Asian History Research Articles

Dim-Sum Over Milk Tea: Taiwan’s 21st Century Gastrodiplomacy and Some Lessons for the Philippines

Gastrodiplomacy is said to have emerged in Asia as an attempt by an Asian country to differentiate its unique flavor that is often mistaken to be that of a neighboring country. Even before the term gastrodiplomacy was coined, countries have practiced this approach to establish a national identity. Taiwan's Tourism Bureau officially started to emphasize food as a means of attraction in 2009. Although Taiwan's gastrodiplomacy is known as "dim-sum diplomacy," pearl milk tea is also listed under the "snack and beverages” category of Taiwan food for tourists.
 Tea, on the other hand, is a pivotal part of Asian history, particularly in its economic aspect. For instance, Taiwan’s tropical weather combined with elevated terrains allows the state to produce tea. It was in the early 1980s when the beverage was reinvented - cold and mixed with sweetened tapioca pudding. Thus, the first milk tea was served in Taiwan.
 The present generation of Filipinos, through a survey conducted, acknowledged milk tea as a product of Taiwan, as Taiwanese milk tea stores also multiplied in the Philippines. Unlike dim-sum, which the Filipinos attribute as Chinese, Filipinos recognize milk tea as a product of Taiwan.
 With this, it is recommended that Taiwan highlights milk tea in its gastrodiplomacy campaign to contribute to the recognition and preservation of “Taiwan cuisine-consciousness.” The Philippines can also learn from this diplomatic strategy in hopes of joining its neighboring countries in the great practice of gastrodiplomacy.
 References
 “16 Most Popular Chinese Dishes,” 24 November 2020. Available in https://food.ndtv.com/lists/10-most-popular-chinese-dishes-740725. Accessed 20 February 2021.
 Ang, Tiny, “Top 10 Milk Teas Places in Manila (The Ultimate List!),” 2013. Available in https://www.spot.ph/eatdrink/53213/top-10-milk-teas-the-ultimate-list?_ga=2.212317969. 409674221.1575507700-1845411473.1575507700. Accessed 05 December 2019.
 Castro, Jasper, “Tracking The Local Milk Tea Trend: How Did This Obsession Start?” 2019. Available in https://www.yummy.ph/news-trends/milk-tea-trend-history-philippines-a00261-20190307-lfrm2. Accessed 25 November 2019.
 Chang, Derrick, “Bubble Tea: how did it start?” 12 July 2017. Available in https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/bubble-tea-inventor/index.html. Accessed 04 December 2019.
 Cwiertka, Katarzyna, “Serving the Nation: The Myth of Washoku,” In Consuming Life of Post-Bubble Japan, edited by Katarzyna Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
 “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins,” 17 January 2019. Available in https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and- generation-z-begins/ft_19-01-17_generations_2019/. Accessed 25 November 2019.
 Defrancq, Camille, “Taiwan’s Gastrodiplomacy: Strategies of Culinary Nation-Branding and Outreach,” National Chengchi University, Master’s Thesis, June 2018.
 “Eight Great Gastrodiplomacy Nations,” 2015. Available in https://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/story/eight-great-gastrodiplomacy-nations. Accessed 07 November 2019.
 Immawati, Nurul Amalia, “The Thailand’s Gastrodiplomacy as a Strategy to Develop National Branding (2002-2015),” Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Undergraduate Thesis, 2017.
 Jaaksola, Sara, “A Brief History of Dim Sum in China,” 01 February 2017. Available in https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/a-brief-history-of-dim-sum-in-china/. Accessed 29 November 2019.
 Lantrip, Brandon Chase, “The Chinese Cultural Influence on Filipino Cuisine,” University of San Francisco, Master Thesis, 2017.
 Lasco, Gideon, "Why Filipinos have a sweet tooth,” 21 December 2017. Available in https://opinion.inquirer.net/109639/filipinos-sweet-tooth. Accessed 03 December 2019.
 Lipscomb, Anna, “Culinary Relations: Gastrodiplomacy in Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan,” March 2019. Available in http://yris.yira.org/essays/3080. Accessed 04 December 2019.
 Lui, Kwanyin, “Bubble tea takes Taiwan to the world,” 27 May 2011. Available in https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=6,23,45,6,6&post=10286. Accessed 04 December 2019.
 Nirwandy, Noor and Ahmad Azran Awang, “Conceptualizing Public Diplomacy Social Convention Culinary: Engaging Gastro Diplomacy Warfare for Economic Branding,” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 130, (2014): 325-332.
 Niu, Isabelle, “From government to refugees, food is now diplomacy,” 28 December 2018. Available in https://qz.com/1496148/from-governments-to-refugees-food-is-now-diplomacy/. Accessed 07 November 2019.
 Ordinanza, Deneca, “LIST: The Best Milk Teas in the Metro and Where to Get Them,” 04 January 2019. Available in https://primer.com.ph/blog/2019/01/04/list-the-best-milk-teas-in-the-metro-and-where-to-get-them/. Accessed 05 December 2019.
 “Taiwan launches gastro-diplomacy drive,” Available in https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/08/taiwan-launches-gasto-diplomacy-drive. Accessed 07 November 2019.
 “Taiwanese Gastrodiplomacy 2.0,” 03 December 2010, Available in https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=2&post=1551. Accessed 07 November 2019.
 “Tasty Taiwan Ties,” 10 August 2010. Available in https://thediplomat.com/2010/08/tasty-taiwan-ties/. Accessed 20 February 2021.
 “The World Factbook: Philippines,” 20 November 2019. Available in https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rp.html#field-anchor- people-and-society-age-structure. Accessed 05 December 2019.
 “Top 10 Milk-Tea Places in Manila (2018 Edition),” 24 July 2018, Available in https://www.spot.ph/eatdrink/the-latest-eat-drink/74521/best-milk-tea-manila- 2018-a00198-20180724-lfrm2. Accessed 05 December 2019.
 “Why do Filipino called food lover,” Available in https://lookupgrade.com/en/blog/english-why-do-filipino-called-food-lover/. Accessed 03 December 2019.
 Zhang, Juyan, “The Foods of the Worlds: Mapping and Comparing Contemporary Gastrodiplomacy Campaigns,” International Journal of Communication, 9, (2015): 568-591.

