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One of the most important questions facing scholars of China is how Chinese society is held together. It is now well known that China has been marked by great diversity. In the realm of social customs, not only were there broad regional or class differences, but also, at a local level, the people in one village might adopt a different set of practices from those of neighboring communities. Yet the majority of these varied practices seems to have fit within a frame that was distinctly Chinese. Thus scholars must also ask how people of dissimilar occupations and economic interests, living in widely separated parts of the country, came to recognize and act on a common set of cultural beliefs. Explaining the variations in Chinese society requires minute knowledge of local conditions. Explaining the uniformities requires historical understanding of the processes involved in the spread of ideas and practices and the ways by which some came to be considered standard. Given the available sources on Chinese society, neither of these tasks is simple. The study of kinship and kinship organizations provides one of the best ways to approach the coexisting uniformities and variations of Chinese society. This edited volume is the collaboration of historians and social scientists, and this collaboration is required if we are to learn enough about kinship in Chinese society to explain both the uniformities and the variations. The substantive papers are all written by historians, but these historians have raided the stock of anthropological terms, models, and theories, tried to use technical terms in a consistent and well-defined way, implicitly addressed anthropologists on the issues that seem to fascinate them, and responded to the suggestions and criticisms of the anthropologists who have read their papers. At the same time, however, they remain historians and do not ignore the types of issues (such as historical context and change over time) with which historians have always dealt. The editors believe that this type of collaboration has distinct advantages over the more usual approach to transcending disciplinary boundaries by placing articles by historians and social scientists side by side in the same volume. If we have been successful, social scientists should find issues of interest in the chapters, and historians should find them full of the substance of history and not too long-winded in the belaboring the obvious. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

This open access book aims to present the cutting-edge research of scholars from the Global South, where scholars from developing countries have begun to join in the production of knowledges of Area Studies and have produced a large body of excellent works of Area Studies based on a variety of disciplines. Articles of this book have been developed from 11 papers which were presented at the 2nd Tsinghua Area Studies Forum, to represent a range of area studies subjects and regions. The book is divided into five chapters that either analyze regional country issues (regions in the world) from the perspective of global linkages and cross-regional linkages or discuss internal issues such as national governance, ethnicity, economy, and civil war, using the nation-state as the unit of analysis.

This book identifies the formation, development and changes in New Zealand perceptions of its Asian neighbours, the work of which is based mainly on New Zealand sources—newspaper reports, Government and Parliamentary papers and documents from New Zealand individuals and organisations. The target audience is those with interest in how European perceptions of Asia were formed in the 19th century and Asia's response to those perceptions and how a country with a strong European culture copes with the need to better integrate with Asian neighbours.

This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic negotiations, preserved in a variety of material media: potsherds, papyrus, paper, administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. Each contribution focuses on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Together, they represent the textual conventions and innovations of learned and vernacular epistolary traditions from many regions of North Africa and Eurasia, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE.

This book advances a holistic conceptualisation of maritime security, under the term ‘Blue Security', and situates it in states across the Indo-Pacific.The Indo-Pacific encompasses a vast space, incorporating two of the planet's biggest oceans, the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, as well as littoral and hinterland states home to half the world's population. Security challenges abound across the maritime Indo-Pacific, ranging from the risk of inter-state war at sea to so-called blue crimes, like piracy, smuggling, and illegal fishing. Climate change and marine pollution, as well as the over-exploitation of scarce and sometimes fragile resources, also pose threats to human security, sustainability, and biodiversity. Using the concept of ‘Blue Security', this book assesses these various challenges and analyses the approaches to their management used by Indo-Pacific states. It argues that we should embrace a holistic understanding of maritime security, incorporating national, regional, international, human, and environmental dimensions. To that end, it explores the Blue Security strategies of 18 Indo-Pacific states, examining their changing perceptions of threat, their approaches to managing those challenges, and their capabilities. The volume makes an innovative contribution to our knowledge of a region crucial to global security and prosperity.This book will be of interest to students of maritime strategy, security studies, Asian politics and International Relations.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Kurdish Studies Archive publishes the content of volumes 1 to 10 of Kurdish Studies. This interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal was dedicated to publishing high-quality research and scholarship. Since 2023 the journal has been continued as the new Kurdish Studies Journal, published by Brill, and focuses on research, scholarship, and debates in the field of Kurdish studies in a multidisciplinary fashion covering a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, economics, history, society, gender, minorities, politics, health, law, environment, language, media, culture, arts, and education.

