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Asia

One Country, Two Societies
Edited by Martin King Whyte
This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China’s foremost social cleavage: the rural-urban gap. The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural-urban relations; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.
Hardcover February 2010
Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars
Eugenio Menegon
In the sixteenth century, European missionaries brought a foreign and global religion to China. Converts then transformed this new religion into a local one. Focusing on the still-active Catholic communities of Fuan county in northeast Fujian, this project's implications extend beyond the issue of Christianity in China to the wider fields of religious and social history and the early modern history of global intercultural relations.
Hardcover December 2009
Empire's Twilight
David M. Robinson
The rise of the Mongol empire transformed world history. Its collapse in the mid-fourteenth century had equally profound consequences. Four themes dominate this study of the late Mongol empire in Northeast Asia during this chaotic era: the need for a regional perspective encompassing all states and ethnic groups in the area; the process and consequences of pan-Asian integration under the Mongols; the tendency for individual and family interests to trump those of dynasty, country, or linguistic affiliation; and finally, the need to see Koryo Korea as part of the wider Mongol empire.
Hardcover December 2009
Sovereignty at the Edge
Cathryn H. Clayton
How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how ­Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s- this book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable.
Hardcover December 2009
Defining Engagement
Robert I. Hellyer
Presenting fresh insights on the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan, Robert I. Hellyer challenges the still largely accepted wisdom that the Tokugawa shogunate, guided by an ideology of seclusion, stifled intercourse with the outside world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Hardcover November 2009
Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China
Micah S. Muscolino
This work explores interactions between society and environment in China’s most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s. Author Micah S. Muscolino gives us a better understanding of the relationship between past ecological changes and present environmental challenges.
Hardcover November 2009
Superstitious Regimes
Rebecca Nedostup
We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities.
Hardcover November 2009
Fractured Rebellion
Andrew G. Walder
Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China’s Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure.
Hardcover October 2009
Gender Struggles
Christopher Gerteis
In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers. Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.
Hardcover October 2009
Negotiating Urban Space
Si-yen Fei
Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. Using Nanjing—a metropolis along the Yangzi River and onetime capital of the Ming—as a central case, the author demonstrates that, prompted by this unique form of urban-rural contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels: as an urban community, as a metropolitan region, as an imagined space, and, finally, as a discursive subject.
Hardcover October 2009
Wretched Rebels
Lucien Bianco
Translated by Philip Liddell
This book, a condensed translation of the prize- winning Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, focuses on “spontaneous” rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that the predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against agents of the state, and suggests that twentieth-century Chinese peasants were less different from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French peasants than might be imagined and points to continuities between pre- and post-1949 rural protest.
Hardcover October 2009
The Monkey and the Inkpot
Carla Nappi
This is the story of a Chinese doctor, his book, and the creatures that danced within its pages. The Monkey and the Inkpot introduces natural history in sixteenth-century China through the iconic Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica) of Li Shizhen (1518–1593). In the first book-length study in English of Li’s text, Carla Nappi reveals a “cabinet of curiosities” of gems, beasts, and oddities whose author was devoted to using natural history to guide the application of natural and artificial objects as medical drugs.
Hardcover October 2009
China's Last Empire
William T. Rowe
Timothy Brook, General Editor
In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.
Hardcover October 2009
Spectacle and Sacrifice
David Johnson

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow author David Johnston to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Hardcover October 2009
Empire of Texts in Motion
Karen Laura Thornber
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.
Hardcover September 2009
China during the Great Depression
Tomoko Shiroyama
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.
Paperback September 2009
From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister
Richard J. Smethurst
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.
Paperback September 2009
Power of Place
James Robson

Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium. James Robson’s analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho-Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.

Hardcover September 2009
When Empire Comes Home
Lori Watt

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan.

Hardcover August 2009
In a Dark Time
Linda Isako Angst
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 July 2009
Daoist Modern
Xun Liu

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Hardcover July 2009
China's Cosmopolitan Empire
Mark Edward Lewis
Timothy Brook, General Editor

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

Hardcover June 2009
Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots
Jacob Eyferth

Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

Hardcover June 2009
A Hundred Horizons
Sugata Bose
A Hundred Horizons takes us to the shores of the Indian Ocean, in a brilliant reinterpretation of how culture developed and history was made at the height of the British raj. Sugata Bose explores the intricate social and economic webs of these shores from 1850 to 1950, finding evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia. This book reconstructs how a region's culture, economy, politics, and imagination are woven together in time and place.
Paperback June 2009
Criminal Justice in China
Klaus Mühlhahn

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Mühlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

Hardcover April 2009
A Cultural History of Modern Science in China
Benjamin A. Elman
In A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom.
Paperback April 2009
The Generalissimo
Jay Taylor
One of the most momentous stories of the last century is China’s rise from a self-satisfied, anti-modern, decaying society into a global power that promises to one day rival the United States. Chiang Kai-shek, an autocratic, larger-than-life figure, dominates this story. Drawing heavily on Chinese sources including Chiang’s diaries, The Generalissimo provides the most lively, sweeping, and objective biography yet of a man whose length of uninterrupted, active engagement at the highest levels in the march of history is excelled by few, if any, in modern history.
Hardcover April 2009
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
Yuma Totani
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.
Paperback April 2009
Articulating the Sinosphere
Joshua A. Fogel

Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Introducing the concept of “Sinosphere” to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.

