Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts.
The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way...

Decolonization brings together the most cutting-edge thinking by major historians of decolonization, including previously unpublished essays and writings by leaders of decolonizing countries including Ho Chi-Minh and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The chapters in this volume present a move away from Western analysis of decolonizaton and instead move towards the angle of vision of the former colonies. This is a ground-breaking study of a subject central to recent global history.

Decolonization brings together the most cutting-edge thinking by major historians of decolonization, including previously unpublished essays and writings by leaders of decolonizing countries including Ho Chi-Minh and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The chapters in this volume present a move away from Western analysis of decolonizaton and instead move towards the angle of vision of the former colonies. This is a ground-breaking study of a subject central to recent global history.

In this powerful and provocative book, Prasenjit Duara uses the case of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeast China from 1932-1945, to explore how such antinomies as imperialism and nationalism, modernity and tradition, and governmentality and exploitation interacted in the post-World War I period. His study of Manchukuo, which had a population of 40 million and was three times the area of Japan, catalyzes a broader understanding of new global trends that characterized much of the twentieth century. Asking why Manchukuo so desperately sought to appear sovereign, Duara examines the...

China Off Center takes as its fundamental assumption that contemporary China can only be understood as a complex, decentralized place, where the view from above (Beijing) and from tourist buses is a skewed one. Instead of generalizing about China, it demonstrates that this diverse national terrain is better conceived as it is experienced by Chinese, as a set of many Chinas. To that end, this anthology of interpretive essays and ethnographic reports focuses on the everyday, the particular, the local, and the puzzling. Together with contextualizing introductions, the readings provide students...

A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an in-depth overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, directly addressing the issues of historical thought in a globalized context.

• Provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, through essays written by a team of leading international scholars
• Complements the Companion to Western Historical Thought, placing non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of the...

In this major new study, Prasenjit Duara expands his influential theoretical framework to present circulatory, transnational histories as an alternative to nationalist history. Duara argues that the present day is defined by the intersection of three global changes: the rise of non-western powers, the crisis of environmental sustainability and the loss of authoritative sources of what he terms transcendence - the ideals, principles and ethics once found in religions or political ideologies. The physical salvation of the world is becoming - and must become - the transcendent goal of our times,...

Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618 907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which...

Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618-907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which...

The European 'dark ages' in the millennium 500 to 1500 CE was a bright age of scientific achievements in China, India and the Middle East. The contributors to this volume address the implications of this seminal era of Asian science for comparative and connective science studies. Although such studies have generally adopted a binary perspective focusing on one or another of the Asian (Chinese, Indian, Islamic) civilizations, this study brings them together into a single volume within a wider Eurasian perspective. Moreover, by drawing together historical, philosophical, and sociological...