Selective Amnesia and South Asian Histories: An Interview with Indrani Chatterjee

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논쟁 형태 선다형 역사 문항의 분석과 문항 개발의 방향

This paper selected and analyzed debate-style multiple-choice questions on the Korean history, East Asian history and World History subjects of the College Scholastic Ability Test(including mock test) and the National academic evaluation for high school seniors from 2013 to 2020. The number of debate-style questions is rare. Debate-style questions are divided into cases in which people in the past argue about the facts persons etc of that period, and cases in which people in the present argue about the facts persons etc of the past, depending on the timepoint of the person participating in the debate. There are more cases of the latter. Debate-style questions may be typified in various ways depending on the intention of the question making. In order to maximize the historical educational effects through debate-style questions, it is necessary to question the persons, organizations, and events that most students take for granted. Debate-style history classes are not held in many schools due to teachers'' abilities, school and student circumstances. Under these situation, debate-style questions of the nationwide history test provide many students with a variety of opinions at that time and today, providing an opportunity to expand their awareness of ‘historical’ events and persons. This allows students to question past events that appear to have taken place ‘without controversy’ and historical descriptions that appear to have been ‘agreed.’

Combined Low-/High-Density Modern and Ancient Genome-Wide Data Document Genomic Admixture History of High-Altitude East Asians.

