Preface / Lea H. Wakeman -- Frederic Wakeman's oeuvre in the framework of world and comparative history / S.N. Eisenstadt -- Navigating history: voyages -- China in the context of world history -- China and the seventeenth-century world crisis -- The Chinese mirror : universal values and particular societies -- The Ming-Qing period -- The Shun interregnum of 1644 -- Romantics, stoics, and martyrs in seventeenth-century China -- The price of autonomy : intellectuals in Ming and Qing politics -- Localism and loyalism during the Qing conquest of Jiangnan : the tragedy of Jiangyin -- Shanghai in the Republic period -- Licensing leisure : the Chinese Nationalists' attempt to regulate Shanghai, 1927-1949 -- Shanghai smuggling -- The historiography of Chinese history -- The use and abuse of ideology in the study of contemporary China -- Chinese archives and American scholarship on modern Chinese history -- Modernity and state -- Civil society in late imperial and modern China -- Drury's occupation of Macao and China's response to early modern imperialism -- Models of historical change : the Chinese state and society, 1938-1989 -- Reflection : telling Chinese history.