From Simon & Schuster, The Fall of Imperial China is Frederic Wakeman, Jr.‘s exploration of Imperial China-both its astronomic rise and steep decline.

From the Introduction: Historians of modern China are used to contrasting the dizzying changes in post-renaissance Europe with the glacial creep of Confucian civilization. The West’s global expansion to new vistas of discovery thus distorts our perspective of those older worlds that resisted European conquest. The most tenacious of these ancient civilizations was the Chinese empire.