Download or read book Lost Modernities written by Alexander Woodside and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.
Download or read book The Struggle for the West written by Christopher Browning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming. This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform. Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today. This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.
Download or read book East Asia Before the West written by David Kang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 otherwise fostered peaceful and long-lasting relationships with one another, and as they have grown more powerful, the atmosphere around them has stabilized. Focusing on the role of the "tribute system" in maintaining stability in East Asia and fostering diplomatic and commercial exchange, Kang contrasts this history against the example of Europe and the East Asian states' skirmishes with nomadic peoples to the north and west. Scholars tend to view Europe's experience as universal, but Kang upends this tradition, emphasizing East Asia's formal hierarchy as an international system with its own history and character. His approach not only recasts common understandings of East Asian relations but also defines a model that applies to other hegemonies outside of the European order.
Download or read book Made Modern written by Edward Jones-Imhotep and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. The book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics including exploration, scientific rationality, the occult, medical instruments, patents, communication, and infrastructure, the contributors situate Canadian scientific and technological developments within larger national and transnational contexts. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.
Download or read book Divergent Modernities written by Julio Ramos and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a Foreword by José David Saldívar Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English—and now published with new material—Ramos’s study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative inter-American cultural criticism. With his focus on the nineteenth century, Ramos begins his genealogy of an emerging Latin Americanism with an examination of Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento and Chilean Andrés Bello, representing the “enlightened letrados” of tradition. In contrast to these “lettered men,” he turns to Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who, Ramos suggests, inaugurated a new kind of intellectual subject for the Americas. Though tracing Latin American modernity in general, it is the analysis of Martí—particularly his work in the United States—that becomes the focal point of Ramos’s study. Martí’s confrontation with the unequal modernization of the New World, the dependent status of Latin America, and the contrast between Latin America’s culture of elites and the northern mass culture of commodification are, for Ramos, key elements in understanding the complex Latin American experience of modernity. Including two new chapters written for this edition, as well as translations of three of Martí’s most important works, Divergent Modernities will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand development and modernity across the Americas.
Download or read book Lost in Transition written by Yiu-Wai Chu and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely and insightful book, Yiu-Wai Chu takes stock of Hong Kong's culture since its transition to a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong had long functioned as the capitalist and democratic stepping stone to China for much of the world. Its highly original popular culture was well known in Chinese communities, and its renowned film industry enjoyed worldwide audiences and far-reaching artistic influence. Chu argues that Hong Kong's culture was "lost in transition" when it tried to affirm its international visibility and retain the status quo after 1997. In an era when China welcomed outsiders and became the world's most rapidly developing economy, Hong Kong's special position as a capitalist outpost was no longer a privilege. By drawing on various cultural discourses, such as film, popular music, and politics of everyday life, Chu provides an informative and critical analysis of the impact of China's ascendency on the notion of "One Country, Two Cultures." Hong Kong can no longer function as a bridge between China and the world, writes Chu, and must now define itself from global, local, and national perspectives.
Download or read book State Formation through Emulation written by Chin-Hao Huang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that states formed in East Asia a thousand years earlier than in Europe, emulating China rather than competing with it.
Download or read book Lost Modernities written by Alexander Woodside and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Woodside offers an overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations.
Download or read book Vietnam and the West written by Wynn Wilcox and published by SEAP Publications. This book was released on 2010 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sound interpretation of Vietnamese cultural attitudes contends that a major reason for American difficulties in Viet-Nam has been the failure to appreciate how wide the gulf is between Viet-Nam and the West. Professor Smith first describes Vietnamese political and social traditions and shows how they were challenged by the West after 1858. He examines Viet-Nam's search for independence and modernization in the first half of this century, contrasts the two governments of the partitioned country during the years 1954-1963, and stresses the critical need to reassess attitudes toward Viet-Nam. His sophisticated, ambitious survey of Viet-Nam history will have a lasting value that sets it apart from the scores of ephemeral books on this country.
Download or read book Modern Erasures written by Pierre Fuller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the acts of epistemic violence behind China's revolutionary transformation from a semi-colonized republic to Communist state over the twentieth century.
Download or read book Asian Expansions written by Geoff Wade and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asia as we know it today is the product of a wide range of polity expansions over time. Recognising the territorial expansions of Asian polities large and small through the last several millennia helps rectify the fallacy, long-held and deeply entrenched, that Asian polities have been interested only in the control of populations, not in expanding their command of territory. In countering this misapprehension, this book suggests that Asian polities have indeed been concerned with territorial control and expansion over time, whether for political or strategic advantage, trade purposes, defence needs, agricultural expansion or increased income through taxation. The book explores the historical experiences of a set of polity expansions within Asia, specifically in East and Southeast Asia, and, by examining the motivations, mechanisms, processes, validations and limitations of these Asian territorial expansions, reveals the diverse avenues by which Asian polities have grown. The chapters draw on these historical examples to highlight the connections between Asian polity expansion and centralised political structures, and this aids in a broader and more comprehensive understanding of Asian political practice, both past and present. Through these chapter studies and the integrative introduction, the book interrogates key concepts such as imperialism and colonialism, and the applicability and relevance of such terminology in Asian contexts, both historical and contemporary. Comparisons and contrasts with European historical expansions are also suggested. This book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Asian history, as well as by those with an interest in Asian interactions, international relations, polity expansion, Asia--Europe historical comparisons and globalisation.
