In their introduction to this excellent collection of nine essays, most of which were presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, historians Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow write convincingly that the “1898 period” in particular and the late Qing in general mark the moment when “Chinese experiences of modernity” (p. 10) began. Recognizing that many of the elements we associate with the May Fourth paradigm first appeared in the under-studied late-Qing period, the editors decry how the late Qing “continues to be treated in an isolated fashion and is seldom drawn into the main currents of ‘Chinese modernity,’ which are seen as more properly placed in the later May Fourth period” (p. 7). The reason to study 1898 now is that we can see and compare China's confrontations with two global capitalisms (late 19th and late 20th centuries). We don't need a “functionalist exhumation of 1898;” we need an approach that helps us understand the “local effects of globalizing trajectories” (p. 7). In sum: “[We need to] rethink 1898 not as an event per se but, more important, as a vital conjunctural historical moment, as an extended moment during and through which Chinese intellectuals and society consciously confronted and began to reformulate the Chinese historical problematic” (p. 7).