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is considered to be one of the last terrestrial environments conquered by the anatomically modern human. Understanding of the genetic background of highland Tibetans plays a pivotal role in archeology, anthropology, genetics, and forensic investigations. Here, we genotyped 22 forensic genetic markers in 1,089 Tibetans residing in Nagqu Prefecture and collected 1,233,013 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the highland East Asians (Sherpa and Tibetan) from the Simons Genome Diversity Project and ancient Tibetans from Nepal and Neolithic farmers from northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau from public databases. We subsequently merged our two datasets with other worldwide reference populations or eastern ancient Eurasians to gain new insights into the genetic diversity, population movements, and admixtures of high-altitude East Asians via comprehensive population genetic statistical tools [principal component analysis (PCA), multidimensional scaling plot (MDS), STRUCTURE/ADMIXTURE, f3, f4, qpWave/qpAdm, and qpGraph]. Besides, we also explored their forensic characteristics and extended the Chinese National Database based on STR data. We identified 231 alleles with the corresponding allele frequencies spanning from 0.0005 to 0.5624 in the forensic low-density dataset, in which the combined powers of discrimination and the probability of exclusion were 1–1.22E-24 and 0.999999998, respectively. Additionally, comprehensive population comparisons in our low-density data among 57 worldwide populations via the Nei’s genetic distance, PCA, MDS, NJ tree, and STRUCTURE analysis indicated that the highland Tibeto-Burman speakers kept the close genetic relationship with ethnically close populations. Findings from the 1240K high-density dataset not only confirmed the close genetic connection between modern Highlanders, Nepal ancients (Samdzong, Mebrak, and Chokhopani), and the upper Yellow River Qijia people, suggesting the northeastern edge of the TP served as a geographical corridor for ancient population migrations and interactions between highland and lowland regions, but also evidenced that late Neolithic farmers permanently colonized into the TP by adopting cold-tolerant barley agriculture that was mediated via the acculturation of idea via the millet farmer and not via the movement of barley agriculturalist as no obvious western Eurasian admixture signals were identified in our analyzed modern and ancient populations. Besides, results from the qpAdm-based admixture proportion estimation and qpGraph-based phylogenetic relationship reconstruction consistently demonstrated that all ancient and modern highland East Asians harbored and shared the deeply diverged Onge/Hoabinhian-related eastern Eurasian lineage, suggesting a common Paleolithic genetic legacy existed in high-altitude East Asians as the first layer of their gene pool.

Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N. A. Attewell (eds), Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History

Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N. A. Attewell (eds), <i>Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History</i>

En torno a los orígenes de la Gran Divergencia: debates recientes en historia económica (2000-2018)

El objetivo principal de este artículo es analizar el debate reciente en torno a los orígenes históricos de la denominada Gran Divergencia. Se examinan cuatro posturas. Primero, la idea de trampa maltusiana desarrollada por Gregory Clark. Segundo, el punto de vista de la Escuela de California de Historia Económica, liderada por Kenneth Pomeranz. Tercero, la hipótesis de la economía de altos salarios de Robert C. Allen. Cuarto, el concepto de revolución industriosa propuesto por Jan de Vries. El artículo concluye describiendo las tendencias recientes de la historiografía económica: la renovación de las ideas maltusianas, las críticas a la historia social de fines del siglo XX y el énfasis en la historia de Asia

Engendering the Buddhist State

This slim but intellectually expansive volume outlines a new understanding of the gendered relationship between the singular and the universal in Southeast Asian history, interrogating the ways early Cambodian history has been written and understood as an encounter between the global, cosmopolitan, theoretical, and phallic on the one hand, and local, vernacular, idiomatic, and yonic on the other. Drawing on diverse theoretical, historical, and historiographical sources, Thompson deconstructs these binary categories to present a more complex image of the engagement between the aesthetics and politics of sexual difference in the ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia. In doing so, she reappraises conceptual models that have informed studies of pre-modern Southeast Asia, notably Sheldon Pollack’s ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ – that vast politically universal and ethnically diverse ecumene that included much of South and Southeast Asia in which ‘Sanskrit became the premiere instrument of political expression ’1 – and George Cœdès’ ‘Indianized states’, the...

