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Recent international intervention in Afghanistan has reproduced familiar versions of the Afghan national story, from repeatedly doomed invasions to perpetual fault lines of ethnic division. Yet almost no attention has been paid to the ways in which Afghans have made sense of their history themselves. Radically questioning received ideas about how to understand Afghanistan, Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes asks how Afghan intellectuals, ideologues and ordinary people have understood their collective past. The book brings together the leading international specialists to focus on case studies of the Dari, Pashto and Uzbek histories which Afghans have produced in abundance since the formation of the Afghan state in the mid-eighteenth century. As crucial sources on Afghans’ own conceptions of state, society and culture, their writings help us understand the dominant and marginal, conflicting and changing, ways in which Afghans have understood the emergence of their own society and its relationships with the wider world. Based on new research in Afghan languages, Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes opens up entirely new perspectives on Afghan political, social and cultural life, providing penetrating insights into the master narratives behind domestic and international conflict in Afghanistan.

This book studies Indira Gandhi’s final term in office as India’s Prime Minister (1980–84). This is an important period in the country’s recent history as it is then that some of the defining features of today’s India’s political system emerged. The book argues that the early 1980s were a period of uncompromising change, particularly in three key areas. First, India undertook the road that would eventually lead to the liberalization of the economy; second, new forms of political mobilization emerged, including mobilization based on communal identities; third, the polity became increasingly regionalized, and the states became crucial actors in India’s political system. The book shows the crucial contribution that — sometimes intentionally, sometimes not — Mrs Gandhi gave to these processes. The book covers a second and overlapping theme, namely Mrs Gandhi’s drive for personal domination of India’s political system and the consequences that this had on her democratic framework. The book argues that Indian institutions were severely, perhaps irremediably damaged by Mrs Gandhi’s rule. The institutionalization of corruption as a systemic feature of India’s political system and the personalization of institutions are the two most detrimental legacies of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. The book traces the origins of these processes and their consequences on the political system. Finally, the book describes the significant changes occurred within India’s society during Mrs Gandhi’s rule, in particular the process of emancipation of the Indian masses that Indira Gandhi contributed in no small measure to accelerate.

This book is a study of the political and economic activities of an important group of British businessmen in India between 1850 and 1960. Though denounced by Indian nationalists as the economic arm of the British Raj, the firms of these ‘Managing Agents’ seemed unassailable before the First World War. However, during the inter-war period they rapidly lost their commanding position to both Indian and other foreign competitors. The author argues that the failure of these firms was, in part, the consequence of their particular (and ultimately self-defeating) attitudes towards business, politics, and race. She casts new light on British colonial society in India, and makes an important contribution to current debates on the nature of the British Empire and the causes of Britain’s relative economic decline.

For the most of the twentieth century, the country of Vietnam has served as a symbol of the bipolar system of rival ideological blocs that characterized the Cold War. As the conflict over communism waned in the 1980s, Vietnam faced the tough task of remaking itself as nation in the eyes of its people and of the world. This book chronicles the evolution of the Vietnamese state as we know it today. With the collapse of communist regimes in Europe, Vietnam witnessed the dissolution of the cornerstone of its policies toward the outside world. Fearing that a full commitment to deep integration in a globalizing world would lead to the collapse of their own current political system, the Vietnamese political elite made slow, cautious steps to involvement with the larger international community. By the year 2000, however, Vietnam had “taken the plunge” and opted for greater participation in the global economic system, leading to its membership in the World Trade Organization in 2006. This book illustrates that the politicians who took a limited approach to international involvement ultimately had condemned Vietnam to a permanent state of underdevelopment. It is only at the turn of the twenty-first century when the Vietnamese state began to relax its policies toward the international community that the nation began to experience a period of revitalization. Remarkably, these changes have happened without Vietnam losing its unique political identity as many had expected. It remains an authoritarian state, but offers far more breathing space to its citizens than in pre-reform era. Far from leading the nation to be absorbed into a Western-inspired development model, globalization has led to a complex domestic diversification and localization that has reinforced Vietnam's distinctive identity rather than obliterating it. The culmination of decades of research and cultural exchange, this book documents the unique story of the birth of a nation amidst the challenges of the post-Cold War era.

