Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - General

This volume explores the religious transformation of each nation in modern Asia. When the Asian people, who were not only diverse in culture and history, but also active in performing local traditions and religions, experienced a socio-political change under the wave of Western colonialism, the religious climate was also altered from a transnational perspective. Part One explores the nationals of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, focusing on the manifestations of Japanese religion, Chinese foreign policy, the British educational system in Hong Kong in relation to Tibetan Buddhism,...

There were over a thousand counties and prefectures in late imperial China; each loomed large in the hearts and minds of the local natives, and had a history of its own. The Order of Places tells a story of how these places were ordered by the long-lived imperial state, and then re-ordered during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as geographical mobility increased. At the center of the story are the mobile merchants from south China's Huizhou Prefecture, then the most prominent merchant group in China. The story presents the dynamics of geography in the world's most enduring...

It has long been known that the modern Chinese language inherited numerous terms from Japanese and that Japanese coined many of those terms in the last decades of the 19th century. These seven essays address the actual processes by which a discreet number of terms came into being, how they outdistanced competitors, and the persons and texts involved in the process. Rather than relying on received tropes of translation heritage, these essays delve much deeper into the particularities of their cases. They set a standard for subsequent scholarship.

In The Wahhabis seen through European Eyes (1772-1830) Giovanni Bonacina offers an account of the early reactions in Europe to the rise of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia. Commonly pictured nowadays as a form of Muslim fundamentalism, the Wahhabis appeared to many European witnesses as the creators of a deistic revolution with serious political consequences for the Ottoman ancien regime. They were seen either in the light of contemporary events in France, or as Islamic theological reformers in the mould of Calvin, opposing an established church and devotional traditions. These audacious...

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history.

The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of...

Popular protests are on the rise in China. However, since protesters rely on existing channels of participation and on patronage by elite backers, the state has been able to stymie attempts to generalize resistance and no large scale political movements have significantly challenged party rule. Yet the Chinese state is not monolithic. Decentralization has increased the power of local authorities, creating space for policy innovations and opening up the political opportunity structure. Popular protest in China - particularly in urban realm- not only benefits from the political fragmentation of...

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquests in the late fourth century B.C., Greek garrisons and settlements were established across Central Asia, through Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) and into India. Over the next three hundred years, these settlements evolved into multiethnic, multilingual communities as much Greek as they were indigenous. To explore the lives and identities of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, Rachel Mairs marshals a variety of evidence, from archaeology, to coins, to documentary and historical texts. Looking particularly at the...

In the midst of the space race and nuclear age, Soviet Realist artists were producing figurative oil paintings. Why? How was art produced to control and co-opt the peripheries of the Soviet Union, particularly Central Asia? Presenting the untold story of Soviet Orientalism, Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen re-evaluates the imperial project of the Soviet state, placing the Orientalist undercurrent found within art and propaganda production in the USSR alongside the creation of new art forms in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. From the turmoil of the 1930s through to the post-Stalinist era,...

Der kurze Traktat al-Maqāṣid al-saniyyah li-maʿrifat al-aǧsām al-maʿdiniyyah des beruhmten agyptischen Geschichtsschreibers al-Maqrīzī (gest. 845/1442) befasst sich mit der Klassifikation der Mineralien, ihren medizinischen Anwendungen sowie Theorien uber ihre Entstehung. Kas legt hier erstmals eine kritische Textedition mit deutscher Ubersetzung und ausfuhrlichem Kommentar vor. Grundlage der Edition des arabischen Texts war in der Hauptsache ein Leidener Codex, der von al-Maqrīzī eigenhandig korrigiert und mit Glossen erweitert wurde....

In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia,...

The early Christian presence in Inner Mongolia forms the subject of this book. These Nestorian remains must primarily be attributed to the Ongut, a Turkic people closely allied to the Mongols. Writing in Syriac, Uighur and Chinese scripts and languages, the Nestorian Ongut drew upon a variety of religions and cultures to decorate their gravestones with crosses rising from lotus flowers, dragons and Taoist imagery. This heritage also portrays designs found in the Islamic world. Taking a closer look at the discovery of this material and its significance for the study of the early Church of the...

Jennifer M. Wei argues that construction and perceptions of language and identity parallel sociopolitical transformations, and language and identity crises arise during power transitions. Under these premises, language and identity are never well-defined or well-bounded. Instead, they are best viewed as political symbols subject to manipulation and exploitation during socio-historical upheavals. A choice of language--from phonological shibboleth, Mandarin, or Taiwanese, to choice of official language--cuts to the heart of contested cultural notions of self and other, with profound...

"Religions of Ancient China" from Herbert Allen Giles. British diplomat, sinologist, and professor of Chinese language (1845-1935).

This book provides a comparative assessment of the material and ideational contributions of five countries to the regional architecture of post-Cold War Asia.

In contrast to the usual emphasis placed on the role and centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Asia's multilateral architecture and its component institutions, this book argues that the four non-ASEAN countries of interest here 3/4 Australia, Japan, China and the United States 3/4 and Indonesia have played and continue to play an influential part in determining the shape and substance of Asian...

Environmental history has evolved into a well-established historical subfield which has broadened the horizons of historical research, beyond human affairs, to include the study of human interactions with natural and man-made environments. This broadened scope has attracted scholars from many different fields; a development which is reflected by this volume as it highlights the recent studies on East Asian environmental history by scholars of History, Economic History, Political ecology, Sociology and Environmental Studies.

This book examines the local realities and environmental...

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in new state-led nation-building projects in Central Asia. The emergence of independent republics spawned a renewed Western scholarly interest in the region's nationality issues. Presenting a detailed study, this book examines the state-led nation-building projects in the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Exploring the degree, forms and ways of the Soviet state involvement in creating Kazakh and Uzbek nations, this book places the discussion within the theoretical literature on nationalism. The author argues that both...

This volume presents a wide variety of articles in the broad field of Asian Studies, covering the latest results of research within the social sciences and the humanities, reflecting the rich diversity within these areas of research.
The contributions stem from research carried out by scholars who are or have been affiliated with the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden/Amsterdam).