Rawski's research has centered on the social and cultural history of the Qing dynasty, often in ways that revise earlier views of political history. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China targeted the standard view that the nonphonetic nature of the Chinese writing system led to low literacy rates and held back economic growth. Paul A. Cohen judged that Rawski "turns this entire set of assumptions on its head...." Arguing that traditional village schools were accessible, texts cheap, and teachers low salaried, and defining functional literacy as the ability to read everyday texts rather a mastery of the classics, she concluded that male literacy rates in late imperial China were in fact among the highest in the pre-modern world, probably amounting to almost one literate person per family. Cohen commented that her analysis was "not unassailable" but that her "overall thesis" "puts the problem of literacy and popular education... in a wholly new light, and future research in this area will have to take up where she has left off." In the early 1990s, Rawski joined a group of scholars who began study of the Manchu language and found new views opened by the materials they now could read. She presented these views in her 1996 presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies, Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History, which challenged the view long held by historians of China that the Manchu had been assimilated, or "sinicized" by the people they conquered. Her argument met with strong negative reaction from Ping-ti Ho in 1996 but is now widely held. The New Qing History school started to appear at this time. Of her monograph, The Last Emperors, Jane Kate Leonard, writing in China Review International wrote "is a remarkable work of historical synthesis and descriptive analysis of the intimate social world of the Qing dynasty’s ruling elite". Leonard continues:
with Susan Naquin, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century, Yale University Press, 1987.
with James L. Watson, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, University of California Press, 1988.
with Bell Yung and Rubie S. Watson, eds., Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, Stanford University Press, 1996.
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with Murdo J. MacLeod, eds. European Intruders and Changes in Behaviour and Customs in Africa and Asia before 1800. volume 30 in An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450–1800, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1998.
with Jan Stuart, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits. Stanford University Press, June 2001.
with Jessica Rawson, eds. China: The Three Emperors, 1662–1795, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005.
