Great State: China and the World

Timothy Brook is a professor and writer on Chinese and world history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A native of Toronto and graduate of the University of Toronto, Brook moved from Toronto to become principal of St. John's College at UBC in 2004, where he was named to the Republic of China Chair. Brook previously held positions at the University of Alberta, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford, where he was Shaw Professor of Chinese from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of several books, including Vermeer's Hat and Confusions of Pleasure.

Impressive ... [Timothy Brook] at his best
Excellent ... The power of this book lies partly in the fact that Brook does not overstate his case. While he does not seek to claim that China's current actions are prefigured by the past, an attentive reader cannot fail to notice extraordinary parallels
Timothy Brook's Great State puts forward an elegant and compelling argument for why we should look at the cosmopolitan part of the Chinese mind-set as well
Some of Mr. Brook's subjects are ethnically Chinese, but many are not - Mongols and Manchus figure prominently, as do Tibetans, Englishmen, Portuguese, Koreans and a host of others ... [It is] a wondrous range
What a pleasure to read a significant, original book that covers millennia of Chinese history in an informal, often chatty, but always learned style
[A] vigorous account ... Scattered across the maps and paintings that Brook invokes, his thirteen encounters take in pirates, merchants, soldiers, traders, explorers, emperors and spiritual leaders - characters in China's complex trade, military, spiritual and political relationships down the centuries. Brook unravels the threads of these relationships across a canvas of war, friendship, savage struggles for power, lethal epidemic disease, triumph and calamity. It is a dizzying and exhilarating journey ... Great State offers some compelling lessons for today, and for all our futures
A fresh look at China's engagement with the outside world over centuries ... With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country
Praise for Vermeer's Hat:Spell-binding ... as a guide to the world behind the pictures Vermeer's Hat is mind-expanding
A brilliant attempt to make us understand the reach and breadth of the first global age
Brook takes you into the paintings in a way that can be spookily intimate
An erudite, surprising book that finds traces of swashbuckling where you'd least expect
Truly mesmerising. In this accessible but authoritative study, he... shows better than anyone I've read so far, the truly subversive power of detail
Praise for Mr Selden's Map of China:The great charm of this book lies not only in its illustrative, erudite detail but in the serendipity that regularly seizes Brook and adds spice to a spellbinding story
The quest is fascinating and picaresque, a sort of cartographical Tristram Shandy with a sure-handed narrator steering us from Ming dynasty China to pre-Civil War Oxford to the Spice Islands of South-East Asia