In November 2012, freshly anointed as China’s leader, Xi Jinping made one of his first stops a history museum. Xi took in an exhibition in Beijing that surveyed the foreign abuses beginning with the opium wars before shifting to the glories of the “New China”, including the “reform and opening up” after Mao Zedong’s death that created the world’s second-largest economy. Flanked by the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the general secretary promised to steer the country to even greater heights: “In my view, to realize the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history,” he said.

Xi’s museum visit made two dynamics clear: history sits at the heart of Chinese politics today, and its leaders believe there is one acceptable narrative, a story of overcoming foreign domination and re-emerging strong. Robert Bickers illustrates both dynamics in Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination, a beautifully written history of China’s 20th-century interactions with the outside world. But instead of the narrow, legitimacy-enhancing story peddled by the Chinese Communist party, Bickers tells a far more complex tale of the forces of attraction, rejection and interdependence that have consistently defined China’s varied dealings with the world.

Bickers, a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914, adopts a wide lens in capturing the diversity of Sino-western interactions. Few nuances escape his eye as he chronicles the myriad ways that Chinese people have sought to define themselves and their country in a world that imposed definitions upon them, sometimes by force. He shows how China’s connections with foreigners in the 20th century produced far more than just the moments of humiliation frequently invoked today in Beijing. Foreign experts, humanitarians and evangelists travelled to China, providing everything from refugee relief to Comintern guidance (even if selfishly motivated), and cosmopolitan, self-confident Chinese sojourned abroad and engaged with the world.