Reviewed by: In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire: Ming China and Eurasia by David M. Robinson, and: Ming China and Its Allies: Imperial Rule in Eurasia by David M. Robinson Timothy Brook In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire: Ming China and Eurasia by David M. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 372. $105.00 hardcover, $84.00 e-book. Ming China and Its Allies: Imperial Rule in Eurasia by David M. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 249. $41.99 cloth, $34.00 e-book. The history of eastern Eurasia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been waiting for this pair of books since Morris Rossabi urged sinologists to recognize that the history of China is more than the history of itself. His edited volume, China among Equals, brought to our attention that Chinese rulers from the tenth to the fourteenth century were keenly aware of, and constantly involved with, the continental world beyond China’s borders.1 For all its glories, the Song (960–1279) was but one among several “equals” with the states that Chinese at the time knew as Liao (916–1125), Jin 金 (1115–1234), and Xia (1038–1227). [End Page 403] The Mongol eradication of the Song in the thirteenth century only further entangled China with the continent of which it had always been a part. Its consequences are the subject of these two books. Ming historians were slow to absorb the insights that Rossabi’s volume offers. My generation of Ming historians was intent on embedding China in the world, but we tended to follow the trails that led overseas to Japan, Southeast Asia, and Europe rather than back to the continent. It was Manchu studies, not Ming or Mongol studies, that finally broke through this resistance in the guise of the New Qing History, which declared that Inner Asia mattered to China to a degree that the traditional Sinocentric account was unwilling to concede. Since then, several historians of the Ming have argued for situating Ming China more securely in its continental relationships—with Koreans, Jurchens, and Tibetans, to be sure, but most of all with Mongols; David Robinson is among these historians.2 In the two books under review, he presents us with the richest research to date on the Mongol origins and orientations of the Ming, as well as the most sustained argument that Ming China needs to be understood as part of a larger eastern Chinggisid system of rulership. The first of these books, In the Shadows of the Mongol Empire, is devoted to the interactions of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang 朱 元璋 (r. 1368–1398), with the politics, warfare, and diplomacy of the Mongol world. The first of its four parts lays out the Eurasian context around the time that the Yuan fell to Zhu’s forces. This context is not simply passive background. Eurasia was a Chinggisid zone, Robinson reminds us, and no one could hope to come to the Chinese throne without meeting the expectations of Mongol rulership. Though the Shangdu- and Beijing-based Mongol regime that Qubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294) founded in 1271 was forced to vacate China in 1368, a state bearing the name of Yuan continued to exist beyond that date—not as a rhetorical performance, but as an international fact, shaping Ming policy and practice for at least the next century and a half. Robinson’s eye-opening case study at the end of part 1 focusing on the western Mongolian city of Qara-Qoto (Black city) demonstrates just how vital and complex life and politics were between Mongol and Ming. [End Page 404] In part 2, Robinson presents his methodology: reading early Ming narratives for what they reveal of the concerns, anxieties, and politics facing a new regime struggling to assert its legitimacy. Finding himself in fierce competition with Mongol rulers and warlords for their loyalty, Zhu Yuanzhang had to communicate to the Mongol world his claim that he had superseded Yuan rule because the Yuan had run out of the fuel of Heaven’s mandate. The Ming had risen not by re-establishing Chinese norms, as some of Zhu’s advisers would have liked him...