Universal Culture in Europe and Asia——A Brief Analysis of the History of Universal Culture in Ancient Rome and China

Around the middle Ages, two universal national cultures emerged in the vast land of Eurasia that spanned ethnicity-namely, Romania (ancient Rome and Byzantium) and China, respectively. Since ancient times, the Chinese people have had a complex feeling for ancient Rome. The official book named “Book of Later Han (Dynasty)” of ancient China, it was described as follows: "most of the Roman people are similar to the people of Qin Dynasty. They are all-powerful and capable of fighting". Therefore, the ancient Chinese Translation of "Rome" was determined as "Da Qin (the first empire of China)". Although there are great differences in culture and customs between Romania (ancient Rome and Byzantium) and China, which can represent the culture of Europe and East Asia, they are surprisingly consistent in terms of a national structure, complex multi-ethnic culture, and influence on neighboring countries. This paper analyzed the formation process of Romania (ancient Rome and Byzantium) and China in universal culture and their influence on neighboring countries, aiming to provide a theoretical basis for the better study of European and Asian history and culture.

“To Understand All Life as Fragile, Valuable, and Interdependent”

Abstract As old age garners more attention in the time of COVID-19, this roundtable discussion brings together scholars from three different areas within aging studies to define the field’s terms and map out some of its contours and potential future directions. Stephen Katz draws on poststructuralist theory, feminism, and theories of materiality and embodiment in his historically informed work in critical gerontology. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s research in global public health and South Asian history brought her to the study of physiological old age as it intersects with social histories in the global South, thus critiquing Eurocentric epistemologies of aging. Pat Thane is a social historian interested in old age in relation to gender, labor, inequality, and welfare states, as well as the long arc of the meaning of old age in the West.

Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis

Reviewed by: Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding ed. by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, and: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis Philip Seaton Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding. Edited by Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 264 pages. ISBN: 9781350127050 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia. Edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. 252 pages. ISBN: 9789888528288 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia and In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire (hereafter, "Overcoming Empire" and "Ruins," respectively) were produced as part of a 2013–2019 group research project called "The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965," managed by Barak Kushner and funded by a European Research Council grant. A simple review of just the two books would comment on the high quality of scholarship across nineteen chapters penned by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, with the requisite introductory chapters by the editors—in other words, a professional job well done. It would also pick up a few of the key arguments in individual chapters, probably with a little more focus on those chapters to which the reviewer's own research is closely connected. I will adopt that approach in the second half of this review, but first I feel it is important to review the project itself with an eye to the new things its conception allows us to say about the year 1945 and its broader lessons for researchers of East Asian history and beyond. But I should start with a declaration of interest. In November 2016, Barak Kushner invited me to one of his project events at the University of Cambridge to give a talk about my recent fieldwork on contents tourism. Although my paper was not published as part of the project—it ultimately appeared in Japan Review—this experience gave me an appreciation of what was being attempted. Kushner writes on his website that the project coordinated postdoctoral research associates and offered PhD scholarships to investigate "the impact of the fall of the Japanese empire in East Asia."1 The project members held symposia, produced numerous other stand-alone articles, and published a book that predates the two under review here: The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia: (hereafter "Dismantling").2 It is particularly important to read Overcoming Empire and Ruins with reference to this earlier book if we are to grasp the total scope of the project. Kushner's introduction to Dismantling sets out the project's aims: The [Japanese] empire did not end as cleanly as is often perceived in domestic national histories of Japan, which until recently tended to ignore the legacy of empire outside Japan's [End Page 423] occupied main islands. It is necessary to bring empire back to discussions of postwar East Asian identity and to fold it into a history for the region as a whole with Japan at the center.3 Kushner notes that while there is much scholarship on the creation of the Japanese empire, the common image of Japan's defeat in war has left the dismantling of the empire comparatively underresearched, particularly in transnational perspective. The ambitious scope of these aims mean that they can only realistically be achieved by a team that pools its research expertise in diverse geographical areas, archival material, cultural memories, and disciplinary approaches. Dismantling comprises sixteen research papers, which makes a total of thirty-five papers across the three books. Dismantling has more of a Japanese focus supplemented by a European perspective; Overcoming Empire focuses more on mainland China, Taiwan, and Korea; and Ruins is somewhere in between with coverage across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The geographical focus of the project, therefore, was East Asia. However, it would have been nice to have a little...

