The Manchu conquest of China is arguably the greatest historical event of the seventeenth century, both for the changes it engendered within Asia and for its far-reaching implications in world history. Yet if we take even the simple phrase "Manchu conquest of China" we see that whether the conquerors were really "Manchu," whether it was an actual "conquest," and whether they ruled a land that could have been defined as "China" at the time are all disputable notions. Indeed, historians have argued against the concept that the Qing state can be identified with a single ethnicity, that the Qing rulers occupied China less as an act of willful conquest than as the result of the Ming dynasty's collapse, and that China under the Ming was very different from that ruled by the Qing.

This talk will focus on the process of formation of Manchu power in northeast Asia and on local, regional, and even global dimensions of the rise of the Manchus. An appreciation of several aspects of this process, and especially of the nature of the solutions adopted by the early Manchu rulers to the several challenges they faced, is essential in order to understand what happened in and after 1644.

Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, Professor, History, UCB