Between 1894 and 1905 the question of the Chinese Empire's future development, its survival even, was the most pressing overseas problem facing the Great Powers. The China Question had the most profound implications for the Powers. Since China's defeat by Japan in 1894–5, the country's complete disintegration was widely anticipated. Fuelling imperial rivalries, a wider Great Power conflict in the event of China's implosion, seemed to be on the cards. At times, that prospect seemed very real. Crucially, the prospect of China's break-up and of large–scale international conflict in its wake altered the configuration among the Great Powers. Instability in the Far East had ramifications beyond the confines of the region; and, as this study shows, with the events of 1894–5 began a wider transformation of international politics. No Power was more affected by these changes than Britain. The ‘China Question’ provides an ideal prism for the study of the problems of late 19th-century British world policy. This study seeks to break new ground by adopting a deliberately global approach, emphasizing the connections between European and overseas developments, and by encompassing diplomatic, commercial, financial, and strategic factors as well as the politics of foreign policy. The notion of a British policy of ‘splendid isolation’, usually associated with the person of Lord Salisbury, Britain's prime minister and foreign secretary at the time, is the chief focus of this study. Controversially, the book concludes that, while ‘isolation’ was reaffirmed at the end of the Russo–Japanese War, this apparent success helped to undermine its continued justification.

This overview of China's development since Mao's death in 1976 has been expanded for the new edition to take into account changes of recent years. Special attention is paid in this edition to recent student protests; the social effects of Deng Xiaoping's “capitalistic” reforms; the cultural impact of the Open Door policy; and the evolving relations between Taiwan and mainland China. The book includes a postscript on the demonstrations at Tian–an–men Square and the crackdown of June 3–4 1989, along with an analysis of the social and political effects of these events.

Since its birth as a concept, civilization has been defined by an encounter with the ‘other’. Barbarism, the ever-ready counter concept, has provided civilization with its raison d'être—that of exerting violence upon other societies to ‘civilize’ them. Enlightenment thinkers defined civilization as an opponent of nature, while science and technology, tools with which nature was to be conquered, became one of the basic indicators of development. Thus was formed the unbroken tie between civilization and science. In the Muslim world, civilization became a synonym for modernization, a lifestyle imposed by the colonialists and their local counterparts. However, as this volume reveals, the resistance to and reception of Western modernity by non-Western societies is not homogenous, nor is the ‘othering’ unidirectional. If the Orientalist discourse portrayed the Islamic East as an exotic, seductive, and untamed ‘other’, a corresponding Occidentalism also stereotyped the West as the soulless, mechanistic ‘other’ to Islam. Challenging the embedded prejudices within social theory, Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World questions the Eurocentric understanding of civilization and also explores the themes of modernization, globalization, and the future of the civilization debate.

The fascinating and chequered history of Delhi through the centuries has been a popular subject among authors. Yet, only a few other than K.A. Nizami record in rich detail the cultural, social, economic, and spiritual fabric of the city—the ‘gorgeous blaze of glory’ that was Delhi—between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. He presents his accounts of the periods of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and the poet Ghalib through the analyses of wide-ranging sources: original literary, travel, biographical, hagiographical, and administrative accounts in Persian, Hindavi, and Urdu. This book is a compilation of the historian’s lectures delivered at the University of Delhi and the Ghalib Institute in Delhi, first published in Urdu in 1972. The author’s conversational style, replete with literary allusions, makes this an essential read for lovers and admirers of this beguiling city and its historic Sufi culture. Ather Farouqui’s English translation captures the true essence of Nizami’s work and now makes it easily available to a wider readership.

In recent years, Japan’s cuisine, or washoku, has been eclipsing that of France as the world’s most desirable food. UNESCO recognized washoku as an intangible cultural treasure in 2013, and Tokyo boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris and New York combined. Together with anime, pop music, fashion, and cute goods, cuisine is part of the “Cool Japan” brand that promotes the country as a new kind of cultural superpower. This book offers insights into many different aspects of Japanese culinary history and practice, from the evolution and characteristics of particular foodstuffs, to their representation in literature and film, to the role of foods in individual, regional, and national identity. It features contributions by both noted Japan specialists and experts in food history. The book poses the question, “What is washoku?” What culinary values are imposed or implied by this term? Which elements of Japanese cuisine are most visible in the global gourmet landscape and why? Chapters from a variety of disciplinary perspectives interrogate how foodways have come to represent aspects of a “unique” Japanese identity and are infused with official and unofficial ideologies. They reveal how Japanese culinary values and choices, past and present, reflect beliefs about gender, class, and race; how they are represented in mass media; and how they are interpreted by state and nonstate actors, at home and abroad. Chapters examine the thoughts, actions, and motives of those who produce, consume, promote, and represent Japanese foods.

