This well-documented study discusses the social and economic changes in Shandong province before the influence of the West was felt at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors show that by the sixteenth century, commercial and handicraft towns linked to national and local markets had already begun to emerge. Urban growth was made possible by increased agricultural production, which in turn stimulated specialization and increased commercialization in the agricultural sector. Another important change in rural society at this time was the emergence of a new stratum of wealthy landlords who managed their estates with wage labor. Case studies of managerial landlords, who form the main focus of this study, are included as well as generalizations drawn from questionnaire materials.

Jing Su and Luo Lun wrote this book while they were young researchers at Shandong University in the late 1950s, using data they had gathered in the culturally relaxed period of the Hundred Flowers. In his Introduction, Endymion Wilkinson analyzes the authors’ thesis and concludes that their Leninist model is inapplicable to premodern Chinese history. The value of this study lies not so much in its conclusion that even without the impact of Western imperialism China would of itself have developed a capitalist society, but rather in the wealth of data the authors present, in this first in-depth study of a relatively advanced region in north China.

By exhaustively analyzing Lao She's literary writings, Vohra traces the development of his political consciousness and convictions. Answers are sought for crucial questions: Why did Lao She drift to a leftist position? Why did he return voluntarily to China? Why did he become disenchanted with the authoritarian regime? And why did he commit suicide?

Besides being an introduction to the life and works of Lao She, this book contributes to a greater understanding of the nature of the social and political change in twentieth-century China.

This book is the result of a conference organised by the Contemporary Portuguese Political History Research Centre (CPHRC) and the University of Dundee that took place during September 2000. The purpose of this conference, and the resulting book, was to bring together various experts in the field to analyse and debate the process of Portuguese decolonisation, which was then 25 years old, and the effects of this on the Portuguese themselves. For over one century, the Portuguese state had defined its foreign policy on the basis of its vast empire &endash; this was the root of its 'Atlanticist' vision. The outbreak of war of liberation in its African territories, which were prompted by the new international support for self determination in colonised territories, was a serious threat that undermined the very foundations of the Portuguese state. This book examines the nature of this threat, how the Portuguese state initially attempted to overcome it by force, and how new pressures within Portuguese society were given space to emerge as a consequence of the colonial wars.

This is the first book that takes a multidisciplinary look at both the causes and the consequences of Portuguese decolonisation &endash; and is the only one that places the loss of Portugal's Eastern Empire in the context of the loss of its African Empire. Furthermore, it is the only English language book that relates the process of Portuguese decolonisation with the search for a new Portuguese vision of its place in the world.

This book is intended for anyone who is interested in regime change, decolonisation, political revolutions and the growth and development of the European Union. It will also be useful for those who are interested in contemporary developments in civil society and state ideologies. Given that a large part of the book is dedicated to the process of change in the various countries of the former Portuguese Empire, it will also be of interest to students of Africa. It will be useful to those who study decolonisation processes within the other former European Empires, as it provides comparative detail. The book will be most useful to academic researchers and students of comparative politics and area studies.

As a scholar, William Hung was instrumental in opening China’s rich documentary past to modern scrutiny. As an educator, he helped shape one of twentieth-century China’s most remarkable institutions, Yenching University. A member of the buoyant, Western-educated generation that expected to transform China into a modern, liberal nation, he saw his hopes darken as political turmoil, war with Japan, and the Communist takeover led to a different future. yet his influence was widespread; for his students became leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and he continued to teach in the United States through the 1970s.

In 1978, he began recalling his colorful life to Susan Chan Egan in weekly taping sessions. Egan draws on these tapes to let a skillful raconteur tell for himself anecdotes from his life as a religious and academic activist with a flair for the flamboyant. His reminiscences encompass the issues and dilemmas faced by Chinese intellectuals of his period. Among the notables who figured in his life and memories were Hu Shih, H. H. Kung, Henry Winter Luce, John Leighton Stuart, Timothy Lew, and Lu Chihwei.

While retaining the flavor of Hung’s reminiscences, Egan explains the evolution and importance of his scholarly work; captures his blend of Confucianism, mystical Christianity, and iconoclastic thought; and describes his effect on those around him. For it was finally his unyielding integrity and personal kindness as much as his accomplishments that caused him to be revered by colleagues and generations of students.

