690 BOOK REVIEWS

donated their personal libraries (ch. 3); and Elizabethanne Boran relates how
Dr Edward Worth, having transformed the books he inherited from his father
into an eighteenth-century connoisseur’s treasure-trove, sought to preserve his
library for posterity by bequeathing it to Dr Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin (ch.
4). The continued survival of Worth’s collection contrasts with the dispersal
of the library of the nineteenth-century Irish antiquarian James Hardiman,
whose son, as Marie Boran recounts, auctioned off many of Hardiman’s

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books less than six months after his father’s death (ch. 5). Rebecca Bowd’s
essay counters such narratives of individual collectors with an examination of
the development of lending libraries in eighteenth-century Leeds (ch. 8), and
the final chapter, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, discusses
a Dutch pamphlet collection purchased early in the nineteenth century by
Trinity College, Dublin. Elizabethanne Boran’s cogent introduction points
out themes that recur throughout the diverse chapters in this volume.
David Pearson’s essay about the motivations of seventeenth-century English
book collectors, by contrast, foregrounds conceptual issues that scholars (and
their editors and publishers) would do well to consider in the future. Although
Pearson notes that ‘there is increasing recognition that women were active
owners and readers [of books] throughout the period, and a growing body
of work is being published in this area’ (p. 143), one finds little evidence of
this trend within the essays of his co-contributors. Baston’s chapter includes a
substantial discussion of the participation of Grisel Grierson and her daughters
in the development of the Areskine family’s library (pp. 197–200), and female
readers and writers (and even a librarian!) appear briefly in several other essays.
In total, however, only five pages of this volume analyse the experiences and
contributions of women.
Pearson also helpfully emphasises that scholars who study libraries should
clearly define their terminology. Not every accumulation of material objects
constitutes a collection: by selecting, gathering together, and setting aside a
group of things, the collector deliberately removes objects from the realm
of use-value. Pearson points out that, while anyone who creates a private
library is a book owner, s/he is not necessarily a collector, and he argues that
‘our default word should be owner, not collector, and we should reserve the
latter for people whose motives for accumulation go beyond the practical,
professional, academic reasons for needing to have a storehouse of recorded
knowledge’ (p. 148). Researchers seeking to answer Pearson’s call for greater
conceptual precision will be aided by the interdisciplinary scholarship about
collectors and collections that has long flourished in museum studies: Susan
M. Pearce’s edited reader, Interpreting Objects and Collections (1994), provides
a rich and accessible introduction to important work in this area. We can see
the rewards of treating the collection as a distinctive form of material culture
in the present volume in Gabriel Moshenska’s engaging ‘biographical’ study of
the famous library of Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, which illuminates
the ‘life history’ of Sussex’s collection from multiple perspectives (p. 168). This
volume thus provides both an informative set of essays and inspiration for
further work in the field.
MARJORIE SWANN
doi:10.1093/ehr/ceaa099 Hendrix College, Conway, AR

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The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, by Ronald C.
Po (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2018; pp. 292. £75).

Until quite recently, the Qing empire was studied predominantly through the
medium of classical Chinese, the literary language (wenyanwen) used for all
written communications until the early twentieth century. After all, it was
the language of all scholars and bureaucrats, court historians, diarists and

