The i ching

How the I Ching became one of the most widely read and influential books in the worldThe I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound infl...

The i ching or book of changes

The bestselling English translation of the ancient classic of Chinese divination that has inspired millions with its timeless insights into the changing nature of existenceThe I Ching, or Book of Changes, has exerted a living influence in China for thousands of years. Today, it continues to enric...

Decorative japanese painting

A people's constitution

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative an...

Empires of vice

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 colonizers, who also derived moral authority from ...

Two buddhas seated side by side

An essential companion to a timeless spiritual classicThe Lotus Sūtra is among the most venerated scriptures of Buddhism. Composed in India some two millennia ago, it asserts the potential for all beings to attain supreme enlightenment. Donald Lopez and Jacqueline Stone provide an essential readi...

Pirates and publishers

A detailed historical look at how copyright was negotiated and protected by authors, publishers, and the state in late imperial and modern ChinaIn Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time ...

Developmentalist cities?

Bringing together inter-disciplinary research into the subject of urban developmentalism, this indispensable collection fills gaps in research on both East Asian developmentalism and urbanization.

Under the shadow of the rising sun

Japan was a party to the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, it ignored repeated German demands to harm the 40,000 Jews who found themselves under Japanese occupation during World War Two. This book attempts to answer why they behaved in a relatively humane fashion towards...

Inglorious empire

Inglorious Empire tells the real story of the British in India and reveals how Britain’s rise was built upon its plunder of India.

Toward a free economy

The unknown history of economic conservatism in India after independenceNeoliberalism is routinely characterized as an antidemocratic, expert-driven project aimed at insulating markets from politics, devised in the North Atlantic and projected on the rest of the world. Revising this understanding...

Laws of the land

A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynastyToday the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tris...

The making of barbarians

A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for todayDebates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many cen...

The last yakuza

The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before in this gripping, true crime story by the author of Tokyo Vice. Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese, living in small-town Japan. He has two talents: playing guitar and picking fights. When his dream of be...

Nehru's india

An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in IndiaNehru’s India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Ja...

The road to dien bien phu

A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in VietnamOn May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After n...

In asian waters

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 area stretching from East Africa and the Midd...

A narrative of cultural encounter in southern china

Using a local land reclamation project of the later eighth century, this book explores the interaction between a local culture of the southeast coast and the Sinitic culture of the north.

Words for the heart

A richly diverse collection of classical Indian terms for expressing the many moods and subtleties of emotional experienceWords for the Heart is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury...

The perils of interpreting

A fascinating history of China’s relations with the West—told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translatorsThe 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East...

Performing memories and weaving archives:

This book engages with how the South African Indians in South Africa and Siddis in Gujarat perform creolized musical, spiritual, and culinary practices in their respective geopolitical spaces in the contemporary era.

Remembering shanghai

In the tradition of Wild Swans, this fully illustrated, multi-generational memoir is at once a thrilling journey and a dazzling time capsule of Shanghai during a period of dramatic political and cultural change.

Plato goes to china

The surprising story of how Greek classics are being pressed into use in contemporary China to support the regime’s political agendaAs improbable as it may sound, an illuminating way to understand today’s China and how it views the West is to look at the astonishing ways Chinese intellectuals are...

Distant shores

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 mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this v...

The last embassy

From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth centuryGeorge Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily d...

Central asia

A major history of Central Asia and how it has been shaped by modern world eventsCentral Asia is often seen as a remote and inaccessible land on the peripheries of modern history. Encompassing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang province of China, it in ...

Violent fraternity

A groundbreaking history of the political ideas that made modern IndiaViolent Fraternity is a major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India. Taking readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947, the...

What is religious authority?

An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of JavaThis compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic rel...

The end of ambition

A groundbreaking new history of how the Vietnam War thwarted U.S. liberal ambitions in the developing world and at home in the 1960sAt the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and d...

The way forward

How China became the China we know today, through war and societal transformation.

The art of being governed

An innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the stateHow did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? In The Art of Being Governed, Michael Szonyi explores the myriad ways that families fulfil...

Prophets unarmed

Drawing on numerous oral history interviews with survivors, this study of Chinese Trotskyism is exhaustive and groundbreaking.

Exile

Indonesia's most celebrated writer speaks out against tyranny and injustice in a young and troubled nation.

Wild profusion

Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nati...

Capitalism

From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India i...

The reproductive bargain

An insightful analysis of gender relations’ role in the Japanese economy’s transition from unstoppable growth to inescapable stagnation.

Factory girls

Investigating the enormous contribution made by female textile workers to early industrialization in Meiji Japan, Patricia Tsurumi vividly documents not only their hardships but also their triumphs. While their skills and long hours created profits for factory owners that in turn benefited the st...

Punishment and power in the making of modern japan

The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Dan...

Classical chinese

Classical Chinese is the most comprehensive and authoritative textbook on the language, literature, philosophy, history, and religion of premodern China. Rigorously and extensively field-tested and fine-tuned for years in classroom settings, it sets a new standard for the field. Originally publis...

The languages of china

An incredible source of information about the Chinese language and China’s minority languagesIn this accessible and informative book, S. Robert Ramsey lucidly explains what the Chinese language is—its social and geographical situation, its history, its range of dialects, the structure of the mode...

The killing season

The definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most brutal, yet least examined, episodes of genocide and detentionThe Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century—the shocking antileftis...

The state, identity, and the national question in china and japan

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of nationalist sentiment in East Asia, as in Europe. This comprehensive work explores how radical Chinese and Japanese thinkers committed to social change in this turbulent era addressed issues concerning national identity, social ...