Hardcover March 2009
Down a Narrow Road
Jay Dautcher

The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice.

Hardcover March 2009
Dry Spells
Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty.

Hardcover March 2009
The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi
Sachiko Murata
William C. Chittick
Weiming Tu
Foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. The copious annotations to the translation explain Liu’s text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.

Hardcover March 2009
The Age of Confucian Rule
Dieter Kuhn
Timothy Brook, General Editor
Just over a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty emerged as the most advanced civilization on earth. Within two centuries, China was home to nearly half of all humankind. This book is an essential introduction to this transformative era.
Hardcover March 2009
Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts II
Edited and translated by Gregory G. Maskarinec

This volume is a bilingual collection of shaman oral texts from the Bhuji Valley of Western Nepal, in the original Nepali and with line-by-line English translation. Accompanying the book is a DVD of audio recordings of the shaman oral texts, supplementary texts not included in the published volume, videos of shaman performances, and additional video and photographic documentation of the social context in which these shamans are found.

Hardcover March 2009
The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir
Lawrence J. McCrea

This book examines the revolution in Sanskrit poetics initiated by the ninth-century Kashmiri Anandavardhana. Anandavardhana replaced the formalist aesthetic of earlier poeticians with one stressing the unifunctionality of literary texts, arguing that all components of a work should subserve a single purpose—the communication of a single emotional mood (rasa). Attention was redirected from formal elements toward specific poems, viewed as aesthetically integrated wholes, thereby creating new literary critical possibilities.

Hardcover March 2009
China between Empires
Mark Edward Lewis
Timothy Brook, General Editor
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. This book traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.
Hardcover February 2009
Military Culture in Imperial China
Edited by Nicola Di Cosmo
These original essays explore the relationship between culture and the military in Chinese society from early China to the Qing empire, with contributions by eminent scholars aiming to reexamine the relationship between military matters and law, government, historiography, art, philosophy, literature, and politics.
Hardcover February 2009
Strait Talk
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker
Relations among the United States, Taiwan, and China challenge policymakers, international relations specialists, and a concerned public to examine their assumptions about security, sovereignty, and peace. Tucker traces the thorny relationship between the United States and Taiwan as both watch China’s power grow.
Hardcover February 2009
Charisma and Compassion
C. Julia Huang
Tzu-Chi (Compassion Relief) began as a tiny, grassroots women's charitable group; today in Taiwan it runs three state-of-the-art hospitals, a television channel, and a university. Based on extensive fieldwork in Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, and the United States, this book explores the transformation of Tzu-Chi.
Hardcover January 2009
The Clash Within
Martha C. Nussbaum
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 January 2009
Deliverance and Submission
Kelly H. Chong
South Korea is home to some of the largest evangelical Protestant congregations in the world. This book investigates the meaning of—and the reasons behind—a particular aspect of contemporary South Korean evangelicalism: the intense involvement of middle-class women. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul that explores the relevance of women’s experiences to Korean evangelicalism, Kelly H. Chong not only helps provide a broader picture of the evangelical movement’s success in South Korea, but addresses the global question of contemporary women's attraction to religious traditionalism.
Hardcover December 2008
Men of Letters Within the Passes
Chang Woei Ong
The main theme of this book is the interaction between two “places,” China and Guanzhong, the capital area of several dynasties. This work examines how Guanzhong literati conceptualized three sets of relations: central/regional, “official”/“unofficial,” and national/local. It further traces the formation over the last millennium of the imperial state of a critical communal self-consciousness.
Hardcover December 2008
Neo-Confucianism in History
Peter K. Bol
The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.
Hardcover November 2008
Popular Protest in China
Edited by Kevin J. O'Brien
Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.
Hardcover November 2008 / Paperback November 2008
Taj Mahal
Giles Tillotson
The meaning of the Taj Mahal, the perceptions and responses it prompts, ideas about the building and the history that shape them: these form the subject of Tillotson’s book. More than a richly illustrated history, this book is an eloquent meditation on the place of the Taj Mahal in the cultural imagination of India and the wider world.
Hardcover November 2008