Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - General

Some of the best and most innovative scholars in international relations and Asian area studies gather here with the working premise that stability in the broader Asia-Pacific region is in large part a function of the behavior of, and relationships among, these three major powers. Each author analyzes the foreign...

The Alliance Israelite Universelle, a French-Jewish organization founded in 1860, occupies a crucial place in the history of Sephardi communities in the modern period. In the fifty years after its creation, the Alliance established a vast network of schools in the lands of Islam for the purpose of "civilizing" the local Jewish communities and remaking them in the idealized self-image of French Jewry.

This study, drawing on the author's extensive research in the archives of the Alliance in Paris, focuses on the work of the Alliance among Turkish Jewry, one of the communities most...

This book provides an alternative theoretical approach to the study of ideology in U.S. foreign policy, emphasizing the importance of ideology in foreign relations. Unlike traditional approaches, which tend to neglect the variability of ideological influence, Chen's approach postulates a two-step causal relationship that explains changes in the strength of ideology and their influence on U.S. foreign policy. Changes in objective conditions cause changes in the strength of ideology, and these changes, in turn, create fluctuations in U.S. foreign policy.

Chen explores that causal...

This work describes the activities of a handful of American companies and about eighty American captains who were trying to run ships on China's great river during the treacherous days between the two world wars. The considerable physical dangers of the Yangtze itself were compounded by the greater human hazards imposed by constant fighting among warlords, piracy, brigandry, kidnapping, opium and munitions smuggling, corruption, seizures, and other forms of intimidation. The events recall--and surpass--anything of the Wild West in American frontier history. No American steamship company...

Ever since the death of Mao, China has undergone a transformation almost as radical as the Communist Revolution that Mao instigated. This book tells the stories of the many difficult economic, political, and social struggles that have taken place in post-Maoist China. Using both Chinese and non-Chinese sources, Alfred K. Ho unravels the complexities of life in China during the past generation. As Ho explains, contemporary Chinese are seeking to find solutions to their problems that reflect their own cultural values. As such, reform in China cannot be seen solely as an effort to emulate the...

From the mid-19th century to the early Cold War, the United States has a long history with China, and that interaction has not always been positive or productive. This brief history of foreign intervention in China, viewed through the experiences of the United States Marines, examines how the occupying powers dealt with a fellow sovereign nation. In many cases this involved the partition or outright absorption of Chinese territory through naked aggression. Clark contends that, considering the past two centuries, the Chinese have good reason to distrust all foreigners, and he urges the...

The United States and the Republic of Korea have managed to forge a strong working relationship both in wartime and in peacetime, despite an inequality in power between them, through fulfillment of their respective responsibilities. Chay explores how Korean and American actions and inaction affected relations between the two and within the international context of the Korean War. He focuses on how and why war might have been avoided or resolved differently as a result of poor choices and missed opportunities. Using Korean sources, as well as Chinese and Russian materials, this study...

Compellence is a fundamental tool of international security policy. This study explains how culture shapes the ways that decision-makers respond to the threat of force. First, Morgan builds a theoretical framework, next he analyzes three cases in which states attempted to compel Japan to change its behavior. The first is an in-depth analysis of the 1895 triple intervention in which Russia, Germany, and France forced Japanese leaders to return the Liaotung Peninsula to China following the first Sino-Japanese War. The second and third relate to World War II: the 1941 oil embargo intended to...

In June 1942 the Indian Army suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Japanese Army and subsequently endured its longest retreat ever. The Japanese forces had proved more mobile in tactics and more motivated and seasoned in warfare. As a result, the Indian Army assessed its mistakes to determine what changes were needed to rebuild itself into a more capable fighting force. Marston looks at the Indian Army as a reform-minded organization, one that was able to take lessons from this major defeat, implement the necessary reforms, and ultimately defeat the Japanese soundly in...

Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and black-turbaned Taliban fundamentalists, Larry Goodson explains in this concise analysis of the Afghan war what has really been happening in Afghanistan in the last twenty years.

Beginning with the reasons behind Afghanistan's inability to forge a strong state -- its myriad cleavages along ethnic, religious, social, and geographical fault lines -- Goodson then examines the devastating course of the war itself. He charts its utter destruction of the country, from the deaths of more than 2 million Afghans and the...

Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text's act of "speaking havoc" rebounds in unsettling ways.

Speaking Havoc investigates how literary and cinematic fictions intervene in the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh's modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, the short stories of Saadat...

Religion plays a central role in Thai society with Buddhism intertwined in the daily lives of the people. Religion also plays an important role in establishing gender boundaries. The growth in recent decades of self-governing nunneries and the increasing interest of Thai women in a Buddhist monastic life are notable changes in the religion/gender dynamic. This anthropological study considers religion and gender relations through the lens of the lives, actions, and roles in Thai society of Buddhist nuns (mae chii).

Making Fields of Merit presents a unique ethnography of Thai...