Asia

Unique in any Western language, this is an invaluable resource for the study of one of the world's great theatrical forms. It includes essays by established experts on Kabuki as well as younger scholars now entering the field, and provides a...

Often identified as leatherworkers or characterized as a criminal caste, Chamars of North India have long been stigmatized as untouchables. In this pathbreaking study, Ramnarayan S. Rawat shows that in fact the majority of Chamars have always been...

This volume is part of the first complete translation (in nine volumes) of the Shih chi (The Grand Scribe's Records), one of the most important narratives in traditional China. Compiled by Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-c. 86 B.C.), it draws upon most major early...

Social reforms aimed at changing the social, political, or economic status of women in India were important both to British colonial rule and to nascent nationalist movements. Debates over practices such as widow immolation, widow remarriage, and child...

This book includes curious stories of the people who inhabited the exotic and vanished world of Nawabi Lucknow, especially the many rogues and villains, some of them British. Using material not used before and containing a number of previousy unpublished...

In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves...

The rise of ethnic and religious conflicts in the post-Cold War era has reawakened consideration of the future of nationalism and the nation state. The Indian subcontinent with its myriad ethnic, religious and linguistic divides provides a focus for...

This is a study of the origins and nature of Japanese imperialism from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 through to 1945. Japan is the only Asian country in modern times to have built both a successful industrial economy and an empire, and it is...

The Politics of India since Independence provides a comprehensive study of the major political, cultural, and economic changes in India since gaining independence. Paul Brass focuses on the consequences of the centralising drives of the national...

This book reconstructs the factional-ideological conflicts surrounding socialist transformation and political reform in China that were played out through 'factional model-making', a norm-bound mechanism for elites of the Chinese Communist Party to...

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295806570Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui,...

Culturally and politically, Indonesia is one of the more complex countries in the world, with 336 ethnic groups speaking 583 languages and dialects. It is only recently that these people have been contained within one political framework. Throughout most...

Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China's western borderlands are awash in a wave of ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through...

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and...

The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia...

The Taliban made piety a business of the state, and thereby intervened in the daily lives and social interactions of Afghan women. Pious Peripheries examines women's resistance through groundbreaking fieldwork at a women's shelter in Kabul, home to...

Despite the rapid spread of Buddhism-especially the esoteric system of Tantra, one of its most popular yet most misunderstood forms-the historical origins of Buddhist thought and practice remain obscure. This groundbreaking work describes the genesis of...

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800-1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that...

This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades preceding Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state...

Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by...

A history of opium's dramatic fall from favor in colonial Southeast AsiaDuring the late nineteenth century, opium was integral to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The taxation of opium was a major source of revenue for British and French...

When Emperor Meiji began his rule, in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire, dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, who ruled over the country's more than 250 decentralized domains and who were, in the main, cut off from the outside world, staunchly...

In this fascinating biography of the Indian revolutionary M. P. T. Acharya (1887-1954), Ole Birk Laursen uncovers the remarkable transnational networks, movements and activities of India's most important anticolonial anarchist in the twentieth century. ...

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster - equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin - and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791409862Author Michael LaFargueFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

"The author has managed to combine successfully the professional approach of an anthropologist with that of a novelist to the description of an Indian village community...Srinivas has made a virtue out of the misfortune of losing all his field notes: The...

Tsunayoshi (1646-1709), the fifth Tokugawa shogun, is one of the most notorious figures in Japanese history. Viewed by many as a tyrant, his policies were deemed eccentric, extreme, and unorthodox. His Laws of Compassion, which made the maltreatment of...

Honorable Mention, Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians departed for India. Known as the Parsis, they slowly lost contact with their...

For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist...

For more than two centuries following its formation in 1581, the Levant Company enjoyed a monopoly of British trade with the Ottoman Empire and provided Britain's diplomatic representation at the Sultan's court and throughout the Ottoman territories...

Among the legacies of the colonial encounter are any number of contemporary 'mixed-race' populations, descendants of the offspring of sexual unions involving European men (colonial officials, traders, etc.) and local women. These groups invite serious...

"That night, the rain poured and wind howled, raindrops crashing like solid objects onto the ground and water. A passenger boat from Ban Phaen to Bangkok, packed with people, pressed on through the current amidst the rising clamor of the rain and storm. ...

Although many books have explored Mao's posthumous legacy, none has scrutinized the massive worship that was fostered around him during the Cultural Revolution. This book is the first to do so. By analyzing secret archival documents, Daniel Leese traces...

This book examines two large and generally overlooked diaspora communities, one Jewish and the other Slavic, which found refuge in Shanghai during the period 1900-1950. Victims of discrimination and persecution in their own lands-Central and Eastern...

The last 120 years have seen great social change and development in Japan. In the early 1870s Japan was still a third world country - a newly unified island nation with a highly agrarian economy and an insecure and weak government. By 1914 Japan has...

His grandfather was the bloodthirsty Mongol leader Genghis Khan, his mother a Christian princess. Groomed from childhood for a position of authority, Khubilai snatched the position of Great Khan, becoming the overlord of a Mongol federation that...

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to...

Chinese Asianism examines Chinese intellectual discussions of East Asian solidarity, analyzing them in connection with Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese relations. Beginning with texts written after the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and concluding...

This beautiful and informative book offers a detailed introduction to the musical heritage of Central Asia for readers and listeners worldwide. Music of Central Asia balances "insider" and "outsider" perspectives with contributions by 27 authors from 14...

A Thousand Steps to Parliament traces how the complicated, contradictory paths to political representation that women in Mongolia must walk mirror those the world over. Mongolia has often been deemed an "island of democracy," commended for its rapid...