The revenge of the 47 rōnin is the most famous vendetta in Japanese history and it continues to inspire the popular imagination today. Written between 1934 and 1941, Mayama Seika's ten-play cycle Genroku Chūshingura is a unique retelling of the incident based on his own painstaking research into the historical facts. Considered a modern masterpiece, it now has a secure place in the Kabuki repertoire and many of the plays are still frequently performed. For the first time, Seika's monumental achievement is here translated into English in its complete and original form by three experienced experts in the field.

«Bidyut Chakrabarty's Nationalizing India constitutes exactly what the subtitle states: ‘a creative blending of derivative and indigenous traditions.'In this context, two central themes are developed: first, that Indian nationalist thinkers redefined the entire concept of nationalism in a unique and ingenious manner, unprecedented in the long intellectual history of the idea. They built a united front against a common adversary by eliciting the fundamental civilizational amity forged in unison for gaining India's emancipation.Second, as an outstanding and prolific scholar in this field, professor Chakrabarty explores relatively unknown innovative nationalist figures to demonstrate that the advent of nationalist thought was a collective endeavor of myriad figures, a unity in diversity. This is another brilliant study by Chakrabarty that merits inclusion among the finest works on nationalism.» (Dennis Dalton, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA) Dwelling on how nationalization was conceptualized by major Indian nationalist thinkers, this book breaks a new ground in contemporary studies on nationalism. In contrast with the Western notion of nationalism, this book provides an appropriate model of nationalizing India with reference to the creative writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghose, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Nazrul Islam. This book is a powerful intervention in the available scholarship which shows that nationalization needs to be comprehended differently in the context of India since underlying a collective India is a civilizational bond unique to Afro-Asian countries.

Kurdish Studies Archive publishes the content of volumes 1 to 10 of Kurdish Studies. This interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal was dedicated to publishing high-quality research and scholarship. Since 2023 the journal has been continued as the new Kurdish Studies Journal, published by Brill, and focuses on research, scholarship, and debates in the field of Kurdish studies in a multidisciplinary fashion covering a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, economics, history, society, gender, minorities, politics, health, law, environment, language, media, culture, arts, and education.

This book is the first and only English-language edition of Huang Xingtao's Reshaping China, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. In this landmark text, Huang Xingtao uses a cultural approach to the history of ideas. He traces the complex contours in the discursive debates around the concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) from its origins in the late Qing; through the pivotal moment of the 1911 Revolution; into the contentious revolutionary upheavals of the 1920s, amidst the national crisis brought on by Japanese invasions in the 1930s; and culminating in the widespread acceptance of the concept during the Civil War. By the late 1940s, the Chinese nation came to represent the idea that all peoples within the country, whatever their ethnicity, were equal citizens who shared common goals and aspirations.

Logics of Integration, by Noriaki Hoshino, recounts the history of the relationship between modern Japanese transpacific migration and the formation of two multi-ethnic empires (Japan and the United States), focusing on intellectual discourses about migrants and their descendants. This book adopts a transnational perspective, juxtaposing two multi-ethnic imperial formations, and develops a theoretical analysis of the discourses on mobility and national/territorial integration. Via this innovative approach, Dr. Hoshino reveals the unique role of Japanese migrants and their representation in the complicated power relationships between the two empires in the modern Pacific world.

There has been a tendency to neglect the political life of Asia, in favour of religious and aesthetic considerations. The myth of the ‘changeless East'dies hard. Few people are aware that the earliest legislation for the rights of the common man go back to the Sumerians and that outlines for a social contract were drawn up by Indian Buddhists two thousand years before Locke and Rousseau.First published in 1985, Patterns of Kingship and Authority in Traditional Asia provides an excellent survey of traditional Asian ideas of government, from the earliest kingdoms of the Sumerians and the Egyptians to the time when Western influence first made itself felt. Each chapter is written by a specialist on a particular country or region of Asia, who seeks to identify some of the essential features of its traditional royal or imperial authority. Particularly fascinating is the way in which traditional institutions continue to have a vital influence upon Asian countries.The serious reader will obtain a clear outline of traditional Asian ideas and systems of government and will indirectly acquire a deeper understanding of other aspects of Asian civilisations.

From the Introduction: The principal question that is posed in this study is, what has been the influence of Mao's united front doctrine on China's foreign policy? A related but secondary question is also considered: In what ways, if any, has China's participation in the international system caused Peking to revise its conception of a united front in world politics? Insofar as Mao's thoughts about united fronts are part of the total array of theories and operational principles that make up the Chinese communist “ideology,” this essay considers one aspect of the relationship between ideology and foreign policy. Since this question has long been the subject of a mostly inconclusive and often circular academic debate, [Armstrong states his] reasons for returning to it here. The first is that the problem is no less important because it admits of no easy solution. Indeed, with the breakdown in the twentieth century of even the limited consensus over norms and values that permitted a great power concert to exist for part of the nineteenth, the question is clearly one of major significance in contemporary international relations. Since China has become in many ways a symbol of the postwar ideological challenge to the established order in world politics, the question is particularly relevant in a study of China's foreign policy. Finally, by combining a strictly limited focus of enquiry with a systematic approach to the problem it may be possible to overcome some of the analytical difficulties that surround the larger issue of the relation of ideas to social practice. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

This book examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, and understudied demographic and geographic contexts.It engages with conceptual debates and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of scholarship on Islamic and Religious Studies, Material Religion, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology of Religion.The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shiʿi—heritage.