Download or read book Caste Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition written by Geir Heierstad and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caste, Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition is an ethnographic study of the potters of Kolkata’s Kumartuli, an analysis of their lives and the related commodification and instrumentalization of caste. This group of artisans turned artists do not display passive responses to colonial and capitalist encounters but engage actively with the modern and economic developments of society at large, redefining the concept of caste identity in the process. Caste, Entrepreneurship and the Illusions of Tradition suggests a new academic direction for the study of modern India, and of caste in particular, through an empirically grounded portrayal of the synthesis of traditional categories and contemporary realities.
Download or read book Hidden Geopolitics written by John Agnew and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Geopolitics is not dead, but nor does it involve the same old logic of a world determined by physical geography in a competition between Great Powers. Hidden Geopolitics recaptures the term to explore how the geography of power works both globally and nationally to structure and govern the workings of the global political economy. Globalization, far from its antithesis, is tightly wound up in the assumptions and practices of geopolitics, relating to the scope of regulatory authority, state sponsorship, and the political power of businesses to operate worldwide. Agnew shows how this “hidden” geopolitics and globalization have been vitally connected. He focuses on three moments: the origins of contemporary globalization in the policies pursued by successive US governments and allies after 1945 and its continued relevance even as the US role in the world changes; the close connection between geopolitical history and status of different countries and their relative capacities to exploit the possibilities and limit the costs of globalization; and new regulatory and standard-setting agencies which emerged under the sponsorship of major geopolitical powers but have grown in power and authority as the dominant states have become limited in their ability to manage the explosion of transnational transactions on their own. Agnew argues that it is time to move on from the narrow inter-imperial cast of geopolitics and the foolish policy advice it produces. The old perspective on geopolitics has taken on new life with the rise of national-populist movements in Europe and the United States and the reinvigoration of territorial-authoritarian regimes in Russia and China. Notwithstanding this trend, we must see the contemporary world through the lens of these complex, “hidden” geopolitical underpinnings that Agnew seeks to expose.
Download or read book China In Comparative Perspective written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by World Scientific Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-02-22 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China in Comparative Perspective provides an overview of China based on empirical observation by field workers, as well as on historical documents, Chinese literary and philosophical texts and core theoretical frameworks in the social sciences. It enables readers to develop ways of putting the modern history, politics, economy and society of China into a framework in which China can be compared and contrasted with other countries.Topics covered include the rise of capitalism, post-socialist transformations, family and gender, nationalism, democracy, and civil society. Each chapter offers a comparison with other countries in East and South-Asia, Europe and the rest of the world, showing how analytic concepts have to be modified to avoid either Eurocentric or Sinocentric bias, and how ideas derived from Chinese sources and observations must be accommodated for complete understanding of the issues discussed.Written by two well-known anthropologists of China from the London School of Economics, Stephan Feuchtwang and Hans Steinmüller, this book is a comprehensive course for postgraduate students in Chinese and Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, political economy, politics and international relations.
Download or read book Why Globalization Matters written by Barrie Axford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what are generally understood as unsettled times, this book explores the possibility and desirability of bringing integrated theory back into globalization research. While there can hardly be a single and all-encompassing ‘grand theory’ of globalization-in-itself, is there scope for the development of a general and systematic approach to globalization dynamics, past and present? In other words, can theorizations of the global be holistic and integrative, taking place in tandem with methodological frameworks that consider the contradictory and uneven layering of different transnational practices across all social relations? Is it possible to develop a general and integrated approach to globalization that links theory and practice in a socially engaged way, and is it desirable to do so? Many relevant academic and non-academic developments suggest not. For example, the postmodernist turn at the end of the last century expressed a profound ‘incredulity’ toward ‘grand narratives’ in the social sciences and humanities. A decade later, some neo-Marxist critics condemned the ‘follies of globalization theory’. More recently, the ‘post-truth’ interventions of national populists suggest not only that ‘globalism’ is the political enemy but also that attempts to understand its patterns and manifestations are relative or irrelevant. Taking Manfred Steger and Paul James’ acclaimed book Globalization Matters as a back-drop against which to interrogate these issues, contributors from a variety of disciplinary, analytical and normative standpoints deliver a thoughtful and much needed assessment of the scholarship of globalization and the ways it is theorized. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.
Download or read book Ambivalent written by Patricia Hayes and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond photography as an isolated medium to engage larger questions and interlocking forms of expression and historical analysis, Ambivalent gathers a new generation of scholars based on the continent to offer an expansive frame for thinking about questions of photography and visibility in Africa. The volume presents African relationships with photography—and with visibility more generally—in ways that engage and disrupt the easy categories and genres that have characterized the field to date. Contributors pose new questions concerning the instability of the identity photograph in South Africa; ethnographic photographs as potential history; humanitarian discourse from the perspective of photographic survivors of atrocity photojournalism; the nuanced passage from studio to screen in postcolonial digital portraiture; and the burgeoning visual activism in West Africa. As the contributors show, photography is itself a historical subject: it involves arrangement, financing, posture, positioning, and other kinds of work that are otherwise invisible. By moving us outside the frame of the photograph itself, by refusing to accept the photograph as the last word, this book makes photography an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Ambivalent‘s contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories. Contributors: George Emeka Agbo, Isabelle de Rezende, Jung Ran Forte, Ingrid Masondo, Phindi Mnyaka, Okechukwu Nwafor, Vilho Shigwedha, Napandulwe Shiweda, Drew Thompson
Download or read book Fir and Empire written by Ian M. Miller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.