Partition's Legacies by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook

Reviewed by: Partition's Legacies by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook Gurharpal Singh Partition's Legacies By Joya Chatterji with an Introduction by David Washbrook. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Since the publication of Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism, and Partition 1932-1947 (1994) and The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (2007), Joya Chatterji has emerged as one of the foremost historians working on the division of India. These works, which have become the standard texts on the subject, are now complemented by this copious volume, which brings together a collection of essays written over a period of twenty years in which the author examines broader themes that shaped this seminal moment in modern South Asian history. The collection is grouped into four categories: identities, decolonisation and nation-making; refugees, mobility and migration; immobility; and citizenship. It also includes an introduction by the late David Washbrook summarising how Chatterji has both anticipated and has been at the forefront of the changing theoretical landscape of the study of the Partition of India. The common theme that binds the volume is Chatterji's focus on Bengal—its history, people and post-1947 development in South Asia and beyond in the Bengali diaspora. There is much to admire in this rich, voluminous collection. Foremost, it offers an excellent example of how to use comparative political history to re-evaluate the Partition that is so often viewed as sui generis. Most essays in it follow a common structure by challenging existing conventional wisdom, formulating the research question, offering a solid empirical foundation for the arguments outlined, and the need for broader comparative reflection to make sense of Partition and its enduring processes. It is impossible to do justice to this collection, but I highlight four aspects that I found especially noteworthy. Chatterji's understanding of decolonisation with its rushed transfer of power reinforces her earlier readings that it was Congress' pursuit of a downsized India without the Muslim-majority provinces that precipitated the cataclysmic events of 1947. "The Congress party's single-minded Unitarianism," she observes, "forced a de-territorialised, variously imagined, 'Muslim nation' into a 'moth-eaten and truncated'state" (33-4). Related to this, the Congress engineered to control the processes and outcomes of the Boundary Commission, so much so that Mountbatten accepted the party's proposed terms of reference without demure, dismissing Jinnah's suggestion that the whole process should be overseen by the United Nations. Heavily influenced by the Congress, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, according to Chatterji, eventually "carved out Pakistan like an inexpert butcher from those parts of the empire the Congress leaders no longer wanted" (34). The essays on the refugees provide strikingly new insights not only into the reasons and nature of the migratory flows that took place but the complex interplay of government actions and individual and collective social capital. A new reading is offered of the settlement of refugees in West Bengal which is traditionally associated with the rise of the communist movement in the state and substantially explains the subsequent ghettoization of Muslims in a few districts and urban localities. And finally, there is much in the volume of the making of identities—historical, modern and diasporic—in shaping the politics of Bengal and the related contestations around citizenship in South Asia and overseas. A collection of this nature inevitably includes some generalisations that are difficult to sustain. Chatterji's contention that "no one expected the carnage that followed" (34) the British withdrawal is hard to justify because since 1940, if not earlier, the Sikh leadership had consistently warned of the consequences of the partition of Punjab if Sikh interests were marginalised. Throughout the 1940s, intelligence reports recognised the fact but the decision-making leadership was comfortable with dismissing Sikh demands as a "nuisance." In the event, Master Tara Singh's declaration after the Lahore Resolution that any scheme for Pakistan would have to cross an "ocean of blood" was much closer to the mark than the statements of Jinnah or Nehru that a transfer to power to the dominions of India and Pakistan would not be accompanied by mass migration. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the inter...

