The essays in this volume seek to give connected and reliable accounts of the relations of China with Europeans who came by sea (thus not the Russians and their occasional foreign associates), from the arrival of the Portuguese early in the sixteenth century to about 1800. There is no strong historiographical rationale for breaking off the narratives at this point; the main late-eighteenth-century themes of trade in tea and opium and the clandestine Roman Catholic presence could be carried right down to the Opium War (1839–1842). But two of these essays were originally prepared for publication in the volumes on the Qing before 1800 of The Cambridge History of China; the first of the nineteenth-century volumes of that series, with excellent chapters on the Canton trade and on Christian missions, was published in 1978. Moreover, by breaking off around 1800, we end our summaries at a period when the basic policies of the Qing state toward maritime Europeans still seemed reasonably functional and successful, and thus undercut to a degree the teleological narrative of dysfunction and cultural arrogance leading straight to the Opium War that has afflicted many summaries of these topics. Recent scholarship on Qing China, emphasizing the sophisticated achievements of “High Qing” state and society and the contingency of the nineteenth-century “great divergence” between China and the West, strengthens our interest in seeing the eighteenth century for itself. New accounts of “strange parallels” among Eurasian polities down to the nineteenth century and of the “transformation of the world” in that century offer riches of citation and interpretation that will keep all of us busy with long thoughts in both directions from 1800 for years to come.

In any case, we feel no shortage of challenges in our assignments for this volume. The developments and events discussed here once were overemphasized in the Eurocentric histories of Henri Cordier, H. B. Morse, and others, but in recent decades they have received only erratic scholarly attention, so that we have not always been able to draw on scholarship that meets current standards of interpretation and documentation and sometimes have had to piece our summaries together from primary sources and a scattered and multilingual secondary literature. Moreover, we have found it immensely exciting and challenging to try to keep up with the dramatic recent changes in the historiography of early modern China and of the European presence in maritime Asia. Some summary of the latter may be helpful for China scholars not familiar with these literatures. A background sketch of current understandings of “late imperial” or “early modern” China is called for, not only for the benefit of readers who are not China scholars, but also because our expositions and interpretations frequently require complex contextualizations of foreign encounters in aspects of Ming–Qing China not ordinarily discussed in accounts of its foreign relations.