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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
The string of military defeats during 1942 marked the end of
British hegemony in Southeast Asia, finally destroying the myth of
British imperial invincibility. The Japanese attack on Burma led to
a hurried and often poorly organized evacuation of Indian and
European civilians from the country. The evacuation was a public
humiliation for the British and marked the end of their role in
Burma."The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma" investigates the
social and political background to the evacuation, and the
consequences of its failure. Utilizing unpublished letters,
diaries, memoirs and official reports, Michael Leigh provides the
first comprehensive account of the evacuation, analyzing its source
in the structures of colonial society, fractured race relations and
in the turbulent politics of colonial Burma.
Lu Jia's New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han
Dynasty is a readable yet accurate translation by Paul R. Goldin
and Elisa Levi Sabattini. Celebrated as "a man-of-service with a
mouth [skilled] at persuasion", Lu Jia (c. 228-140 BCE) became one
of the leading figures of the early Han dynasty, serving as a
statesman and diplomat from the very beginning of the Han empire.
This book is a translation of Lu Jia's New Discourses, which laid
out the reasons for rise and fall of empires. Challenged by the new
Emperor to produce a book explaining why a realm that was conquered
on horseback cannot also be ruled on horseback, Lu Jia produced New
Discourses, to great acclaim.
The present volume is a result of an international symposium on the
encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the
Americas, which was organized by Boston College's Institute for
Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College in June 2017. In Asia,
Protestants encountered a mixed Jesuit legacy: in South Asia, they
benefited from pioneering Jesuit ethnographers while contesting
their conversions; in Japan, all Christian missionaries who
returned after 1853 faced the equation of Japanese nationalism with
anti-Jesuit persecution; and in China, Protestants scrambled to
catch up to the cultural legacy bequeathed by the earlier Jesuit
mission. In the Americas, Protestants presented Jesuits as enemies
of liberal modernity, supporters of medieval absolutism yet master
manipulators of modern self-fashioning and the printing press. The
evidence suggests a far more complicated relationship of both
Protestants and Jesuits as co-creators of the bright and dark sides
of modernity, including the public sphere, public education,
plantation slavery, and colonialism.
The 1720 Imperial Circumcision Celebrations in Istanbul offers the
first holistic examination of an Ottoman public festival through an
in-depth inquiry into different components of the 1720 event.
Through a critical and combined analysis of the hitherto unknown
archival sources along with the textual and pictorial narratives on
the topic, the book vividly illustrates the festival's
organizational details and preparations, its complex rites (related
to consumption, exchange, competition), and its representation in
court-commissioned illustrated festival books (surnames). To
analyze all these phases in a holistic manner, the book employs an
interdisciplinary approach by using the methodological tools of
history, art history, and performance studies and thus, provides a
new methodological and conceptual framework for the study of
Ottoman celebrations.
In Patriotic Cooperation, Diana Junio offers an account of a
cooperative venture between the Nationalist government and the
Church of Christ in China, known as the Border Service Department,
that carried out substantial social programs from 1939 to 1955 in
China's Southwestern border areas. Numerous scholars have argued
that Chinese state-religion relations have been characterized
primarily by conflict and antagonism. By examining the history of
cooperation seen in the Border Service Department case, Diana Junio
contends that these relations have not always been antagonistic; on
the contrary, under certain conditions the state and the church
could achieve a mutually beneficial goal through successful
cooperation, with a strong degree of sincerity on both sides.
From a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness"
("The New Yorker") comes the most authoritative, readable
single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the holy land
Nine hundred years ago, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy
war by the Pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern
Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by
both faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed, Islam and
Christianity fought for dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a
succession of chillingly brutal wars: the Crusades. Here for the
first time is the story of that epic struggle told from the
perspective of both Christians and Muslims. A vivid and fast-paced
narrative history, it exposes the full horror, passion, and
barbaric grandeur of the Crusading era, revealing how these holy
wars reshaped the medieval world and why they continue to influence
events today.
