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Vagabonds, swindlers, bandits, and rebels. These figures may lie in quiet corners of Qing archives, but under the pen of historian Jodi Weinstein, they not only come alive, but ring out their voices, enmeshed with regional history and state formation. Focusing on the Zhongjia, who are believed to be the forbears of the current day Buyi (Bouyei) minzu – one of China's fifty-six state-designated nationalities – Weinstein is interested in how members of such a lesser-known ethnic group in late imperial China's southwestern frontier responded to state centralization with ingenuity. Giving equivalent attention to both imperial and indigenous perspectives, Weinstein carries out a careful, honest examination of historical narratives and livelihood strategies from below. Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion is thus a timely and refined contribution to the recent waves of scholarship engaged in reappraising agency and livelihoods in the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands, also known as 'Zomia' in Scott's 2009 influential monograph The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. ...