This book provides a distinctive perspective on Chinese history that delves deeply into the economic activities occurring on the Qing dynasty’s frontiers, which Kim places within the changing global economy and relates to the status of Turkestan within the Qing polity. It offers a persuasive account of the different economic interests of Muslims in the region, moving beyond the conventional ethnic taxonomies that other historians have used to explain events there. In the eighteenth century, this area (today part of northwest China) was affected economically by global flows of silver as well as by the international market for ginseng that held great value for the imperial household.
Kim links the economics of the area to the political interests of the Muslim beg (or beig) leadership and the Qing court. The local Muslim economic elites needed Qing military force to ensure their new claims, including the displacement of older claims on...