A plea for a fundamental reorientation in how we think about China’s relationships with other Asian state, this collective volume presents a new, less politicized framework for understanding the history of interpolity relations in Asia. Its premise is that rulers and states across Inner and East Asia have long been intimately entangled with each other, and that relations among them be analyzed in terms of the interactions of three culturally distinct legal “worlds”—the Chinggisid Mongol world, the Confucian Sinic world, and the Tibetan Buddhist world. Each constituted its own legal order, and together they shaped the context in which states dominated the region since the rise of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

The book incorporates succinct contributions from sixteen colleagues into a unified framework that the co-authors developed over the course of five years of workshops. The goal of the book is not solely to reorient.it is to remediate. The findings of the book should be of interest to historians and international relations specialists, but our purpose was to help parties in conflict understand their own histories in order to clear a path out of the deeply entrenched divisions that run through the region and threaten Asia’s future.