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Boundaries and Beyond
Using the concept of boundaries, physical and cultural, to understand the development of China’s maritime southeast in late Imperial times, and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas, these linked essays by a senior scholar in the field challenge the usual readings of Chinese history from the centre. After an opening essay which positions China’s southeastern coast within a broader view of maritime Asia, the first section of the book looks at boundaries, between “us” and “them”, Chinese and other, during this period. The second section looks at the challenges to such rigid demarcations posed by the state and existed in the status quo. The third sect...
Trade and Society, the Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683-1735
The book examines the social and economic changes in south Fukien (Fujian) on the southeast coast of China during late imperial times. Faced with land shortages and overpopulation, the rural population of south Fukien turned to the sea in search of fresh opportunities to secure a livelihood. With the tacit support of local officials and the scholar gentry, the merchants played the pivotal role in long-distance trade, and the commercial networks they established spanned the entire China coast, making the port city of Amoy (Xiamen) a major centre for maritime trade. In the work, the author discusses four interrelated spheres of activity, namely, the traditional rural sector, the port cities, the coastal trade and the overseas trade links. He argues that the creative use of clan organizations was key to the growth of the Amoy network along the coast as well as overseas.
Sugar and Society in China
In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.
Taiwan: A New History
This is a comprehensive portrait of Taiwan. It covers the major periods in the development of this small but powerful island province/nation. The work is designed in the style of the multi-volume "Cambridge History of China".
Indian and Chinese Immigrant Communities
This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a window onto the overseas Indian and Chinese communities in Asia. Contributors discuss the interactive role of the cultural and religious ‘other’, the diasporic absorption of local beliefs and customs, and the practical business networks and operational mechanisms unique to these communities. Growing out of an international workshop organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, this volume explores material, cultural and imaginative features of the immigrant communities and brings together these two important communities within a comparative framework.
This House Is Not a Home: European Everyday Life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830
Lisa Hellman offers the first study of European everyday life in Canton and Macao. How foreigners could live, communicate, move around – even whom they could interaction with – were all things strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities. The Europeans sometimes adapted to, and sometimes subverted, these rules. Focusing on this conditional domesticity shows the importance of gender relations, especially the construction of masculinity. Using the Swedish East India Company, a minor European actor in an expanding Asian empire, as a point of entry highlights the multiplicity of actors taking part in local negotiations of power. The European attempts at making a home in China contributes to a global turn in everyday history, but also to an everyday turn in global history.
Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization
"As the Ch’ing government’s Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart was the most influential Westerner in China for half a century. These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China’s Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch’ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart’s return visit to Europe with the Pin-ch’un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland. Smith, Fairbank, and Bruner interleave the segments of Hart’s journals with lively narratives describing the contemporary Chinese scene and recounting Hart’s responses to the many challenges of establishing a Western-style organization within a Chinese milieu."
Embodied Dependencies and Freedoms
Have you ever thought about dependencies in Asian art and architecture? Most people would probably assume that the arts are free and that creativity and ingenuity function outside of such reliances. However, the 13 chapters provided by specialists in the fields of Asian art and architecture in this volume show, that those active in the visual arts and the built environment operate in an area of strict relations of often extreme dependences. Material artefacts and edifices are dependent on the climate in which they have been created, on the availability of resources for their production, on social and religious traditions, which may be oral or written down and on donors, patrons and the art m...
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 world In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes—an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan—grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world. The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas. In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the proc...
Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai
Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways. The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700), the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous networks and maritime polities; they competed and cooperated with one another and with powerful political and economic units, such as the Manchu Qing, Tokugawa Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, and the Dutch East India Company. Mar...
