Hi, Thomas - Here's the edited ms. Thanks again for the pleasure of reading your work. <br /><br />You'd mentioned feeling that it is too wordy, but really I didn't find all that much to cut, and it didn't seem tremendously wordy to me.&nbsp; If you have a specific word-count or page-number goal, we could be more aggressive in cutting it down, but absent that type of requirement, I think it's pretty succinct, particularly given your writing skills.&nbsp; <br /><br />Another comment, for you to take or leave:<br />I wonder if you might consider a restructuring of this ms. Your material in the section &ldquo;Overlapping empires&rdquo; has a delicious flavor, offers a fascinating personal view of the reality of Hulunbuir, strongly draws a reader into the narrative. What if you began the piece with this material? Focus on&nbsp;the specific place and your experience of that place, then pull back and begin asking your questions: what is empire? Etc etc. Maybe this is more in the style of &ldquo;creative nonfiction&rdquo; than pure scholarly writing, but I don&rsquo;t see anything wrong with that &ndash; it&rsquo;s still a work of scholarship, but written in a possibly more engaging manner. And getting the reader engaged, whether the reader is a scholar or a dilettante, can&rsquo;t be a bad thing, can it? I don&rsquo;t think the material about Hulunbuir is too personal &ndash; you don&rsquo;t talk about where you bought a beer or met a friend or anything &ndash; but it makes the facts of the history vividly alive.<br /><br />So for example in an initial section you would describe Hulunbuir using the material that is presently in paragraphs 2 and 3 of the Overlapping empires section, then you pull back and say something like: But what is meant by &ldquo;empire&rdquo;, the concept and the reality &ndash; introduce your topics formally? So maybe you have 3 paragraphs (fairly long) for your first section, then segue into the following sections for&nbsp;&ldquo;what is empire&rdquo; and your scholarly discussions. &nbsp;You could call this new first section &ldquo;Legacy of empire&rdquo; for example.<br /><br />Then the section on Overlapping empires could begin with referring back to Hulunbuir briefly (&ldquo;What we see in Hulunbuir today is the cumulative reflection of overlapping imperiums&hellip;&rdquo; &ndash; something like that only better expressed!) and then go on to the CER discussion etc. &ldquo;To appreciate the diversity of interest&hellip;&rdquo;I think this revised structure could also strengthen the ms. as a stand-alone piece.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />I look forward to reading more.&nbsp; RebeccaTDE