The first comprehensive study in English of the Japanese hell
figure Datsueba explores her evolution since her eleventh-century
emergence as a terrifying old woman who strips the clothes of the
dead in the afterworld. Drawing widely on literature, art, and
worship practices, the author reveals how the creative utilization
of Datsueba's key attributes-including a marker of borders, a
keeper of cloth, and an elderly woman-transformed her into a
guardian of the human journey through life and death and shaped a
figure that is diverse and multifaceted, yet also strikingly
recognizable across the centuries.
During the 1930s, much of the world was in severe economic and
political crisis. This upheaval ushered in new ways of thinking
about social and political systems. In some cases, these new ideas
transformed states and empires alike. Particularly in Europe, these
transformations are well-chronicled in scholarship. In academic
writings on India, however, Muslim political and legal thought has
gone relatively unnoticed during this eventful decade. This book
fills this gap by mapping the evolution of Muslim political and
legal thought from roughly 1927 to 1940. By looking at landmark
court cases in tandem with the political and legal ideas of
Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding
fathers, this book highlights the more concealed ways in which
Indian Muslims began to acquire a political outlook with distinctly
separatist aspirations. What makes this period worthy of a separate
study is that the legal antagonism between religious communities in
the 1930s foreshadowed political conflicts that arose in the run-up
to independence in 1947. The presented cases and thinkers reflect
the possibilities and limitations of Muslim political thought in
colonial India.
Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia redirects the
largely western-oriented study of citizenship to postcolonial
states. Providing various fascinating first-hand accounts of how
citizens interpret and realize the recognition of their property,
identity, security and welfare in the context of a weak rule of law
and clientelistic politics, this study highlights the importance of
studying citizenship for understanding democratization processes in
Southeast Asia. With case studies from Thailand, Indonesia, the
Philippines and Cambodia, this book provides a unique bottom-up
perspective on the character of public life in Southeast Asia.
Contributors are: Mary Austin, Laurens Bakker, Ward Berenschot,
Sheri Lynn Gibbings, Takeshi Ito, David Kloos, Merlyna Lim, Astrid
Noren-Nilsson, Oona Pardedes, Emma Porio, Apichat Satitniramai,
Wolfram Schaffer and Henk Schulte Nordholt.
India has one of the world's largest tribal populations. According
to the 2011 census, the total tribal population was estimated at
8.6 percent in India. In Tamil Nadu, the tribal population is about
1.1 percent spread among six major primitive tribal communities.
Consumption expenditure is one of the indicators of wellbeing and
standard of living in households. This book focuses on the
Malaiyali Tribe, which inhabits the Jawadhu hills. This tribal
group lives below the poverty line, deriving main sources of income
from seasonal agricultural and agricultural labor work. It also
depends on secondary sources of income from gathering and selling
forest-based products. The major objectives of the study are i) to
identify factors influencing household income and expenditure
patterns, and ii) to analyze income and expenditure patterns of
scheduled tribe households. An appropriate study area will be
chosen in the State of Tamil Nadu. The book aims to help understand
tribal income and expenditure patterns, and it would be useful for
designing further tribal livelihood programs in India and
elsewhere.
Prince, Pen, and Sword offers a synoptic interpretation of rulers
and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth
century. Four core chapters zoom in on the tensions and connections
at court, on the nexus between rulers and religious authority, on
the status, function, and self-perceptions of military and
administrative elites respectively. Two additional concise chapters
provide a focused analysis of the construction of specific
dynasties (the Golden Horde and the Habsburgs) and narratives of
kingship found in fiction throughout Eurasia. The contributors and
editors, authorities in their fields, systematically bring together
specialised literature on numerous Eurasian kingdoms and empires.
This book is a careful and thought-provoking experiment in the
global, comparative and connected history of rulers and elites.
The thirteenth-century cookbook Fidalat al-khiwan fi tayyibat
al-ta'am wa-l-alwan by the Andalusi scholar Ibn Razin al-Tujibi
showcases 475 exquisite recipes. This edition was meticulously
translated into English based on a newly discovered manuscript
containing the complete text. It includes an introduction,
glossary, 218 color illustrations, and 24 modernized recipes.