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letter writers. The vast body of published and archival documentation they
left behind revealed an empire that had taken on many of the institutions
and attitudes of their Ming (1368–1644) predecessors. The last decades,
however, have seen a significant change in the study of the Qing. Scholars
have begun to recognise the importance of other languages for the study of
the Qing, such as Manchu, Mongol and Tibetan. When the Manchu invaded
the Ming empire in the early seventeenth century and established the Qing
dynasty, the Manchu language did not disappear; far from it, a vast amount
of documentation remains not only in Manchu, but also in the languages of
regions in which the Manchu expanded their empire. Manchu documents
reveal a Qing empire that is not only continuous with the regime it succeeded,
but also an entirely new kind of empire: multi-lingual, territorially expansive,
religiously and culturally diverse, and imperialist. Some have called this the
New Qing History, although the term perhaps suggests more coherence than
its presumed members would care to accept.
Ronald C. Po’s book proposes a new direction for this New Qing History:
‘New Qing Maritime History’. By defining a frontier as ‘a multi-layered
transcultural region that can be understood in both physical and cultural terms’
(p. 29) and applying this definition to the coastal regions of the Qing empire
(1644–1911), Po seeks to demonstrate that ‘since the late seventeenth century,
the [Chinese] empire has been integrated into the maritime world through its
maritime militarization and seaborne shipping’ (pp. 4–5). As John McAleer
noted in his review of another eighteenth-century maritime history in this
journal (Renaud Morieux, The Channel: England, France and the Construction
of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century [2016]), ‘a maritime frontier
is not just a physical space, or a political, military or economic notion used
by contemporaries, but also a historiographical tool’ (rev. ante, cxxxiii [2018],
725–7). By presenting his work as laying the foundations for a new ‘lens of
analysis’ called ‘New Qing Maritime History’ (p. 7, n. 11), Po’s book clearly
demonstrates this historiographical power.
Po’s claim about Qing integration into the maritime world of the eighteenth
century does not, in fact, rely on Manchu sources. His analysis focuses on
the official imperial documentation of the Qing empire, which was produced
in classical Chinese. In Appendix 1, he presents the appearances of (and
references to) the maritime frontier in imperial documents, demonstrating
very clearly how concerned both the scholar-officials and the emperors who
ruled over China between c.1650 and 1800 were with the maritime realm. More
specifically, Po identifies a key distinction in these sources between the ‘inner’
and ‘outer’ seas. The distinction is not, strictly speaking, geographical, but
conceptual; it separates the watery spaces that fall under the administrative
control of the Qing government from the sea spaces that lay beyond the
purview of the government. As Po explains, these are not settled distinctions,
but they are applied on the basis of the relative position of the beholder.

EHR, CXXXV. 574 (June 2020)

692 BOOK REVIEWS
To demonstrate this inner/outer distinction, Po analyses not only the
bureaucratic documentation that details concerns, problems and imperial
responses related to the inner and outer seas, but also representations of these
spaces on maps. Po’s reading of the construction of Qing maritime spaces and
the Qing establishment of legitimate control over the empire’s ‘inner seas’ that
these maps reveal is very convincing. Taking the eighteenth-century empire
seriously as a naval power, Po offers an insight into the workings of the Qing

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navy, showing convincingly the deployment of this navy to secure and extend
Qing control over its coastal realm and its burgeoning maritime trade. Po’s
work reveals an empire that combined its notorious march into the Uyghur-
populated Western territories with a strong sense of the commercial benefits
offered by maritime trade.
Po’s work means that the hackneyed narrative of the eighteenth-century
Chinese empire as one of the great land empires that unfortunately turned
its back on the maritime realm and refused to engage with anything that lay
beyond the coastal boundary of the empire will have to be revised. In that
sense, Po’s book will also have significant implications for the ways in which
historians of Britain write about the encounter between Britain and China, a
narrative that usually starts with Macartney’s failed mission to China in 1795,
and leads to the outbreak of the Opium War, which had such devastating
consequences for the Sino-British relationship. The usual explanations for the
outbreak of war involve at least some expression of the sentiment that the
Chinese empire had thus far failed to (but now must be made to) recognise
the importance of the maritime realm that had brought such rewards to the
European powers and helped cement the foundations of capitalism in Europe.
Po convincingly shows that certainly between the annexation of Taiwan in
1693 and the end of Qianlong’s reign in 1795, the Qing rulers did care about
control over its ‘inner seas’. That said, he also has to admit that by the very end
of the eighteenth century, the imperial state no longer invested the necessary
resources to maintain that control and refused to implement overdue naval
reforms. When it came to the confrontation with the British navy in the early
nineteenth century, the Qing ‘maritime vision’ no longer equated to ‘power’
in the Qing Empire.
ANNE GERRITSEN
doi:10.1093/ehr/ceaa100 University of Warwick

Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland, by Martha McGill (Woodbridge:

The Boydell P., 2018; pp. 255. £50).

In this work, Martha McGill looks to move the discussion of the supernatural
in Scotland away from witches and to refocus our attention on the idea of
the ghost in the Scottish psyche between 1685 and 1830. Looking beyond the
traditional bounds of the Enlightenment period has allowed for developments
beyond the late eighteenth century to be taken into account, and enabled
McGill to chart the impact of changing ideas about rationality and the
supernatural on the belief in ghosts among the educated Scottish population.
This is contrasted with the relatively consistent representation of ghosts in
ballads, broadsides and other forms of popular culture, summarised in the

EHR, CXXXV. 574 (June 2020)