While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores'post-historical'Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound'end of history'which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

Journey through the heart of Sindh, a land of timeless allure and modern paradoxes.'Sindh: Pakistan'takes you from the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, cradle of one of the world's oldest civilizations, to the bustling metropolis of Karachi, revealing the complex layers of the province's past, present, and future. History That Shaped a Nation Sindh has stood at the crossroads of history. For centuries, it was the gateway to the Indian subcontinent, a place where the Indus River Valley civilization flourished, empires rose and fell, and Islam took root. Explore Sindh's role in dynastic struggles, the British Raj, and the tumultuous Partition of India in 1947 – events that reshaped the region and continue to impact life in Sindh today. The Strength of Diverse Traditions Delve into the mystical world of Sufi saints, where poetry, music, and devotion intertwine. Discover how the teachings of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai continue to inspire Sindhis around the globe. Learn about the resilience of women in rural Sindh, the trailblazing female leaders challenging gender norms, and the vibrant artistic and literary contributions of Sindhi women. From the intricate patterns of Ajrak cloth to the breathtaking architecture of grand tombs and mosques, celebrate the vibrant cultural heritage of the province. The Power of Land and Water Explore the stark beauty of the Thar Desert, where a proud people adapt to a harsh yet life-giving environment. Understand the central role of the mighty Indus River – a source of sustenance, but also a focal point of ecological and political struggle. Navigate the labyrinthine streets of Karachi, a city of extremes, reflecting both Sindh's aspirations and its stark inequalities. Voices Facing Modern Challenges'Sindh: Pakistan'brings to light Sindh's ongoing battles. Sectarian divides, political corruption, and development pressures pose complex challenges. Yet, amid these difficult realities, discover the strength of Sindhi youth using digital activism to push for change, the passionate social movements calling for reform, and the spirit of resilience that drives Sindh forward. Sindh's Global Connections Sindh's story doesn't exist in isolation. Uncover the worldwide reach of the Sindhi diaspora and the enduring ties between Sindh and countries across the globe. Through remittances that build homes and support families, to the intellectual and cultural exchange flowing through overseas communities, Sindh's global reach has an immense impact on its internal dynamics. The Path Forward This multifaceted portrait invites you to engage with the complexities, struggles, and triumphs of Sindh. In these pages, diverse Sindhi voices tell their stories, charting a path for the region's future. Their narratives will offer readers a powerful perspective on Sindh's unique place in a rapidly changing Pakistan, while celebrating the strength of its ancient roots and its determination to thrive. Let'Sindh: Pakistan'illuminate this region with the depth and nuance it deserves. This book serves as a tribute to the enduring spirit of its people, and a gateway toward understanding a pivotal part of Pakistan's rich tapestry.

Dalā'il al-Nubuwwa literature that is centered on narratives from the Prophet Muḥammad's life has most commonly been viewed, or even dismissed, as the product of popular veneration. Building extensive research on biographical and bibliographical sources, this book demonstrates that Dalā'il al-Nubuwwa literature emerged among the circles of early ḥadīth scholars of the late 2nd/8th century. By analyzing extant texts of Dalā'il al-Nubuwwa regarding their sources, structures, methodological approaches, and selection of contents, it showcases that these works were part of epistemological discourses on prophecy that transcended religious boundaries as well as the dividing lines between various Muslim scholarly disciplines.

This book attempts to study Panjab historiography from the viewpoint of cosmography, the concept derived from the cosmological paradigm which Professor Harjeet Singh Gill, an eminent semiotician, developed in his oeuvre.Since its introduction in the colonial Panjab, the discipline of historiography subdued the indigenous craft of history writing such as katha, qissa, janamsakhi, and jangnama wherein what Professor Gill has conceptualized as “the dialectic of representation and transcendence” remained ever active.This title has been co-published with Aakar Books.