The Law Code of Viṣṇu (Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kashmir. Both because the Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra is the only Dharmaśāstra that can be geographically located and because it introduces some interesting and new elements into the discussion of Dharmaśāstric topics, this is a document of interest both to scholars of Indian legal literature and to cultural historians of India, especially of Kashmir. The new elements include the first Dharmaśāstric evidence for a wife burning herself at her husband’s cremation and the intrusion of devotional religion (bhakti) into Dharmaśāstras.

This volume contains a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on fifteen manuscripts, an annotated English translation, and an introduction evaluating its textual history, its connections to previous Dharmaśāstras, its date and provenance, its structure and content, and the use made of it by later medieval writers.

Leadership and Values provides new material in two key areas. First, it is an in-depth study of the organization and administration of large-scale Chinese enterprises, with considerable detail on Chinese behavior in such settings. Second, the author constructs from the Chinese data a framework for the cross-cultural analysis of large-scale organizations. This framework identifies key variables that, when considered systematically, permit a clearer understanding of the role of cultural factors in organizational behavior and design.

The data for this study were gathered by participant-observer techniques at firms in Taiwan, and many of the findings are assumed to apply in large part to behavioral patterns on the mainland and in other areas of Chinese culture.

The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.

Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understandings of laws intersected with people’s interpretations of written laws and with their experiences of laws in practice. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China.

The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.

Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understandings of laws intersected with people’s interpretations of written laws and with their experiences of laws in practice. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day.

The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

Law is a moving system of rules that changes according to a nation’s political and socioeconomic development. To understand the law of the People’s Republic of China today, it is imperative to learn the history and philosophy of the law when it was first shaped. This is a comprehensive introduction to Chinese legal scholarship and the prominent scholars who developed it during the initial decades of the PRC, when the old Chinese legal system was abolished by the newly established Communist government. With responsibilities for full-scale recovery and reconstruction, while cultivating entirely new disciplines and branches of legal studies, the thirty-three leading legal scholars featured herein became the creators, pioneers, and teachers of the new Communist legal system. Through their scholarship, we can see where the field of Chinese legal studies came from, and where it is going.

Nongji Zhang reveals the stories of the most prominent PRC legal scholars, including their backgrounds, scholarly contributions, and important works. This essential tool and resource for the study of Chinese law will be of great use to faculty, students, scholars, librarians, and anyone interested in the field.

Li Mengyang (1473–1530) was a scholar-official and man of letters who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. In this first book-length study of Li in English, Chang Woei Ong comprehensively examines his intellectual scheme and situates Li’s quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty.

Ong examines Li’s emergence at the distinctive historical juncture of the mid-Ming dynasty, when differences in literati cultures and visions were articulated as a north-south divide (both real and perceived) among Chinese thinkers. Ong argues that this divide, and the ways in which Ming literati compartmentalized learning, is key to understanding Li’s thought and its legacy. Though a northerner, Li became a powerful voice in prose and poetry, in both a positive and negative sense, as he was championed or castigated by the southern literati communities. The southern literati’s indifference toward Li’s other intellectual endeavors—including cosmology, ethics, political philosophy, and historiography—furthered his utter marginalization in those fields.

Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, The Libertine’s Friend uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing particularly on overlooked works of pornographic fiction, Giovanni Vitiello offers a frank exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China.

Vitiello’s story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, he identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and sheds light on a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. Drawing on this trove of material, Vitiello presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China, revealing the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.

The collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates around fifty million years ago profoundly altered earth’s geography and regional climates. The rise of the Himalaya led to intensification of the monsoon, the birth of massive glaciers and turbulent rivers, and an efflorescence of ecosystems along the most extreme elevational gradient on Earth. When the Ice Age ended, humans became part of this mix, and today nearly one quarter of the world’s population inhabits its river basins, from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Life in the Himalaya examines the region’s geophysical and biological systems and explores the past and future of human sustainability in the mountain’s shadow.

Maharaj Pandit divides the Himalaya’s history into four phases. During the first, the mountain and its ecosystems formed. In the second, humans altered the landscape, beginning with nomadic pastoralism, continuing to commercial deforestation, and culminating in pockets of resistance to forest exploitation. The third phase saw a human population explosion, accompanied by road and dam building and other large-scale infrastructure that degraded ecosystems and caused species extinctions. Pandit outlines a future networking phase which holds the promise of sustainable living within the mountain’s carrying capacity.

