Imperial Twilight

When I began traveling to Asia for business, I became hungry to understand the history beneath the surfaces I was moving through. Imperial Twilight answered questions I did not even know I had. Stephen Platt tells the story of the decades leading up to the Opium War with remarkable nuance and empathy for all sides. This is not a simple story of Western villainy and Chinese victimhood, though Western behavior was often indefensible. It is a story about the collision of worldviews, about what happens when two civilizations with completely different assumptions about commerce, diplomacy, and power find themselves in the same room. The consequences of that collision are still shaping the world today.

Imperial Twilight fits beautifully alongside Conquerors by Roger Crowley, which covers the earlier Portuguese maritime expansion, and The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, which places the entire story in the context of millennia of East-West exchange.