This book offers a complete, archive-based account of the relationship between China and the British Left, from the rise of modern Chinese nationalism to the death of Mao Tse tung. Beginning with the ‘Hands Off China’ movement of the mid-1920s, the book charts the mobilisation of British opinion in defence of China against Japanese aggression, 1931–45, and the role of the British left in relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. It shows how this relationship was placed under stress by the growing unpredictability of Communist China, above all by the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Cultural Revolution, which meant that by the 1960s China was actively supported only by a dwindling group of enthusiasts. The impact of the suppression of the student protests in Tiananmen Square (June 1989) is addressed as an epilogue. This book argues that the significance of the left's relationship with China has been unjustly overlooked. There were many occasions, such as the mid-1920s, the late 1930s and the early 1950s, when China demanded the full attention of the British left. The book also argues that there is nothing new in the current fascination with China's emergence as an economic power. Throughout these decades the British left was aware of the immense, unrealised potential of the Chinese economy, and of how China's economic growth could transform the world. In addition to analysing the role of the political parties and pressure groups of the left, the book sheds new light on the activities of many well-known figures in support of China, including intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, R H Tawney and Joseph Needham. Many other interesting stories emerge, concerning less well-known figures, which show the complexity of personal links between Britain and China during the 20th century. The book is based on many fascinating new archival sources, as well as a close reading of the left-wing press.

In 1902, the British government entered into a defensive alliance with Japan, a state that had surprised much of the world with its sudden rise to global prominence. For the next two decades, the Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold the balance of power in East Asia, shielding Japan from foreign rivals, and allowing Britain to concentrate on meeting the German challenge in Europe. Yet it was also a relationship shaped by its contradictions. On the one hand, Anglo-Japanese alliance legitimized Japan’s participation in great-power diplomacy, and worked to counteract racist notions of a ‘yellow peril’. On the other, Japan’s defiance of established racial hierarchies made the alliance controversial across much of the British Empire. On the settlement frontiers of Australasia and North America, white colonial elites formulated their own responses to the growth of Japan’s power, charged by the twinned forces of colonial nationalism and racial anxiety, as they designed immigration laws to exclude Japanese migrants, developed autonomous military and naval forces, and pressed Britain to rally behind their vision of a ‘white empire’. On the eve of the First World War, Japan stood at the centre of a series of escalating inter-imperial disputes over foreign policy, defence, migration, and ultimately, over the future of the British imperial system itself. This account weaves together studies of diplomacy, strategy, and imperial relations to pose searching questions about how Japan’s entry into the ‘family of civilized nations’ was complicated by ideas of race.

The Vietnam War is the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies, policy reports, memoirs, and literary titles. As America’s longest and most controversial war, it coincided with domestic turmoil in the United States and in Southeast Asia, led to the displacement of large numbers of people, and strained the social fabric of Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese societies. The complex nature of the war means that despite the many books that have been written about it, much remains to unfold, in particular the experiences of ethnic minorities in Laos who became entangled in Cold War politics during the 1960s and 1970s. This book fills the gap by exploring the dramatic forces of history that drew several dozen young Hmong men to become fighter pilots in the United States’ Secret War in Laos, which was in direct support of the larger war in Vietnam. They transformed from ethnic minorities who mostly lived on the margins of Lao society to daring airmen working alongside American pilots. After four decades in exile, surviving pilots, families of those killed in action, and American veterans who worked with them collectively narrated their version of the historical events that resulted in the forced migration of nearly 150,000 Hmong to the United States. By privileging Hmong knowledge, this book begs us to reconsider the war from overlooked perspectives and to engage in the ongoing construction of meanings of war and postwar memories in shaping ethnic and national identities.

This study is a richly detailed historical work of the unsettled half-century from the 1790s to the 1830s when the British East India Company (EIC) strove to establish control over the colonial north-eastern frontiers spanning the River Brahmaputra to the Burmese border. It offers a much-needed reframing of regional histories of South Asia away from the sub-continental Indian mainland to the varied social ecologies of Sylhet, Cachar, Manipur, Jaintia, and Khasi hills. As a mercantile corporation, the EIC aimed at getting in command of the millennium-old over-land commercial routes connecting India and China. The study specifically engages with the early nineteenth century explorations of trade across Burma. Simultaneously, the Mughal diwani grant compelled them to govern territory. Drawing on extensive research, the study demonstrates the incompatibility of bureaucratic power, the complex socioeconomic networks of authority, and the ever-changing landscapes of the region. In a monsoon climate, where rivers moved and land was inundated for months, any attempt to form a uniform administration tended to clash with hybrid land- and waterscapes. This work explores how daily administrative and military practice shaped colonial polities and subject formation. Located at the intersection of colonial, legal, and environmental history, the study is of particular interest for scholars and students in history, political ecology, and anthropology.

