privileges. Yet these same officials gave official titles to Chinese pirates as part of a "summon and appease" (zhaofu) policy in the hope that the pirates would abandon crime for more civilized pursuits. After a decade of frustrations, the Dutch decided to take a page from the pirates' playbook and tried to unite the pirates to attack China. The pirate war against China did not go well for the Dutch, who failed to unite the pirates under their leadership. Nonetheless, they did eventually reach a modus vivendi with Chinese officials and began trading regularly with China. Yet after the collapse of the Ming Empire in 1644, the Dutch increasingly suffered competition from an ex-pirate organization: the powerful Zheng family. Its leader, Zheng Chenggong, created a loyalist state with maritime pretensions. So long as the company was competing against private Chinese seamen who lacked state support, it was able to hold its own. But once these seamen were united in the framework of a maritime Chinese state, the company could not prevail.

In 1637 Hans Putmans, having just retired as governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan comptoir, set out from the East Indies to return to Holland. During the long voyage home he composed a report about his last year as governor, describing how he had expanded the Company's control over large parts of the island's hinterlands. He himself had led Dutch troops against the town of Mattau, one of the most powerful aboriginal towns of Taiwan, and against the towns of Soulang and Taccareangh. The results of his expeditions were, he wrote, spectacular: 'Through the […] guidance and will of God, [the conquest] was easily accomplished, and, since they had never before seen such a manner of war, our authority and respect among these blind heathen was extended and raised to such a point that not only the towns of Soulangh, Backeluan, […] Taccareijangh, […] and Mattau presented their lands to the Dutch state, but also Pangsoia, Tapouliang, and many other towns in the area'. In all some twenty aboriginal towns sought peace with the Company after Putmans' expeditions, a huge increase in the Company's holdings on Taiwan. When, in 1929, Putmans had taken his oath of office, his job had been to run a small trading factory on the island's coast, a base from which the Company could profit from the rich China trade. The subjugation of these twenty towns abruptly changed his job, and changed the Company's mission on Taiwan: How were these towns to be administered?

Neither here nor there : trade, piracy, and the "space between" in early modern East Asia / Michael Laver -- Envoys and escorts : representation and performance among Koxinga's Japanese pirate ancestors / Peter D. Shapinsky -- Friend or foe? : intercultural diplomacy between Momoyama Japan and the Spanish Philippines in the 1590s / Birgit Tremml-Werner -- Maps, calendars, and diagrams : space and time in seventeenth-century maritime East Asia / Robert Batchelor -- Yiguan's origins : clues from Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin sources / John E. Wills Jr. -- Between bureaucrats and bandits : the rise of Zheng Zhilong and his organization, the Zheng Ministry (Zheng Bu) / Cheng-heng Lu -- The Zheng regime and the Tokugawa bakufu : asking for Japanese intervention / Patrizia Carioti -- Determining the law of the sea : the long history of the Breukelen Case, 1657-1662 / Adam Clulow -- Dreams in the Chinese periphery : Victorio Riccio and Zheng Chenggong's regime / Anna Busquets -- Shame and scandal in the family : Dutch eavesdropping on the Zheng lineage / Leonard Bluss -- Bridging the bipolar : Zheng Jing's decade on Taiwan, 1663-1673 / Xing Hang -- The burning shore : Fujian and the coastal depopulation, 1661-1683 / Dahpon David Ho -- Admiral Shi Lang's secret proposal to return Taiwan to the VOC / Weichung Cheng -- Trade, piracy, and resistance in the Gulf of Tonkin in the seventeenth century / Robert J. Antony -- Koxinga and his maritime regime in the popular historical writings of post-Cold War Taiwan / Peter Kang -- Japan in the Chinese tribute system / Mark Ravina