To form a truer portrait of Northeast Asian perspectives on modernity, this book presents a broad range of analyses from philosophical and political-philosophical scholars specializing in the region.The book considers the encounter between'Western'modernity and'Eastern'tradition not as a simple clash of cultures, but as a generative and hybridizing process of negotiation. It examines the concrete manifestations of modernity in various intellectual and political movements that attempted to radically restructure Northeast Asian societies. And through these situated perspectives, it rethinks and redefines the idea of'modernity'itself, challenging and presenting alternatives to Western-centric thinking on the topic.This book will be of particular interest to political philosophers, political theorists, comparative philosophers, regional specialists in East Asia, and all scholars grappling with the perplexities of global'modernity.'

This book explores the material and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty based on the Chinese magnum opus Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (literally, The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World), written under the pseudonym of the seventeenth-century writer Xizhou Sheng.The novel weaves into its narrative, through the characters'personalities and the events it illustrates, important details of Ming material life. Through the literary snapshot of the Ming material culture as reflected in Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, this work investigates the practices and customs of clothing, food, and travel, three of the'four major concerns of the people's livelihoods,'known as yishizhuxing in Chinese. While frequenting economic dimensions and probing the impact that Ming politics had on the ethos and social economy of the period, it sheds significant light on folk customs, legal and religious practices, and the status of women, among other issues.This work aims to enrich the current Western scholarship, done primarily by Timothy Brook, Craig Clunas, and Glen Dudbridge, on Ming material culture. The book will be of great value to students and scholars of East Asian Studies, Chinese literature, and those interested in the history of material culture in general.

For the first time in the modern era, Asia is not dominated by an outside power. Is this the Asian Century? Will internal rivalries emerge between China, Japan and India? How will growing tensions between the United States and China shape the global economic, strategic and political system? Covering governance, culture, and society in East and South Asia, this book introduces: - Key economic developments, including the Asian economic miracle and the 1997/8 Financial Crisis- The central role of education, and the contentious debate about'Asian values'- The rapid expansion of military spending in the region- The demography and geography of major nations and their forms of nationalismWith further reading suggestions and discussion questions for every chapter, this is essential introductory reading for students of Asian Studies and interested general readers alike.

In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessors. In others, they trained compilers to collect and systematize local knowledge that could be passed up the administrative hierarchy to government and national institutions. Their projects helped to claim natural resources, prepare for infrastructural development, and create new institutionalized knowledge and public engagement with textual representations of China's geobody. This book elucidates the ways in which knowledge production in early twentieth-century China centered on space and contributed to China's transformation into a modern nation-state.

This open access book provides fascinating insights into the incredible changes that Vietnam underwent in the long twentieth century as it transformed from an early modern kingdom to a European colony, to a divided land with opposing ideologies, and to a unified country in a globalized world. At each stage in this long century of changes, there were Vietnamese who sought to mold their society into some vision of “modernity.” The book looks at multiple, rather than one form of modernity, and links those forms with the different political moments that Vietnam experienced, in tandem with the outside interlocutors that were maintained during those periods. As such, this book provides a holistic view of the many forms of modernity and their global links that can be found in Vietnam over the course of the long twentieth century. These multiple modernities are documented in this book, and the authors do so by bringing together the strengths of “traditional” language-based area studies scholarship with the insights that an awareness of trans-national and global perspectives provides. Relevant to historians and researchers in the broader arena of Southeast Asian studies with a particular interest in Vietnam—its journey from past to present—this book is a must-read engagement with a country that has undergone and continues to experience, rapid transformation.

Using a wide variety of previously unavailable sources, Hong Yung Lee offers a theoretical and historical perspective on China's ruling elite, examining their politics and the bureaucratic system in which they participate. He traces the evolution of these cadres from the guerrilla fighters who first joined the communist movement and founded the new regime in 1949 to the technocratic specialists who wield power today. In the revolution, communist leaders built a peasant-based party organization whose members were largely recruited from uneducated poor peasants and hired laborers. Even after they became the founders of a new regime, their rural orientation and revolutionary experiences continued to affect the political process. Lee shows how the requirements of modernization compelled the state to replace the revolutionary cadres with bureaucratic technocrats. Selected from the postliberation generation, the new leaders are more committed to problem-solving than to socialism. Despite uncertainties in the immediate future, this elite transformation signifies an end to modern China's revolutionary era. Lee argues that it seems only a matter of time before China will have a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime led by technocrats possessing a managerial perspective and a pragmatic economic orientation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Kurdish Studies Archive publishes the content of volumes 1 to 10 of Kurdish Studies. This interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal was dedicated to publishing high-quality research and scholarship. Since 2023 the journal has been continued as the new Kurdish Studies Journal, published by Brill, and focuses on research, scholarship, and debates in the field of Kurdish studies in a multidisciplinary fashion covering a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, economics, history, society, gender, minorities, politics, health, law, environment, language, media, culture, arts, and education.

