
David Robinson
As an undergraduate, I was fascinated by martial arts in China. I spent half my college years in Beijing and Taipei, where I developed a strong interest in local history. Many years later, the result was my first book, Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven. It tried to reconstruct a forgotten world, where bandits and enforcers in and around the capital of Beijing were tied to the emperor and his senior court officials.
A focus on the local unexpectedly drew me into regional and then global history. Later works explored the court culture of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), early modern Chinese military history, Northeast Asia (especially Koryŏ-Chosŏn history), and eventually the Mongol empire and its various Eurasian successor states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
As I encountered new places and peoples, I grew curious about their connected histories, including the realm of shared historical memories, diplomatic practice, and modes of rulership. In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire: Early Ming China (2019) and Ming China and Its Allies: Imperial Rulership in Eurasia (2020), are attempts to think about early modern China's rich and diverse connections to neighboring polities. I again approached the question through the prism of the Ming court in Beijing...and its surprisingly deep ties to places from Samarqand, Besh-Baliq, and Tibet to Mongolia, Korea, and more. Korea and the Fall of the Mongol Empire: Alliance, Upheaval, and the Rise of a New East Asian Order (2022) uses the life of the Goryeo ruler King Gongmin to explore Korea's experience as ally to two contemporary superpowers, the Mongol Empire and then the Ming Dynasty, in the second half of the fourteenth century.
My current project traces the experiences of a Mongolian family that immigrated to China in the early fifteenth century and ended up serving the Ming throne until the dynasty fell in 1644. I am especially interested in the twin issues of ability and difference, especially as they relate to military affairs.