Today, the Himalaya is threatened by recurrent natural disasters and is at risk of catastrophic loss of life. If humans are to have a sustainable future there, Pandit argues, they will need to better understand the region’s geological vulnerability, ecological fragility, and sociocultural sensitivity. Life in the Himalaya outlines the mountain’s past in order to map a way forward.

The first English translation of the oldest extant work in Apabhramsha, a literary language from medieval India, recounting the story of the Ramayana.

The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama’s exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship.

The second volume recounts Rama’s exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities—rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana’s marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama’s honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita’s disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana.

This is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani’s critical edition.

The Limits of Alignment is an engaging and accessible study that explores how small states and middle powers of Southeast Asia ensure their security in a world where they are overshadowed by greater powers. John D. Ciorciari challenges a central concept in international relations theory—that states respond to insecurity by either balancing against their principal foes, “bandwagoning” with them, or declaring themselves neutral. Instead, he shows that developing countries prefer limited alignments that steer between strict neutrality and formal alliances to obtain the fruits of security cooperation without the perils of undue dependency.

Ciorciari also shows how structural and normative shifts following the end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S. primacy have increased the prevalence of limited alignments in the developing world and that these can often place constraints on U.S. foreign policy. Finally, he discusses how limited alignments in the developing world may affect the future course of international security as China and other rising powers gather influence on the world stage.

The Limits of Change disputes the impression that the conservative ideas and styles of China's Republican period were neither strong nor persuasive enough to counter the ideas or the revolution of Mao. As the contributors to the book point out, these conservative movements reflected a modern outlook and shared a framework of common concepts with the radical movements they opposed.

In these essays we see the broad range of responses that conservatism in the Republican period took--from a new nativist historical consciousness, to quasi-Fascist theories of political mobilization, to efforts at a revival of Confucianism as a moral faith. Individual writers analyze the early Republican National Essence movement, the new Confucian humanism of the 1920s and afterwards, political ideology under Republican military dictatorships, and the ideas of modern literary conservatives. Two major interpretive essays placeChinese trends in the context of worldwide conservative responses to industrialization, political modernism, and the challenge of secularism.Through its far-reaching, detailed, and sympathetic assessment of the role of conservative ideology in China's modern intellectual experience, Limits of Change makes a distinguished contribution to Chinese studies.

A new English translation of Raghuvaṃśa by the celebrated Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, who inspired such modern writers as Goethe and Tagore.

For a millennium and a half, Kalidasa’s works—from The Cloud Messenger to The Recognition of Shakuntala—have delighted audiences in India and beyond. Although the renowned poet and dramatist inspired many literary works over the centuries, little is known about his life. He likely lived in central India in the late fourth or early fifth century.

Kalidasa’s The Lineage of the Raghus, or Raghuvaṃśa, belongs to the Sanskrit literary tradition of mahākāvya, or court poem. It recounts the lives of ancient kings in the sūryavaṃśa, the Solar Dynasty who ruled from the capital city of Ayodhya. The poem describes, among other episodes, the quest for offspring by Dilipa, a descendant of the primordial king Manu; the world conquest of his son Raghu, which offers a panorama of the Indian subcontinent; the exploits of the famous Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu; and the debaucheries of Agnivarna, which jeopardize the future of the lineage.

This volume presents a new edition of the Sanskrit text in the Devanagari script alongside a fresh English translation of this enduring epic.

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures.

In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as lineages and temple networks) and central state institutions. The first part provides the framework for viewing Daoism as a social institution in regard to both its religious lineages and its service to the state in the bureaucratic apparatus to implement state orthodoxy. The second part follows four cases to reveal the connections between clerical lineages and local networks. Wang illustrates how Daoism claimed a universal ideology and civilizing force that mediated between local organizations and central state institutions, which in turn brought meaning and legitimacy to both local society and the state.

The Literati Purges explores the phenomenon of the political purge in early Yi Dynasty Korea. Four such upheavals occurring within a fifty-year span are known in Korean historiography by the term sahwa, literati purge; the first three of these events, occurring in 1498, 1504, and 1519, are the subject of this study.

