sources that are described before any of the events described in them. In his magisterial seven volume ‘I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, Petech made available a mine of contemporary missionary accounts which are still invaluable source materials. Petech’s monographs attempt to bring Himalayan history into the light of world history. This aim was always to be appreciated, and, as Herbert Franke noted in 1950 when Petech published “China and Tibet in the early 18th century”, It may be considered as a fortunate coincidence... just now when the Chinese government tries to establish again its suzerainty over the land of snow because it will enable the reader to get a clear notion how the Chinese protectorate in Tibet came into being. (Franke 1950) These are sentiments with which many would thoroughly agree. However, Petech’s early attempts also tend to subsume unique events within western explanatory frameworks. In 1947 he wrote: As to Ladakh, there is little to be said. It suffered the fate of all countries which tried to build an empire without that indispensable foundation, a sufficiently large population of the home country. (1988 [1947]: 39) This attempt to universalise the process of empire-building also has politically loaded connotations in a time when Italy had just failed to regain the Roman Empire, thwarted by the dwindling imperial powers of Britain and France and the new empire, America. When he returned to the topic of Ladakh in 1977, he admitted that ‘I found my first effort hopelessly obsolete’ (1977: xi). His second treatment is more nuanced, and he finally explains the collapse of Ladakhi power with more of an emphasis on economic overstretch (idem: 79). Central Tibet and the Mongols, Petech’s latest book-length study, is a more fluidly written narrative, character-led and more descriptive in tone. It is still authoritative, and has naturally overtaken Tucci’s work on the same period. As Elliot Sperling wrote in his 1995 review: ...since the 1949 publication of Giuseppe Tucci’s Tibetan Painted scrolls [and in] the absence of any single monograph dedicated to the public, this last work was often taken by default as the main secondary source on the subject....[While] “Central Tibet and the Mongols” is a relatively short work and leaves a few subjects less than fully explored... [it] is now the basic secondary source to which students of Yuan-Tibetan relations must turn. (Journal of the American Oriental Society 115.2 (1995):