Asia

The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It...

In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of...

The Indus Waters Treaty is considered a key example of India-Pakistan cooperation, but less has been said about its critical influence on state-making in both countries. Rivers Divided reveals the importance of the Indus Basin river system, and thus...

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up...

Here is a brief, well-written, and lively survey of the history of Southeast Asia from ancient times to the present, paying particular attention to the region's role in world history and the distinctive societies that arose in lands shaped by green...

One of twentieth-century India's great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace...

In this accessible new study, Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this...

Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime's brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug...

In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan)...

The aim of Bengal: The British Bridgehead is to explain how, in the eighteenth century, Britain established her rule in eastern India, the first part of the subcontinent to be incorporated into the British Empire. Though the British were not in firm...

As the birthplace of moveable-type printing, China has some claim to being the homeland of publishing. China's ancient civilisation has nurtured a distinctively Chinese publishing industry, and this industry has done much to spread Chinese ideas and...

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was the first formal agreement of its type reached by a Western 'great' power with a non-Caucasian nation in the modern era. As such, it represented an important milestone diplomatically, strategically and culturally. This...

This volume brings together Siburapha's most highly acclaimed novel, Behind the Painting, with three short stories highlighting the plight of the underclass: "Those Kind of People," "Lend Us a Hand," and "The Awakening." Behind the Painting is the story...

Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the...

This incisive study adds a new dimension to discussions of Egypt's nationalist response to the phenomenon of colonialism as well as to discussions of colonialism and nationalism in general. Eve M. Troutt Powell challenges many accepted tenets of the...

During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the...

By the early 1900s both Britain and Russia, suspicious of Imperial Germany, decided to stabilize their relations and replace their rivalry in Central Asia - the 'Great Game' - with rapprochement. But as Jennifer Siegel here demonstrates, reality in the...

Why are relations between politically mobilised ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? Madurika Rasaratnam's book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed...

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.Akbarnama, or The History of Akbar, by Abu'l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a...

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to...

An account of the Vietnam War, as seen by the American PFCs, sergeants and platoon leaders in the rivers and jungles and trenches. Into their stories, Lehrack has woven a narrative that explains the events they describe and places them into both a...

Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians-merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers-left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781647488345Author Captivating HistoryFormat PaperbackPage Count 118Imprint Captivating HistoryPublisher Captivating HistoryWeight(grams) 181gDimensions(mm)...

Media, Communication, Culture offers a bold and comprehensive analysis of developments in the field amidst the effects of postmodernism and globalization. James Lull, one of the leading scholars in the discipline, draws from a wide range of social and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781973722144Author Charles River EditorsFormat PaperbackPage Count 56Imprint CreateSpacePublisher CreateSpace

The Han dynasty was the first to forge a stable empire governing all of China. It ruled during a golden age that shaped much of the nation's cultural history and development. In an effort to preserve their legacy of beauty and power, the Han created...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789881866721Author Derek SandhausFormat PaperbackPage Count 178Imprint China Economic Review PublishingPublisher China Economic Review Publishing

Afghanistan: A Military History from the Ancient Empires to the Great Game covers the military history of a region encompassing Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, and West Asia, over some 2,500 years. This is the first comprehensive study in any...

During South Vietnam's brief life as a nation, it exhibited glimmers of democracy through citizen activism and a dynamic press. South Vietnamese activists, intellectuals, students, and professionals had multiple visions for Vietnam's future as an...

In its history since Independence, India has seen widely different economic experiments: from Jawharlal Nehru's pragmatism to the rigid state socialism of Indira Gandhi to the brisk liberalization of the 1990s. So which strategy best addresses India's,...

The Lotus Sutra proclaims that a unitary intent underlies the diversity of Buddhist teachings and promises that all people without exception can achieve supreme awakening. Establishing the definitive guide to this profound text, specialists in Buddhist...

These essays, devoted to the history of Mysore under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, underscore the need to defend the memory of two rulers, who were indomitable opponents of the colonial regime; they also emphasize the centrality of Haider Ali and Tipu...

This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.Book InformationISBN 9781474474122Author Kiki Tianqi...

For centuries, China was confident in its role as the 'Middle Kingdom', the undisputed cultural, economic and political powerhouse of Asia. Today, with China once again a leading player on the world stage, countries across the continent are facing an...

What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good...

This pathbreaking study provides the first comprehensive examination of India-China interactions in the broader contexts of Asian and world history. By focusing on material exchanges, transmissions of knowledge and technologies, networks of exchange...

An adaptation of The Ocean of Churn for young readersWhen did the first humans arrive in India and how did they get here?What are Roman artefacts from hundreds of years ago doing in a town near Puducherry?How did merchants from Arabia end up near...

For decades, the US military has been contaminating the Pacific region with toxic substances. Thousands of service members, their families, and local residents have been exposed-but the US has hidden the damage and refused to help victims. This book...

Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the...

Yoshimasa may have been the worst shogun ever to rule Japan. He was a failure as a soldier, incompetent at dealing with state business, and dominated by his wife. But his influence on the cultural life of Japan was unparalleled. According to Donald...