The author's original aim was to narrate in full detail the background, development, and consequences of each purge, focusing on those issues and events that best reveal the political institutions and processes as they actually operated in early Yi Korea. But as the study proceeded it became clear that the story of the literati purges was, above all, the history of the development of the remonstrance or censorial function in the Yi state and the conflict among the administrative organs of the government that accompanied this development. In short, although The Literati Purges focuses on events, it is at the same time an institutional study.

From the Sino-Japanese War to the Communist Revolution, the onrushing narrative of modern China can drown out the stories of the people who lived it. Yet a remarkable cache of letters from one of China’s most prominent and influential families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds new light on this tumultuous era. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh take us inside the Lius’ world to explore how the family laid the foundation for a business dynasty before the war and then confronted the challenges of war, civil unrest, and social upheaval.

Cochran and Hsieh gained access to a rare collection containing a lifetime of letters exchanged by the patriarch, Liu Hongsheng, his wife, Ye Suzhen, and their twelve children. Their correspondence offers a fascinating look at how a powerful family navigated the treacherous politics of the period. They discuss sensitive issues—should the family collaborate with the Japanese occupiers? should it flee after the communist takeover?—as well as intimate domestic matters like marital infidelity. They also describe the agonies of wartime separation, protracted battles for control of the family firm, and the parents’ struggle to maintain authority in the face of swiftly changing values.

Through it all, the distinctive voices of the Lius shine through. Cochran and Hsieh’s engaging prose reveals how each member of the family felt the ties that bound them together. More than simply a portrait of a memorable family, The Lius of Shanghai tells the saga of modern China from the inside out.

Using biography to deepen understanding of Chinese music, contributors present richly contextualized portraits of rural folk singers, urban opera singers, literati, and musicians on both geographic and cultural frontiers. The topics investigated by these authors provide fresh insights into issues such as the urban-rural divide, the position of ethnic minorities within the People's Republic of China, the adaptation of performing arts to modernizing trends of the twentieth century, and the use of the arts for propaganda and commercial purposes.

The social and political history of China serves as a backdrop to these discussions of music and culture, as the lives chronicled here illuminate experiences from the pre-Communist period through the Cultural Revolution to the present. Showcasing multiple facets of Chinese musical life, this collection is especially effective in taking advantage of the liberalization of mainland China that has permitted researchers to work closely with artists and to discuss the interactions of life and local and national histories in musicians' experiences.

Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Rachel Harris, Frank Kouwenhoven, Tong Soon Lee, Peter Micic, Helen Rees, Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Shao Binsun, Jonathan P. J. Stock, and Bell Yung.

A visitor to Beijing in 1900, Chinese or foreign, would have been struck by the great number of native-place lodges serving the needs of scholars and officials from the provinces. What were these native-place lodges? How did they develop over time? How did they fit into and shape Beijing's urban ecology? How did they further native-place ties?

In answering these questions, the author considers how native-place ties functioned as channels of communication between China's provinces and the political center; how sojourners to the capital used native-place ties to create solidarity within their communities of fellow provincials and within the class of scholar-officials as a whole; how the state co-opted these ties as a means of maintaining order within the city and controlling the imperial bureaucracy; how native-place ties transformed the urban landscape and social structure of the city; and how these functions were refashioned in the decades of political innovation that closed the Qing period. Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century.

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally.

The book is set in one locality, Wuzhou (later Jinhua), a prefecture in China’s Zhejiang province, from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Its main actors are literati of the Song, Yuan, and Ming, who created a local tradition of learning as a means of cementing their common identity and their claim to moral, political, and cultural leadership. Close readings of philosophical and literary texts with quantitative analysis of social and kinship networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built.

By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

Although located far from the populated centers of traditional Japan, the three Kumano shrines occupied a central position in the Japanese religious landscape. For centuries Kumano was the most visited pilgrimage site in Japan and attracted devotees from across the boundaries of sect (Buddhist, Daoist, Shinto), class, and gender. It was also a major institutional center, commanding networks of affiliated shrines, extensive landholdings, and its own army, and a site of production, generating agricultural products and symbolic capital in the form of spiritual values. Kumano was thus both a real place and a utopia: a non-place of paradise or enlightenment. It was a location in which cultural ideals--about death, salvation, gender, and authority--were represented, contested, and even at times inverted.

