Victor B. Lieberman

"The first of three volumes surveying the historical, spatial, and human dimensions of inter-Asian connections, Asia Inside Out: Changing Times brings into focus the diverse networks and dynamic developments that have linked peoples from Japan to Yemen over the past five centuries. (Continued). "Each author examines an unnoticed moment--a single year or decade--that redefined Asia in some important way. Heide Walcher explores the founding of the Safavid dynasty in the crucial battle of 1501, while Peter C. Perdue investigates New World silver's role in Sino-Portuguese and Sino-Mongolian relations after 1557. Victor Lieberman synthesizes imperial changes in Russia, Burma, Japan, and North India in the seventeenth century, Charles Wheeler focuses on Zen Buddhism in Vietnam to 1683, and Kerry Ward looks at trade in Pondicherry, India, in 1745. Nancy Um traces coffee exports from Yemen in 1636 and 1726, and Robert Hellyer follows tea exports from Japan to global markets in 1874. Anand Yang analyzes the diary of an Indian soldier who fought in China in 1900, and Eric Tagliacozzo portrays the fragility of Dutch colonialism in 1910. Andrew Willford delineates the erosion of cosmopolitan Bangalore in the mid-twentieth century, and Naomi Hosoda relates the problems faced by Filipino workers in Dubai in the twenty-first. (Continued). "Moving beyond traditional demarcations such as West, East, South, and Southeast Asia, this interdisciplinary study underscores the fluidity and contingency of trans-Asian social, cultural, economic, and political interactions. It also provides an analytically nuanced and empirically rich understanding of the legacies of Asian globalization." --Book jacket.

"Seeking to transcend the hoary insistence on East-West dichotomies, this collection looks at transformations in cultural and political organization across Eurasia that were both more general and more psychologically significant to pre-1830 actors themselves than the problem that has obsessed twentieth-century comparativists, namely, the origins of a unique European industrialism. Nine coordinated essays explore the proposition that the integration of isolated units to form more cohesive systems in France, Russia, and other European countries c. 1000-1830 correspond in important respects to integrative processes that were occurring at the same time in parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Japan.". "Insofar as similarities between some European and Asian areas exceeded those between different sectors of Asia, this collection invites historians to reject Eurocentric perspectives in favor of more thematic, contextually-specific categories. At the same time it raises the possibility of a broad "early modern" period for Eurasia at large."--BOOK JACKET.