Traces of a Daoist Immortal is a Daoist-infused tour de force on the Daoist mountain hermit Chén Tuán 陳摶 (Xīyí 希夷 [Infinitesimal Subtlety]; d. 989) and his fellow “hidden immortals.” Breaking various academic taboos, including hyper-historicism, social constructivism, and conformist mentalities, here Komjathy, in an aspirational gesture towards unbridled inquiry, offers annotated translations and scholarly introductions to ten major works associated with the Daoist immortal. The book also contains a cutting-edge, mythopoetic introduction that addresses the life and legend of Chén Tuán, his connection to the Western Marchmount of Huàshān 華山 (Mount Hua; Huàyīn, Shǎnxī), Daoist views about sleeping, dreaming, waking, as well as Daoist time-being.

The third edition of Critical Issues in Contemporary China offers an in-depth and up-to-date analysis of Xi Jinping's strategies to address critical domestic and international challenges facing China in a ‘new era'.This book joins the current debates about Xi Jinping's ‘new era', reflecting upon the continuity and change in the CCP's domestic and foreign policies under Xi's leadership and Xi's capacity to realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. The international team of contributors evaluate such pressing issues as: Xi's re-centralization of power and securitization of domestic politics the Chinese economic model state-civil society relations Xi's gender policy and return to the traditional family values Beijing's responses to unrest in Xinjiang and Hong Kong Xi's evolving unification strategies towards Taiwan the Belt and Road Initiative, and the deterioration of US-China relations. Providing readers with rich empirical assessment of Xi's responses to the political, economic, social and international challenges facing contemporary China, the third edition of Critical Issues will be an essential resource for students of Chinese politics, economy, society and foreign relations.

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire studies the dynamics of Ottoman peasant economy in the sixteenth century. First, it shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom about the'stationariness'of the Asian agrarian economies, Ottoman peasant economy witnessed substantial growth in response to population increase, urban commercial expansion and to increased taxation demands. Second, the book argues that economic development did not take place independently of political structures, of the state. This meant that in the light of the fiscal and legitimation concerns of the Ottoman state and contrary to the assumptions of the models of economic development, changes in population and in commercial demand did not result in the disruption of the integrity of the small peasant holding as the primary unit of production. The book develops these arguments in the context of a detailed empirical study of the economic trends, of the state rules or institutions that embodied the relations of revenue extraction, and of exchange in Ottoman Anatolia.

The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky narrates life at the Indian princely court of Bhopal, during the 1940s. Vera was the daughter of Professor M. J. Herzenstein, a member of the State Duma in pre-revolutionary Russia, and married to Count Mark Luboshinsky. After the Bolshevik revolution, they emigrated to Czechoslovakia where they met Hamidullah Khan, Nawab of Bhopal, an important political figure during the last decades of the British Empire and India's fight for independence. Impressed by Mark Luboshinsky's managerial abilities, the Nawab invited him to come to India to manage his estates. The couple spent seven years in India (winter 1938 - winter 1945). They stayed in and around Bhopal taking part in palace business or travelling across India accompanying the Nawab's family on long journeys. The Diary is a unique and completely unknown text to the Anglophone world: a rich primary source for historians of India's princely states, providing an interesting and uncommon depiction of the Nawab, his family, acquaintances, associates, and more generally, the life of Indians and foreigners in India during World War II. With literary flair, Vera describes not only her life in India, but also her intimate relationship with the Begum and British residents of Bhopal as well as meetings with well-known people like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Fatima Jinnah, or Anandamayi Ma, and Paul Brunton. Importantly, the Diary also offers an extremely rare Eastern European female voice in late colonial India: a voice that both submits to and transgresses the Orientalist moods of its time.

Since 2009, images of Tibetans setting themselves on fire in protest of the repressive policies of the Chinese government have drawn attention from around the world. In Aflame for Freedom in Tibet: The Origin and Development of the Self-Immolation Movement, Namloyak Dhungser examines the protest movement and its motivations through interviews with Tibetans, both inside Tibet and abroad, and in the context of developments in Tibetan history, providing unique insight into the multifaceted origins of this movement in both contemporary and historic Tibetan perspectives. The number of self-immolating protestors continues to climb: a final plea from Tibetans to the world to secure their freedom. This book is not only a path to a deeper understanding of the Tibetan situation—past and future—but a call to action to recognize basic Tibetan human rights.

Threads of globalization is an interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion-specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long twentieth century. It examines how the shift from artisanal production to'fast fashion'over the past 150 years has devalued women's textile labour and how skilled textile/ garment makers and the organizations that support them are preserving and reviving heritage traditions. It also offers examples of how socially engaged artists in Asia and the diaspora use their work to criticize labour and environmental abuses in the global fashion industry.

