Learning to Rule

Evelyn S. Rawski, author of The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions:
In Barish’s study of imperial education, Empress Dowager Cixi emerges as a skillful coalition builder, open to diverse policy stances, who participates in the global movement toward nationalizing monarchies. Learning to Rule offers readers a fresh, complex vision of Qing rule in its last decades.

Mark C. Elliott, author of The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China:
Eschewing stale teleologies of nineteenth-century decline, this highly original and well-crafted study of late Qing reforms thoughtfully probes what happens to imperial politics and national ambitions when the emperor is a child and his tutors the most powerful men in the land.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, author of Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World and The Wobbling Pivot: China Since 1800:
It is a classic problem in Qing history: How in the aftermath of the profound devastation of the Taiping War did the Qing empire not only survive but also initiate a degree of reform and transformation? Daniel Barish suggests an intriguing explanation: The education of the Xianfeng emperor and his successors provided an effective synthesis of traditional ethics and novel, reformist political theories (particularly relating to constitutional monarchy), undergirded by new media of print and photography, could have allowed the emperors to become modernizing public figures. It suggests a comparative context encompassing other reforming monarchies in a global “late imperial” era. The emperors and their courts could not sustain the dynasty beyond 1912, but the ruler as a public presence as shaped in these last Qing decades continued as a subliminal model for post-imperial leaders from Sun Yatsen to Mao. In this way, Barish demonstrates the far-reaching impact of the late nineteenth-century Qing emperors on ruling style and presentation in twentieth-century China.