Asia

Kabuki is well known for its exaggerated acting, flamboyant costumes and makeup, and unnatural storylines. The onnagata, usually male actors who perform the roles of women, have been an important aspect of kabuki since its beginnings in the 17th century...

The main contribution of the work is to offer a comprehensive history of the English East India Company during the century 1660-1760. It also examines the commercial economy of the Asian countries in which the Company traded and its political relations...

In Thailand and World War II, Direk Jayanama provides a unique, first-hand account of Thailand's diplomatic, military, and economic history between 1938 and 1948. Diplomat, statesman, academic, and writer, Direk Jayanama helped guide the Thai nation...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791436004Author Livia KohnFormat PaperbackPage Count 330Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780940777088Author Charles C McDougaldFormat PaperbackPage Count 364Imprint San Francisco PublishersPublisher San Francisco PublishersWeight(grams)...

An eminently readable, complete summary of all the essentials of Buddhist teaching and practice, Buddhism Explained is useful both for those wanting an understandable introduction to the subject and experts wishing a comprehensive but brief reference. It...

Dazzled by the model of Japan's Western-style constitutional government, Chinese officials and elite activists made plans to establish locally elected councils. By October 1911, government agencies had reported the establishment of about 5,000 councils. ...

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by...

Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji...

Often dismissed as the rumblings of "the street," popular politics is where political modernity is being formed today, according to Partha Chatterjee. The rise of mass politics all over the world in the twentieth century led to the development of new...

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which...

The Defiant Border explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls from the colonial period into the twenty-first century. This book looks at local Pashtun tribes' modes for evading first British colonial,...

William Nelson Lovatt in Late Qing China: War, Maritime Customs, and Treaty Ports,1860-1904 looks at the late Qing dynasty through the eyes of a British-American who spent most of his adult life in China in the late nineteenth century, fighting in four...

From the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 to the start of the Opium Wars in 1841, China has engaged in only two large-scale conflicts with its principal neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These four territorial and centralized states have...

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the...

How many times have you heard that creative writing programmes are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places,...

Several years ago in Rajasthan, an eighteen-year-old woman was burned on her husband's funeral pyre and thus became sati. Before ascending the pyre, she was expected to deliver both blessings and curses: blessings to guard her family and clan for many...

When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable...

Chiara Formichi explores the ways in which Islam and Asia have shaped each other's histories, societies and cultures from the seventh century to today. Challenging the assumed dominance of the Middle East in the development of Islam, Formichi argues for...

When he left war-ravaged Vietnam some thirty years ago, journalist David Lamb averred "I didn't care if I ever saw the wretched country again." But in 1997, he found himself living in Hanoi, in charge of the Los Angeles Times's first peacetime bureau...

China and Maritime Europe, 1500-1800 looks at early modern China in some of its most complicated and intriguing relations with a world of increasing global interconnection. New World silver, Chinese tea, Jesuit astronomers at the Chinese court, and...

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world today. In China, a country with a vast array of regional and local vernaculars, how was this “common language” forged? How did people learn to speak Mandarin? And what does a focus on...

In July 2009, violence erupted among Uyghurs, Chinese state police, and Han residents of UErumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, in northwest China, making international headlines, and introducing many to tensions in the area. But conflict in the region...

Widely regarded as a classic on the Vietnam War, Decent Interval provides a scathing critique of the CIA's role in and final departure from that conflict. Still the most detailed and respected account of America's final days in Vietnam, the book was...

Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the...

Sources in Chinese History, now in its second edition, has been updated to include re-translations of over a third of the documents. It also incorporates nearly 40 new sources that work to familiarize readers with the key events, personages, and themes...

The true nature of the Japanese samurai warrior is an elusive and endlessly fascinating enigma for those in the West. From their inauspicious beginnings as barbarian-subduing soldiers, the samurai lived according to a code known as bushido - or 'way of...

Daisetsu Teitar Suzuki was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism to the non-Asian world. Many outside Japan encountered Buddhism for the first time through his writings and teaching, and for nearly a century his work and legacy have contributed...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788194759331Author Dilip DattaFormat PaperbackPage Count 104Imprint Indian Foundation for Vedic SciencePublisher Indian Foundation for Vedic...

Until 1951, when Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, Japanese cinema was isolated from world distribution and the international discourse on film. After this historic event, however, Japanese cinema...

Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles...

A comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest and most important land borders in the worldThe Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires...

Presented here are nine tales from the celebrated Ming dynasty Sanyan collection of vernacular stories compiled and edited by Feng Menglong (1574-1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time in China. The stories he...

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea,...

After many years in Asia, Marco Polo wrote one of the most influential books of the past millennium. No mere travel account, Polo's Book is a work that played a key role in the development of European overseas expansion. In this engaging and...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781241496593Author Henry Andrew HarperFormat PaperbackPage Count 92Imprint British Library, Historical Print EditionsPublisher British Library, Historical...

This comprehensive book surveys Korean history from Neolithic times to the present. Michael J. Seth explores the origins and development of Korean society, politics, and still little-known cultural heritage from their inception to the two Korean states...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780299230944Author Vina A. LanzonaFormat PaperbackPage Count 392Imprint University of Wisconsin PressPublisher University of Wisconsin PressWeight(grams)...

Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this...