This book offers an analytical account of the April Third Massacre in Korea, a bloody confrontation between supporters of the Syngman Rhee Administration and those suspected (largely incorrectly) of being Communists, or members of the South Korean Workers'Party—the second largest Communist Party after Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule. As a result, some 80,000 villagers, fishermen, and policemen were killed. The book, drawing from a wide array of primary sources, ranging from South Korean governmental records, memoranda, memoirs, and recently unclassified documents, examines the role of the South Korean Workers'Party in the April Third Massacre on Jeju and how it shaped the origins of the Korean War. The author maps these origins of the Korean War from the outbreak of the April Third Massacre and through the ensuing chain of violence which included the Yo-su and Sun-ch'on Massacres of October 1948, engulfing the peninsula until 1949. Of interest to all scholars studyingmodern Korea, it is particularly relevant to historians focused on the Korean War, as well as political scientists and international relations experts interested in East Asian conflicts.

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal'East'--primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus--with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the'foreign East'--the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International explores how the concept of'the East'was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Masha Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualized and carried out by students, comrades, and activists--Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualizing these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes Soviet history into postcolonial studies and global history.

During the era of French colonial rule in Indochina, as many as two hundred thousand Indochinese sojourned in France. Subjects and Sojourners is a vivid and comprehensive social, cultural, and political history of this diverse group, which ranged from ruling monarchs to the most marginal laborers. Drawing from a range of rich but underused archives, Charles Keith explores how French colonialism extended Indochina's colonial society into France, where Indochinese subjects studied, labored, fought, and lived in imperial spaces and contexts that were profoundly different from those they had left behind. Time in France transformed these sojourners, and when they returned to Indochina, they in turn transformed colonial society. Indochinese, in short, did not simply encounter “France” in the colony: they went and lived it for themselves.

In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-remarkably for this time-such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. Their position, coupled with dominance over strategic ports and mines, allowed them to facilitate trade throughout East and Southeast Asia. They also played a key cultural role in disseminating Confucian texts, Buddhist sutras, ink paintings, and pottery, and in creating a distinctive, hybrid culture that fused Japanese, Korean, and Chinese beliefs, objects, and customs. Kings in All but Name illustrates how Japan was an ethnically diverse state from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, closely bound by trading ties to Korea and China. It reveals new archaeological and textual evidence proving that East Asia had integrated trading networks long before the arrival of European explorers and includes an analysis of ores and slag that shows how mining techniques improved and propelled East Asian trade. The story of the Ouchi rulers argues for the existence of a segmented polity, with one center located in Kyoto, and the other in the Ouchi city of Yamaguchi. It also contradicts the belief that Japan collapsed into centuries of turmoil and rather proves that Japan was a stable and prosperous trading state where rituals, policies, politics, and economics were interwoven and diverse.

A concise new history of a century of struggles to define Asian identity and express alternatives to European forms of universalism.The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the conflicting and overlapping ways in which Asians have conceived their bonds and their roles in the world. Tracking the circulation of ideas and people across colonial and national borders, Sugata Bose explores developments in Asian thought, art, and politics that defied Euro-American models and defined Asianness as a locus of solidarity for all humanity.Impressive in scale, yet driven by the stories of fascinating and influential individuals, Asia after Europe examines early intimations of Asian solidarity and universalism preceding Japan's victory over Russia in 1905; the revolutionary collaborations of the First World War and its aftermath, when Asian universalism took shape alongside Wilsonian internationalism and Bolshevism; the impact of the Great Depression and Second World War on the idea of Asia; and the persistence of forms of Asian universalism in the postwar period, despite the consolidation of postcolonial nation-states on a European model.Diverse Asian universalisms were forged and fractured through phases of poverty and prosperity, among elites and common people, throughout the span of the twentieth century. Noting the endurance of nationalist rivalries, often tied to religious exclusion and violence, Bose concludes with reflections on the continuing potential of political thought beyond European definitions of reason, nation, and identity.

The identity politics of the householder Naths (Yogis), on the one hand, is one of the oldest and most persistent identity assertions in Bengal and Assam. On the other, for an array of reasons, the identity assertion of the householder Naths of Bengal and Assam has failed to draw academic curiosity so far. Since the late nineteenth century, a segment of the Naths, largely educated and elite, has been crafting their identity as Brahman grounded on their “origin myth”, negotiating with the British colonial administration through different census enumerations, as well as internal social reforms. One of the primary reasons for their current lagging is that the Naths never politicised their identity and demands, and did not mobilise themselves in the democratic political arena.

