- China between Empires
- Hardcover February 2009
- Military Culture in Imperial China
- Hardcover February 2009
- Strait Talk
- Hardcover February 2009
- Charisma and Compassion
- Hardcover January 2009
- The Age of Confucian Rule
- Hardcover December 2008
- Men of Letters within the Passes
- Hardcover November 2008
- Neo-Confucianism in History
- Hardcover November 2008
- The Taj Mahal
- Hardcover November 2008
- Popular Protest in China
- Hardcover November 2008 / Paperback November 2008
- The Clash Within
- While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.
- Paperback October 2008
- Deliverance and Submission
- Hardcover October 2008
- The Power of the Buddhas
- Hardcover October 2008
- Culture, Courtiers, and Competition
- This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.
- Hardcover September 2008
- The Great Wall Revisited
- Hardcover September 2008
- In a Dark Time
- Since Japanese sovereignty from American occupation in 1972, these islands have become the site of a complex colonial and postcolonial relationship of resistance and dependence between Okinawa, Japan, and the United States. Angst looks behind this historical and geopolitical experience by drawing upon diverse perspectives of Okinawa women from different generational and economic backgrounds.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Beijing Time
- Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.
- Hardcover May 2008
- The Forbidden City
- The Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng) lying at the heart of Beijing formed the hub of the Celestial Empire for five centuries. Over the past century it has been celebrated and excoriated as a symbol of all that was magnificent and terrible in dynastic China’s legacy. In this book, Barmé provides a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Olympic Dreams
- Already the world has seen the political, economic, and cultural significance of hosting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—in policies instituted and altered, positions softened, projects undertaken. But will the Olympics make a lasting difference? This book approaches questions about the nature and future of China through the lens of sports—particularly as sports finds its utmost international expression in the Olympics.
- Hardcover May 2008
- City Between Worlds
- Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Lee offers an insider’s view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors.
- Hardcover April 2008
- The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan
- The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.
- Hardcover April 2008
- The Scandal of Empire
- The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. In this powerfully written critique, Nicholas Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable, we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
- This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
- Hardcover April 2008
- Emplacing a Pilgrimage
- The sacred mountain oyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Gendering Modern Japanese History
- The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.
- Paperback March 2008
- Partisans of Allah
- Today, more than ever, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. As the line drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims becomes more rigid, Jalal seeks to retrieve the ethical meanings of this core Islamic principle in South Asian history. Drawing on historical, legal, and literary sources, Jalal traces the intellectual itinerary of jihad through several centuries and across the territory connecting the Middle East with South Asia.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Tradition, Treaties, and Trade
- Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese “tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Visible Cities
- The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Blussé chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities—Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia.
- Hardcover March 2008
- The Age of Visions and Arguments
- The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism--the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government--Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.
- Hardcover March 2008
- China's Trapped Transition
- In a book sure to provoke debate, Minxin Pei examines the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party's reform strategy--pursuing pro-market economic policies under one-party rule. Combining powerful insights with empirical research, China's Trapped Transition offers a provocative assessment of China's future as a great power.
- Paperback March 2008
- Death by a Thousand Cuts
- In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts” or “death by slicing,” this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China. Death by a Thousand Cuts is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchi’s abolition in 1905.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Mao's Last Revolution
- The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People's Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao's Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in Chinese history.
- Paperback March 2008
- War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005
- Japan has long wrestled with the memories of World War II. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts--over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea--is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory.
- Paperback March 2008
- China during the Great Depression
- The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Some Assembly Required
- One linchpin of China’s expansion has been township and village enterprises (TVEs), a vast group of firms with diverse modes of ownership and structure. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of rural enterprises. This study also examines how ordinary rural residents have made sense of and participated in the industrialization engulfing them in recent decades.
- Hardcover March 2008
- When Our Eyes No Longer See
- As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Dilemmas of Victory
- This illuminating work examines the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the Communist takeover of China. Instead of dwelling on elite politics and policy-making processes, Dilemmas of Victory seeks to understand how the 1949-1953 period was experienced by various groups, including industrialists, filmmakers, ethnic minorities, educators, rural midwives, philanthropists, standup comics, and scientists.
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
- The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Beacon Fire and Shooting Star
- The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.
- Hardcover December 2007
- Amid the Clouds and Mist
- In 1200, what is now southwest China--Guizhou, Yunnan, and the southern portion of Sichuan--was home to an assortment of strikingly diverse cultures and ruled by a multitude of political entities. One purpose of this book is to examine how China's three late imperial dynasties--the Yuan, Ming, and Qing--conquered, colonized, and assumed control of the southwest. Another objective is to highlight the indigenous response to China's colonization of the southwest, particularly that of the Nasu Yi people of western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan, the only group to leave an extensive written record.
- Hardcover November 2007
- Articulating Citizenship
- This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens, and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths' civic action.
- Hardcover November 2007
- Competition over Content
- Analyzing textbooks, examination questions and essays, and official and private commentary, De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and how examination standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. These questions reframe the debate about the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Provincial Patriots
- From the Taiping Rebellion to the Chinese Communist movement, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why this province wielded such disproportionate influence. By putting provincial Hunan at the center of this narrative, Platt uncovers an unexpected and surprising story of modern China that sheds light on the current resurgence of regionalism in the country.
- Hardcover October 2007
- From Comrade to Citizen
- A leading scholar of China's modern political development examines the changing relationship between the Chinese people and the state. Correcting the conventional view of China as having instituted extraordinary economic changes but having experienced few political reforms in the post-Mao period, Merle Goldman details efforts by individuals and groups to assert their political rights.
- Paperback September 2007
- From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister
- From his birth into the lowest stratum of the samurai class to his assassination at the hands of right-wing militarists, Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1936) lived through tumultuous times that shaped the course of modern Japan. This engaging biography underscores the profound influence of the charismatic seven-time finance minister on the political and economic development of Japan by casting new light on his unusual background, unique talents, and singular experiences.
- Hardcover September 2007
- Normalization of U.S.-China Relations
- Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.
- Paperback September 2007
- The Divine Nature of Power
- Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings.
- Hardcover July 2007
- Raising the Bar
- Over the past two decades, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia have been engaged in unprecedented efforts to re-cast and rapidly expand the legal profession-with profound implications not only for law, but also for politics, international relations, and society itself. Raising the Bar is the first book-length study in English of this phenomenon.
- Paperback July 2007
- Between Dreams and Reality
- From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Korean men trained for the state military examination, or mukwa. But few were actually appointed as military officials after passing the test. In this comprehensive history, Park argues that the mukwa was not only the state's primary means of recruiting aristocrats as new members of the military bureaucracy, but also a way for the ruling elite to partially satisfy the status aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves.
- Hardcover May 2007
- Disciplining the State
- Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. Thornton maps these complex processes during three critical reform periods, and offers a historical reading of state-making as a contest between central and local regimes.
- Hardcover May 2007
- War and Faith
- During the sengoku era in Japan, warlords and religious institutions vied for supremacy, with powerhouses such as The Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, bands of commoners fighting for various causes. Tsang delves into the complex relationship between these ikko leagues and the Honganji institution, arguing for a fuller picture of ikko ikki as a force in medieval Japanese history.
- Hardcover May 2007
- The Clash Within
- While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.
- Hardcover May 2007
See also: All Books in HISTORY.