First Globalization presents an original and sweeping conceptualization of the grand cultural-civilizational encounter between Asia and Europe. Now largely taken for granted, the exchange resonates in multiple ways even today. Offering a "metageography" of the vast Eurasian zone, Geoffrey C. Gunn shows how between 1500 and 1800, a lively two-way flow in ideas, philosophies, and cultural products brought competing civilizations into serious dialogue and mostly peaceful exchange. In Europe, the interaction was reflected in missionary reporting, cartographic representations, literary...

Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power. Professor Gunn's comprehensive study, which assesses the state's efforts to implement national language policies, explores the aspects of the complex relationship between language and power including the oral tradition, the rise of Islamic literacy, print culture and mass literacy, and the electronic media and its effects.

This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. He analyzes successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections between colonialism and...