Sui-Wai Cheung's study of the institutional history of copper coins in the Ming dynasty reveals how emperors and statesmen perceived and used the copper coins at their disposal. In this process, he uncovers the reality of the Sons of Heaven, showing that although Ming emperors seemed to have unlimited power, they could not afford the upkeep on their palace. In this revealing history of Ming China, Cheung argues that especially after the breakdown of the household registration system, the aim of the Ming coinage system was to create a new source of income in order to maintain the emperor's domain in Beijing.

This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki Library.The book surveys and analyzes changes in religious groups and identities in late antique Arabia, ca. 300-700 CE. It engages with contemporary and material evidence: for example, inscriptions, archaeological remains, Arabic poetry, the Qurʾān, and the so-called Constitution of Medina. Also, it suggests ways to deal with the later Arabic historiographical and other literary texts. The issue of social identities and their processes are central to the study. For instance, how did Arabian ethnic and religious identities intersect on the eve of Islam? The book suggests that the changes in social groups were more piecemeal than previously thought.

A New Politics of Heritage Reconstruction in Afghanistan investigates the politics of cultural heritage preservation in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2015.Based on several periods of ethnographic fieldwork and the author's direct employment on several internationally-sponsored heritage projects, this book studies the new and complex intersections between cultural heritage and politics in Afghanistan. Wyndham argues that a particular configuration of heritage and politics has emerged after the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamyan and demonstrates how the characteristics of this ‘post-Bamyan'heritage paradigm are revealed through a number of case studies of internationally sponsored heritage work. These case studies reveal how politics and heritage are currently configured across a diverse range of governments, state and non-state actors, NGOs, individuals and forms of expertise—and why such intersections matter. The book responds to a call from across the discipline of Heritage Studies to look more closely at the relationships between heritage, power and politics.A New Politics of Heritage Reconstruction in Afghanistan provides a fascinating case study on the intersection of heritage and politics that will be of interest to students and scholars of heritage, as well as to professionals working on heritage preservation - both within and outside of government.

This book examines key aspects of the Asia Pacific War (1931–1945), that was initially waged between Japan and China, before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor drew in the U.S.-led allied forces from 1941 to 1945.Part I of the book examines three interlocking components, the origins of the war; its impact on combatants and civilians; and its short-term legacy, including the huge changes that took place in the postwar governance of Japan. Part II explores the ongoing impact and legacy of the war for those in postwar Japan, and later generations, particularly through the examination of the ambiguity of state-led reconciliation with Japan's neighbors, the growth of dynamic civil reconciliation efforts, and the prominent role of the arts in peace movements. Through a people-centered approach it filters historical events through the lens of the war's impact on individuals, who found themselves players within a larger frame of the social history of Japan and caught up in the international power dynamics of the nuclear age.Featuring studies of contemporary peace activism, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Modern Asian and U.S. History, as well as those interested in postwar memory and reconciliation.

Los movimientos separatistas han afectado áreas en Indonesia desde su independencia. El separatismo está conectado con la práctica de la soberanía estatal, pero también con la identidad grupal: es un fracaso de la identidad indonesia y una expresión de una identidad local diferente. Las teorías del separatismo favorecen ciertas variables explicativas, como la pobreza o la religión, pero, como se muestra en este estudio, el fenómeno es mucho más complicado. Después de examinar las rebeliones en la etapa inicial de la consolidación de Indonesia, este libro explora tres casos de separatismo en el este del país: la República de Molucas del Sur, Papúa Occidental y Timor-Leste, así como el “caso negativo” de Sumba, donde existen variables que pueden conducir al separatismo, pero no hay movimiento separatista. Además, el estudio examina la persistencia del separatismo vinculado al concepto de continuidad social, así como a la privación relativa. Este trabajo será de interés para los estudiosos de Asia y los políticos, así como para aquellos interesados en los estudios de la revolución, la rebelión y el separatismo.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan's geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals'nocturnal experiences and one culture's persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.

By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy. Northern Chinese officials commissioned these steles exclusively to record a family's extensive genealogy, rather than the biography or achievements of an individual. Tomoyasu Iiyama shows how the rise of these steles demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. In fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China. The evolution of genealogical steles delineates how local elites, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese culture, fully accommodated to Mongol imperial rule and became instead one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia.

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal–military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labor. Although much has been written about the institutional, strategic, and political aspects of the history of the Song and its military, this book is a first-of-its-kind investigation into the lives of the people who fought for the state. Elad Alyagon examines the army as a meeting place between marginalized social groups and elites. In the process, he shows the military to be a space where a new criminalized lower class was molded in a constant struggle between common soldiers and the agents of the Song state. For the millions of people caught in the orbit of this system—the tattooed soldiers, their families, and their neighbors—the Song period was no age of benevolence, but one of servitude, violence, and resistance. Inked is their story.