This book encompasses both the real and the ideal, both the historical and the ideological, Kumano. It studies Kumano not only as a site of practice, a stage for the performance of asceticism and pilgrimage, but also as a place of the imagination, a topic of literary and artistic representation. Kumano was not unique in combining Buddhism with native traditions, for redefining death and its conquest, for expressing the relationship between religious and political authority, and for articulating the religious position of women. By studying Kumano's particular religious landscape, we can better understand the larger, common religious landscape of premodern Japan.

The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.

In the first decade of the 20th century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.

The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here with all available additional manuscripts. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.

The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.

What makes Kalinovsky’s intense account both timely and important is its focus not on motives for initiating the conflict but on the factors that prevented the Soviet leadership from ending a demoralizing war. Why did the USSR linger for so long, given that key elites recognized the blunder of the mission shortly after the initial deployment?

Newly available archival material, supplemented by interviews with major actors, allows Kalinovsky to reconstruct the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.

Do democratic states bring about greater social and economic equality among their citizens? Modern India embraced universal suffrage from the moment it was free of British imperial rule in 1947—a historical rarity in the West—and yet Indian citizens are far from realizing equality today. The United States, the first British colony to gain independence, continues to struggle with intolerance and the consequences of growing inequality in the twenty-first century.

From Boston Brahmins to Mohandas Gandhi, from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nico Slate traces the continuous transmission of democratic ideas between two former colonies of the British Empire. Gandhian nonviolence lay at the heart of the American civil rights movement. Key Indian freedom fighters sharpened their political thought while studying and working in the United States. And the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights.

Spanning three centuries and two continents, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead offers a new look at the struggle for freedom that linked two nations. While the United States remains the world’s most powerful democracy, India—the world’s most populous democracy—is growing in wealth and influence. Together, the United States and India will play a predominant role in shaping the future of democracy.

Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize

“Remarkable and pathbreaking…A radical rethink of colonial historiography and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of Hindustan.”
—Mahmood Mamdani

“The brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name ‘Hindustan’…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger.”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books

“Remarkable…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant.”
—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire

“A tremendous contribution…This is not only a book that you must read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.”
—Audrey Truschke, Current History

Did India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Manan Ahmed Asif tackles this contentious question by inviting us to reconsider the work and legacy of the influential historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir. Inspired by his reading of Firishta and other historians, Asif seeks to rescue our understanding of the region from colonial narratives that emphasize difference and division.

Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, he uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. The Loss of Hindustan reveals how multicultural Hindustan was deliberately eclipsed in favor of the religiously partitioned world of today. A magisterial work with far reaching implications, it offers a radical reinterpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity.

Lost and Found offers a new understanding of modern Japanese regionalism by revealing the tense and volatile historical relationship between region and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aizu, a star-crossed region in present-day Fukushima prefecture, becomes a case study for how one locale was estranged from nationhood for its treasonous blunder in the Meiji Restoration, yet eventually found a useful place within the imperial landscape. Local mythmakers—historians, memoirists, war veterans, and others—harmonized their rebel homeland with imperial Japan so as to affirm, ironically, the ultimate integrity of the Japanese polity. What was once “lost” and then “found” again was not simply Aizu’s sense of place and identity, but the larger value of regionalism in a rapidly modernizing society.

In this study, Hiraku Shimoda suggests that “region,” which is often regarded as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple and contingent spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities just as much as internal diversity.

A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.

Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life.

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.

The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji casts a long shadow across the literary terrain of the Heian period (794-1185). It has dominated critical and popular reception of Heian literary production and become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court.

But the brilliance of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity.

Charo B. D'Etcheverry calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light upon this undervalued body of work. D'Etcheverry examines three representative texts—The Tale of Sagoromo, The Tale of the Hamamatsu Middle Counselor, and Nezame at Night—as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji and as valuable indexes to the literary tastes and readerly expectations that evolved over the Heian period.

Balancing careful analyses of plot, character, and motif with keen insights into the cultural and political milieu of the late Heian period, D'Etcheverry argues that we should read such works not as mere derivatives of a canonical text, but as dynamic fictional commentaries and variations upon the tropes and subplots that continue to resonate with readers of Genji.

Widely recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the voice of a nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies’s portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

In Davies’s vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with the heady arguments and intrigues of a country on the eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun’s works which reflect the larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During the last phase of Lu Xun’s career, the so-called “years on the left,” we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which the people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire the debates shaping China today.

Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support the Party in the decades following his death. Far from the apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was the key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun’s Revolution is a major contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.