China has been a challenge to Christianity since the beginning of
modern times, and it remains so today. Here is a great civilisation
comprising a quarter of humankind, yet largely untouched by
Christian values and beliefs. Any theological evaluation of the
state of world Christianity that does not take China into account
is impoverished and radically incomplete.
In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula,
Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the
large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in
agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to
understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence
of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins,
which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for
people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers.
In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities
to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil. This book
synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and
ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian
Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the
limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to
complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that
is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes
significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery
and to the environmental history of the Middle East-an area that
has thus far received little attention from scholars.
Reprint of 1970 publication from the US Army Center of Military
History. A description of selected small unit actions, written
primarily to acquaint junior officers, noncommissioned officers,
and enlisted soldiers with combat experiences in Korea.
Does the industrial development of a country entail the
democratization of its political system? Malaysia in the World
Economy examines this theme with regards to Malaysia in the period
between 1824 and 2011. Capitalism was first introduced into
Malaysia through colonialism specifically to supply Britain with
much-needed raw materials for its industrial development. Aside
from economic exploitation, colonial rule had also produced a
highly unequal and socially distant multicultural society, whose
multifaceted divisions kept the colonial rulers in supreme
authority. After independence, Britain ensured that Malaysia became
a staunch western ally by structuring in a capitalist system
specifically helmed by western-educated elites through what
appeared to be "formal" democratic institutions. In such a system,
the Malaysian ruling elites have been able to "manage" the
country's democratic processes to its advantage as well as preempt
or suppress serious internal challenges to its power, often in the
name of national stability. As a result, an increasingly unpopular
National Front political coalition has remained in power in the
country since 1957. Meanwhile, Malaysia's marginal position in the
world economy, which has maintained its economic subordination to
the developed countries of the west and Japan, has reproduced the
internal social inequities inherited from colonial rule and
channeled the largest returns of economic growths into the hands of
the country's foreign investors as well as local elites associated
with the ruling machinery. Over the years however, the state has
lost some of its political legitimacy in the face of widening
social disparities, increased ethnic polarization, and prevalent
corruption. This has been made possible by extensive exposures of
these issues via new social media and communications technology.
Hence, informational globalization may have begun to empower
Malaysians in a new struggle for political reform, thereby
reconfiguring the balance of power between the state and civil
society. Unlike other past research, Malaysia in the World Economy
combines both macro- and micro-theoretical approaches in critically
analyzing the relationship between capitalist development and
democratization in Malaysia within a comparative-historical and
world-systemic context.
Japan at Nature's Edge is a timely collection of essays that
explores the relationship between Japan's history, culture, and
physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work
on Japanese modernization by examining Japan's role in global
environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped
bodies and landscapes over the centuries. The immediacy of Earth's
environmental crisis, a predicament highlighted by Japan's March
2011 disaster, brings a sense of urgency to the study of Japan and
its global connections. The work is an environmental history in the
broadest sense of the term because it contains writing by
environmental anthropologists, a legendary Japanese economist, and
scholars of Japanese literature and culture. The editors have
brought together an unparalleled assemblage of some of the finest
scholars in the field who, rather than treat it in isolation or as
a unique cultural community, seek to connect Japan to global
environmental currents such as whaling, world fisheries,
mountaineering and science, mining and industrial pollution, and
relations with nonhuman animals. The contributors assert the
importance of the environment in understanding Japan's history and
propose a new balance between nature and culture, one weighted much
more heavily on the side of natural legacies. This approach does
not discount culture. Instead, it suggests that the Japanese
experience of nature, like that of all human beings, is a complex
and intimate negotiation between the physical and cultural worlds.
Contributors: Daniel P. Aldrich, Jakobina Arch, Andrew Bernstein,
Philip C. Brown, Timothy S. George, Jeffrey E. Hanes, David L.
Howell, Federico Marcon, Christine L. Marran, Ian Jared Miller,
Micah Muscolino, Ken'ichi Miyamoto, Sara B. Pritchard, Julia Adeney
Thomas, Karen Thornber, William M. Tsutsui, Brett L. Walker,
Takehiro Watanabe.
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