Eugene Y. Park's annotated translation of a long-awaited book by Kim Ingeol introduces Anglophone readers to a path-breaking scholarship on the widening social base of political actors who shaped “public opinion” (kongnon) in early modern Korea. Initially limited to high officials, the articulators of public opinion as the state and elites recognized grew in number to include mid-level civil officials, State Confucian College students, all Confucian literati (yurim), influential commoners who took over local councils (hyanghoe), and the general population. Marshaling evidence from a wealth of documents, Kim presents a compelling case for the indigenous origins of Korean democracy.

This book constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive text-in-context study of the translation of Christian tracts (from English into Chinese) by Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century China. It focuses on the large body of hitherto widely neglected Protestant Chinese books and tracts, putting the translated texts into their socio-political, cultural and ideological contexts. This integrated approach proves to be fruitful and insightful in describing and explaining actual practices of translation, or translation norms. [...] The book addresses the central issue of how original texts were selected, translated and presented by Protestant missionaries under the patronage of various missionary institutions in order to achieve their specific agendas. Based on primary materials and rare archival documents, this extensive survey of the corpus of Chinese Christian literature fills a significant gap in the evaluation of Protestant missions to China, especially with regard to the role of the Religious Tract Society (RTS). Moreover, the contributions of Chinese collaborators are examined in detail to achieve a more balanced view in accessing the role of missionary translators. The book also sheds light on the sophisticated procedures and strategies of cross-cultural translation, particularly on the facet of religious translation in the Chinese translation tradition.'... John T.P. Lai provides a wealth of information about the development of Protestant religious publishing in late imperial China. Full of interesting data and illustrations, this work should find an audience with church historians and mission scholars.'Joseph Tse-Hei Lee in Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal Fields of interest: Religious Studies, Translation Studies, History of Christianity in Modern China. Contents: Introduction. Chapter 1: Translation, Protestant Missions, and the Chinese Context. Chapter 2: Institutional Patronage: The Ideological Control of Tract Societies. Chapter 3: Teamwork Translation: The Invisibility of Chinese Collaborators. Chapter 4: Christian Tracts in Chinese Costume: A Critical Survey. Chapter 5: Rewriting the Children's Message: The Peep of Day. Chapter 6: Domesticating for Chinese Literati: The Anxious Inquirer. Conclusion Appendices: Appendix A: Protestant Missionary Publishers and Societies in China. Appendix B: Protestant Missionaries and Chinese Translators. Appendix C: Chinese Translations of Christian Literature, 1812-1907. Appendix D: Most Well-Received Christian Literature in Chinese, 1812-1907. Appendix E: Favell L. Mortimer's Works in Chinese. Appendix F: William Muirhead's Works in Chinese. Bibliography. Index.

This book provides a sweeping overview of East Asian international relations in history from the nineteenth century onwards, with a focus on Korea and its relationship with East Asia and the USA. In contrast with many books which concentrate exclusively on the twentieth century, this book offers a long-term perspective on modernity and modernization in East Asia. It addresses the tributary system, the Meiji Restoration, Japanese imperialism in East Asia, and the Cold War in East Asia. It also incorporates the First and Second Indochina Wars from Vietnam's perspective and expands the geographical scope of East Asia beyond the traditional framework of Korea, Japan, and China. The book begins with the tributary system as a starting point of East Asian modernity in contrast to the old view that the tributary system was not a'modern'system. It rejects the idea that Japan was modernizing while Korea remained stagnant and shows why Japanese colonialism continues to be controversial and problematic. Through the book's emphasis on Vietnam's perspective of the Indochina Wars, it places much value on nationalism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization as forces of modernity and modernization. Relevant to scholars and students in history, international relations, and East Asian studies more broadly, the book brings with it a novel, fresh and innovative approach to East Asian history.

Exploring family stories reveals the rich history of a seventh-century Buddhist shrine. As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father's stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave temples at Ellora. Recalling those stories as an adult, she was inspired to learn more about the caves, especially the Buddhist worship hall known as the “Vishwakarma cave.” Immersing herself in family history, oral traditions, and works by archaeologists, art historians, scholars of Buddhism, Indologists, and Sanskritists, Narayan set out to answer the question of how this cave came to be venerated as the home of Vishwakarma, the god of making in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Cave of My Ancestors represents the perfect blend of Narayan's skills as a researcher and writer. Her quest to trace her family's stories took her to Ellora; through libraries, archives, and museums around the world; and across disciplinary borders. Equal parts scholarship, detective story, and memoir, Narayan's book ably leads readers through centuries of history, offering a sensitive meditation on devotion, wonder, and all that connects us to place, family, the past, and the divine.