`An excellent book that reduces a vast mass of complex data and specialist scholarship to manageable proportions. Professor Dillon has written a lucid and penetrating history of China that achieves both breadth and depth. Students will benefit from the author's clear-headed approach and plain yet eloquent style. This is one of the best single texts on modern Chinese history yet to appear.' Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese History, Cardiff University

`What is China?' This was the question posed nearly a hundred years ago by the Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, Herbert Giles, and it is equally valid today. China can seem remote and separate to people in the West; this stimulating and accessible history breaks down these barriers and makes sense of this complex and varied country.

China: A Modern History illuminates the huge, scattered and diverse political world that is China. Drawing on his extensive research and a wide range of original Chinese sources, Michael Dillon explores how the country's many different communities have a multiplicity of histories and traditions, races and ethnicities, religions (or none) and languages, but still share some sense of overarching Chinese identity, reaching out to Russia, the Caucasus and Japan and much of Asia.

China has been defined by the rise and fall of empires. This comprehensive political history places China's development, from the nineteenth century to its present status as a regional and even world economic superpower, in its historical and international context. Weaving together the central themes of social, political, economic, religious and cultural history, China: A Modern History is a full narrative history with many original ideas and insights.

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'.

Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing.

The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

Presents a pictorial history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, with hundreds of previously-unpublished photographs and personal stories of combatants from both sides.