In an interview on Uyghur Nationalism

Your first two books are by the same author: Owen Lattimore. What makes him such an important figure in this field?

He was a writer who was respected in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the editor of the Pacific Affairs, an influential journal, and he was an influential commentator on Asian affairs. What impresses me is the breadth of his knowledge of Asia, his knowledge of Asian languages, his knowledge of Asian culture, and his ability to relate to people living in the region. However during the 1950s he suddenly fell foul of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist House Committee on Un-American Activities, as did a number of American China specialists, although he, like many of McCarthy’s other victims, was not a Communist. Unable to find work in the United States, he came over to the UK where he established a Department of Chinese Studies and a Mongolian Studies Centre in Leeds. He was my first teacher of Chinese history and taught the period of history that he had experienced himself without notes, combining analysis and anecdotes which made the China of the 1930s and 1940s come alive.

Tell me about Inner Asian Frontiers of China. I notice it was first published in 1940. Why is it still relevant today?

Well it hasn’t really been superceded in spite of its age. It was the first serious study in English of the historical relationship between China and Central and Inner Asia, including those parts of Central and Inner Asia which are now considered by the Chinese to be part of China, in other words Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia. There had been studies in Russia, but this book really covered the topic from a completely different angle. It was also based both on academic study and Lattimore’s experience in China because he had travelled widely in China, Mongolia and Xinjiang, partly as a result of his job which involved trading between those different parts of China. So it was a combination of academic study and his experience on the ground, a combination that I consider to be extremely important.

What does the book offer people who want to know more about the Uyghurs’ relationship with China?

Well what it really does is to trace the relationship between what can be broadly called the agricultural societies of China proper and the nomadic steppe societies of Inner Asia. The book looks at them as a totality, in a way that hasn’t since been repeated. Lattimore’s most important contribution is that he demonstrates that the conflicts and problems that exist between China and its Inner Asian frontiers today are nothing new and that they go back at least to the 1930s and in fact much further back than that. He divides his study into two. In the first part he looks at the historical background going right through Chinese history from the earliest periods. Some of the details that he presents may be considered irrelevant today, scholars of different periods will wish to query his interpretations and will want to update the account. The second half of the books focuses on the constituent regions of Inner Asia and analyses them in turn but it is the fact that he deals with the whole region as one that is rather unusual.