This book reopens the question of consular jurisdiction and extraterritoriality in China and Japan. The book combines recent findings in Qing history on the nature of ethnicity and law with the history of the treaty ports in both China and Japan, especially Shanghai, Yokohama, and Nagasaki. Extraterritoriality was not implanted into East Asia as a ready-made product but developed in a dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions, which are best understood within the complex triangular relationship between China, Japan and the West. A close reading of treaty texts and other relevant documents suggests that a Qing institution for the adjudication for Manchu-Chinese disputes served as the model for both the International Mixed Court in Shanghai and the extraterritorial arrangements in Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in 1871. The adaptability of Qing legal procedure provided for a relatively seamless transition into the treaty port era, which would have momentous consequences for China’s national sovereignty in the twentieth century. There was no parallel to this development in the Japanese case. Instead, Japanese authorities chose not to integrate consular courts and mixed courts into the indigenous legal order, and as a consequence, consular jurisdiction remained an alien body in the Japanese state, and Japanese policymakers were determined to keep it that way.

Guan Yu was a minor general in his own day, who supported one of numerous claimants to the throne in the early third century CE. He was captured and executed by enemy forces in 219. He eventually became one the most popular and influential deities of imperial China under the name Lord Guan or Emperor Guan, of the same importance as the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin. This is a study of his cult, but also of the tremendous power of oral culture in a world where writing became increasingly important. The book follows the rise of the deity through his earliest stage as a hungry ghost, his subsequent adoption by a prominent Buddhist monastery during the Tang (617–907) as its miraculous supporter, and his recruitment by Daoist ritual specialists during the Song dynasty (960–1276) as an exorcist general. It continues on with his subsequent roles as a rain god, protector against demons and barbarians, and, eventually, moral paragon and almost messianic saviour. Throughout his divine life, the physical prowess of the deity, more specifically Lord Guan’s ability to use violent action for doing good, remained an essential dimension of his image. Most research ascribes a decisive role in the rise of his cult to the literary traditions of the Three Kingdoms, best known from the famous novel by this name. This book argues that the cult arose from oral culture and spread first and foremost as an oral practice.

A history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era, the book addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices in China’s long history and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to their modern counterparts in the twentieth century and beyond. From ancient times to the twenty-first century, there has been an enduring expectation or hope among the Chinese people that justice should and will be done in society, which is expressed in a popular Chinese saying, “Heaven has eyes.” To the Chinese mind in the imperial era, justice was, and was to be achieved as, an alignment of Heavenly reason, state law, and human relations. Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century, when Western-derived notions—natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process—came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong, which was a fundamental shift in philosophical and moral principles that informed law and justice. The legal-judicial reform agendas since the beginning of the twentieth century (still ongoing today) stemmed from this change in the Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize these principles in everyday practices is much more difficult to accomplish, hence all the legal dramas, including tragedies, in the past century or so. The book lays out how and why that is the case.

This book begins with two simple questions: Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? And what can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China, and, more broadly, about the historical development of the universal subject of modernity? Insofar as it responds to those questions, this book is a history of the Western imagination. But it is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, the explosion in international commerce that dates from the 18th century and goes by the name of “globalization,” the theories of human rights, and the history of the idea of modernity. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the latter would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples (including medical case reports, photographs, novels, paintings, and travellers' reports) in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. The representational and historical apparatus that produces these examples has organized the West's explicit relation to China and served as a crucial mode of expression for the West's most fundamental values.

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The chapters here address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China. This critical biography tells the story of his remarkable life, one that bridged Counter‐Reformation Catholic Europe and China under the Ming dynasty. Using Chinese and western sources, Hsia follows the life of Ricci from his childhood in Macerata, through his education in Rome, to his sojourn in Portuguese India, before embarking on the long journey of self‐discovery and cultural encounter in the Ming realm. Along the way, we glimpse the workings of the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia, the mission of the Society of Jesus, and life in the European enclave of Macau on the Chinese coast. The book offers sketches of Ricci's fellow Jesuits and portraits of Chinese mandarins, who formed networks indispensible for Ricci's success. Examining new sources, Hsia offers new information and insight into Ricci's long period of trial and frustration in Guangdong province, where he first appeared in the persona of a foreign Buddhist monk. After 12 years in China, Ricci achieved in 1595 the crucial breakthrough in his career. Ricci's move to Nanchang enabled him to engage in sustained intellectual conversation with a leading Confucian scholar and consequently, to find a synthesis between Christianity and Confucianism in propagating the Gospels in China. With his expertise in cartography, mathematics and astronomy, Ricci quickly won recognition, especially after he had settled in Nanjing in 1598. As his reputation and friendships grew, Ricci launched into a sharp polemic against Buddhism, while his career took its crowning achievement in the imperial capital of Beijing. The life, work, and legacy of Ricci is alive today, as the author reflects on a century of Ricci scholarship and commemoration.

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled.