Asia

The Veda in Kashmir presents a detailed history and the current state of Veda tradition in Kashmir. It traces the vicissitudes of Vedic texts and rituals and their survival during some 400 years of Muslim rule. The peculiarities of the Sakalya Rgveda,...

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...

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...

Claude Markovits tells the story of two groups of Hindu merchants from the towns of Shikarpur and Hyderabad in the province of Sind. Basing his account on previously neglected archival sources, the author charts the development of these communities, from...

In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (R), Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower, and...

Steve Coutinho explores in detail the fundamental concepts of Daoist thought as represented in three early texts: the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the Liezi. Readers interested in philosophy yet unfamiliar with Daoism will gain a comprehensive understanding...

The Soviet withdrawal from Afganistan has been largely attributed to the bravery of the Afghan resistance reinforced by American weaponry and support. This book shows how it was infact years of persistent United Nations initiatives that proved crucial to...

Dead Men Risen, winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize for Books, is the epic story of a beleaguered British battle group fighting desperately to prevent the Taliban from seizing Afghanistan's Helmand province just as the U.S. Marines arrive to take over...

Michael Schaller argues that the reconstruction of postwar Japan not only shaped the future of that country, but also the future of U.S. policy throughout postwar Asia, leading up to the controversial interventions in China, Korea, and Vietnam. In this...

Ideologies of the Raj examines how the British sought to justify their rule over India. The author argues that two divergent strategies were devised to legitimate their authority: the one defined characteristics which the Indians shared with the British...

Longlisted for the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn RedwoodChina's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and...

Eminently accessible, yet rigorous, this engaging introduction to the political, social, and cultural development of Chinese civilization tells the story of China--from its beginnings to the present day--in a way that goes beyond simple, misleading...

The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the "middle kingdom"-literally the cultural and political center of the world-remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western understandings of China. This worldview was primarily...

This book is a study of the circumstances leading to British intervention in Vietnam in 1945, and the course and consequences of this intervention. The first part of the work links French colonialism with the native communist insurgency, while examining...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsShort-listed for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2013.Book InformationISBN 9780307948533Author William DalrympleFormat PaperbackPage Count 592Imprint Vintage...

Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, Gina Anne Tam centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens...

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...

Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India's engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that...

Forty years after China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution, this book revisits the visual and performing arts of the period - the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet. Probing...

Shawn McHale explores why the communist-led resistance in Vietnam won the anticolonial war against France (1945-54), except in the south. He shows how broad swaths of Vietnamese people were uneasily united in 1945 under the Viet Minh Resistance banner,...

"Contentious Traditions" analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who...

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in itChina has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the...

Will democracy figure prominently in China's future? If so, what kind of democracy? In this insightful and thought-provoking book, David Hall and Roger Ames explore such questions and, in the course of answering them, look to the ideas of John Dewey and...

The remarkable success of twentieth-century Hong Kong was driven by electricity. The British colony's stunning export-driven economic growth, its status as a Cold War capitalist dynamo, its energetic civil society, its alluring urban modernity-all of...

The Emergence of China presents the classical period in its own terms. It contains more than 500 translated excerpts from the classical texts, linked by a running commentary which traces the evolution and interaction of the different schools of thought...

Nearly forty years after the outbreak of the "Minamata Disease," it remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes three rounds of responses to this incidence of...

Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to...

In 1872, China-ravaged by poverty, population growth, and aggressive European armies-sent 120 boys to America to learn the secrets of Western innovation. They studied at New England's finest schools and were driven by a desire for progress and reform...

Female chastity stirs trouble in medieval ChinaA variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960-1279)-medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes-depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong...

By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China's (CCP's) impact on social change in China between 1978 and...

Contemporary North and South Korea are nations of radical contrasts: one a bellicose totalitarian state with a failing economy; the other a peaceful democracy with a strong economy. Yet their people share a common history that extends back more than...

Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. It comprises more than 17,000 islands inhabited by 230 million people who speak over 300 different languages. Now the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia remains extraordinarily heterogeneous due...

In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film,...

The fertile land of the five rivers (punj+ab in Persian) has persistently stirred the imagination of its peoples. Its story is the story of invasion. In 326 BCE Alexander the Great marched through the Hindu Kush, conquered the verdant plains now divided...

Meritocracy and Its Discontents investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that arise from its existence. Each year, some nine million...

Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati...

China remains an enigma to many. It is suspended in limbo between media reports and the filtered reality of friends and family visits. This enormous and complex country is either vilified for its shortcomings or praised for its vibrancy, culture and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780980532029Author Rajani Palme DuttFormat PaperbackPage Count 116Imprint Gambol BooksPublisher Gambol BooksWeight(grams) 145gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062131799Author M J AkbarFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams)...

A sweeping account of how the sea routes of Asia have transformed a vast expanse of the globe over the past five hundred years, powerfully shaping the modern worldIn the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes-an...