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While many books examine specific wars, few study the history of
war worldwide and from an evolutionary perspective. "A Global
History of War "is one of the first works to focus not on the
impact of war on civilizations, but rather on how civilizations
impact and shape the art and execution of war. World-renowned
scholar Gerard Chaliand concentrates on the peoples and cultures
who have defined the manner in which war is conducted and the
lasting historical consequences. The text offers a unique picture
of the major geopolitical and civilizational clashes that have
rocked our common history and made us who we are today. The
relationship between war and civilizations comes alive, while our
understanding of war and its development takes a new turn. How did
the foremost non-European empires of the world rise and fall? What
critical role did the nomads of the Eurasian steppes and their
descendants play? Chaliand illuminates the poorly understood
military cultures and martial traditions of the great Eurasian
empires, including Turkey, China, Iran, and Mongolia. Based on
fifteen years of research, this book provides a novel military and
strategic perspective on the crises and conflicts that have shaped
the current world order.
Many observers of late imperial China have noted the relatively
small size of the state in comparison to the geographic size and
large population of China and have advanced various theories to
account for the ability of the state to maintain itself in power.
One of the more enduring explanations has been that the Chinese
state, despite its limited material capacities, possessed strong
ideological powers and was able to influence cultural norms in ways
that elicited allegiance and responded to the desire for order.
The fourteen papers in this volume re-examine the assumptions of
how state power functioned, particularly the assumption of a sharp
divide between state and society. The general conclusion is that
the state was only one actor--albeit a powerful one--in a culture
that elites and commoners could shape, either in cooperation with
the state or in competition with it. The temporal range of the
papers extends from the twelfth to the twentieth century, though
most of the papers deal with the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The book is in four parts. Part I deals with philosophical,
historiographical, and literary debates and their relation to the
late imperial state; Part II with the multiple roles of officials,
elites, specialists, and commoners in constructing norms of
religious beliefs and practices. Part III presents criticisms by
late imperial intellectuals of both state policies and social
conventions, and examines official efforts to incorporate and
utilize elite commitments to Confucian views of political and
cultural order. Part IV discusses ways in which the
twentieth-century Chinese political order emerged from a trajectory
defined in part by the intersection of late imperial practices with
Western categories of knowledge.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos,
University of California Press's Open Access publishing program.
Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Scholarly discussions on
economic development in history, specifically those linked to
industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great
attention to the formation and development of the market economy as
a set of institutions able to augment people's welfare. The role of
specific nonmarket practices for promoting the economic development
and welfare has been a distinct concern, typically involving
discussion of the state's economic policies. How have societies
tackled those issues that the market did not? To what extent did
those solutions reflect the structure of an economy? Public Goods
Provision in the Early Modern Economy explores these questions by
investigating efforts made for the provision of "public goods" in
early modern economies from the perspective of Japanese
socioeconomic history during Tokugawa era (1603-1868), and by
comparing those cases with others from Europe and China's economic
history. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry-early
modern era welfare policies for the poor, infrastructure, and
forest management-to provide both a unique perspective on Japanese
public finance at local levels and a vantage point outside of
Europe to encourage a more global view of early modern political
economies that shaped subsequent modern transformations.
The Qing state, driven by Confucian precepts of good government and
urgent practical needs, committed vast resources to its granaries.
Nourish the People traces the basic practices of this system,
analyzes the organizational bases of its successes and failures,
and examines variant practices in different regions. The volume
concludes with an assessment of the granary system's social and
economic impact and historical comparison with the food supply
policies of other states.
China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy,
reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained
economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China?
Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the
nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest
of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of
research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political
differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible
both for China s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe s
difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early
industrialization.
Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how
economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative
prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of
institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on
institutional change has surprising implications for understanding
modern transformations in China and Europe and for future
expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic
history, essential to any larger social science account of modern
world history.
While many books examine specific wars, few study the history of
war worldwide and from an evolutionary perspective. "A Global
History of War "is one of the first works to focus not on the
impact of war on civilizations, but rather on how civilizations
impact and shape the art and execution of war. World-renowned
scholar Gerard Chaliand concentrates on the peoples and cultures
who have defined the manner in which war is conducted and the
lasting historical consequences. The text offers a unique picture
of the major geopolitical and civilizational clashes that have
rocked our common history and made us who we are today. The
relationship between war and civilizations comes alive, while our
understanding of war and its development takes a new turn. How did
the foremost non-European empires of the world rise and fall? What
critical role did the nomads of the Eurasian steppes and their
descendants play? Chaliand illuminates the poorly understood
military cultures and martial traditions of the great Eurasian
empires, including Turkey, China, Iran, and Mongolia. Based on
fifteen years of research, this book provides a novel military and
strategic perspective on the crises and conflicts that have shaped
the current world order.
"This bold, intellectually ambitious, and wholly original book
challenges the way in which Western social science understands
China. . . . It will set the standard for all future comparative
and theoretical research on China." Timothy Brook, Stanford
University"This is a most extraordinary book. Wong's approach is to
explore carefully similarities and differences between Chinese and
European development over the long term, highlighting themes
related to state-making and popular action. This is by far the most
sophisticated, extended discussion of imperial and modern China in
comparative perspective that I have seen." Peter C. Perdue,
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe assumption still made in
much social science research that Europe provides a universal model
of development is fundamentally mistaken, according to R. Bin Wong.
The solution is not, however, simply to reject Eurocentric norms
but to build complementary perspectives, such as a Sinocentric one,
to evaluate current understandings of European developments. A
genuinely comparative perspective, he argues, will free China from
wrong expectations and will allow those working on European
problems to recognize the distinct character of Western
development."
The assumption still made in much social science research that
Europe provides a universal model of development is fundamentally
mistaken, according to the author of this study. The solution
however, is not, he says, simply to reject Eurocentric norms, but
to build complementary perspectives, such as a Sinocentric one, to
evaluate current understandings of European developments. A
genuinely comparative perspective, he argues, will free China from
wrong expectations and will allow those working on European
problems to recognize the distinct character of Western
development.
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