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism: Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism:Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan Noriko Ishii On 18 April 1934, Kobe College, one of the first women's colleges in Japan founded by the American Congregational women missionaries, celebrated the dedication of its new Okadayama campus, built in a beautiful Mediterranean style. This was a product of a thirty-year transnational collaboration of American Protestant women's networks across the Pacific. Japanese women of the Kobe College alumnae association provided the land and American women of Protestant churches provided the buildings for the one-million-dollar expansion. At the dedication ceremony, Mrs Hazel Thorne Wilson, representing the Kobe College Corporation in Chicago, declared that the corporation would continue promoting Kobe College as "a symbol of international friendship and goodwill."2 Hashimoto Hatsue, Class of 1926, speaking on behalf of the Japanese women alumnae, said the alumnae's success was due to "a burning love for the college" and "the loving kindness of many American friends,"3 inferring Japanese women's deference to American women's friendship. This case study of the Kobe College expansion campaign provides us a window to examine how the notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism were imagined and used as we historicize the campaign against the backdrop of the shifting world order and the changing landscape of the American foreign missionary movement between 1905 and 1934. The thirty years of the expansion campaign coincided with the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the 1924 US Immigration Act prohibiting Japanese immigration, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and the emergence of uneasy tensions between the United States and Japan, each with their Pacific empires. Both Japanese and American missionaries were forced to face the controversial question of how to deal with the Japanese empire's religious policy of encouraging the three major religions, Shintoism, Buddhism and Christianity, to evangelize among the colonized in order to assimilate them into the Japanese empire. In addition, during the 1920s, women of the American foreign missionary movement faced an internal crisis in which most of the separate women's mission boards were merged with their male-led denominational parent boards. These mergers epitomized the decline of female autonomy in American Protestant foreign mission enterprises.4 Robert also points out that after the First World War, "'World Friendship' decisively replaced 'Woman's Work for Woman' as the missiology of the woman's missionary movement." Robert explained that "World Friendship assumed that western culture no longer had a monopoly on virtue" and that "what was needed of missions was not paternalism, but partnership and friendship: united work for peace and justice,"5 suggesting that such partnership entailed an equal relationship between the western missionaries and their Indigenous counterparts. This article argues that in the Japanese mission field, the transition was more complex. In the Kobe College expansion campaign, the nineteenth-century mission ideology of Woman's Work for Woman remained salient and coexisted with the ecumenical notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism. David A. Hollinger links the concept of what he called "missionary cosmopolitanism" or liberal internationalism in the missionary movement to Wilsonian internationalism. He also called for more attention to study the role of missionary-connected individuals in postwar American diplomacy, including the so-called "mish kids" or the missionary children, because they served as the informants of prewar Asian history and culture, and became the key purveyors of liberal internationalism in the United States.6 This article argues that such was the case in the Kobe College expansion campaign, for both American and Japanese women often used the notions of Wilsonian internationalism and friendship and the concept of Christian internationalism interchangeably. Moreover, Kobe College was imagined to be an ecumenical space of aspirational cosmopolitanism and friendship by both American and Japanese women, especially under the leadership of missionary president Charlotte B. DeForest, herself a "mish kid" born in Japan. Drawing on the conceptual framework of "aspirational cosmopolitanism" defined as "the pursuit of conversations across lines of difference, between disparate socio-cultural, political and linguistic groups, that provisionally created shared public worlds,"7 this article examines how the Kobe College expansion campaign...

The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca ed. by Nile Green

Reviewed by: The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca ed. by Nile Green Danielle Ross The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Edited by Nile Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. xvi + 340 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-30092-7. $34.95 (paper). The Persianate World sets out to fill a gap in both Persian studies and linguistic history: exploring the geographic frontiers of the Persian-writing world. As Nile Green notes in the book's introduction, the concepts of the "Persianate world" or "Persian zone" as a geographical space in which Persian language, literature, and culture enjoyed hegemony was articulated over fifty years ago by Marshall G. S. Hodgson in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in World Civilization (3 vols) (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1974). However, while the concept of a Persianate cultural-linguistic community continues to enjoy currency in Middle Eastern and Inner Asian/Eurasian history, the Persianate community has not gained the same level of prominence in the study of World History as the Latin, Greek koine, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Classical Chinese cultural-linguistic communities. Scholars and laypeople outside the field of Persian studies still tend to associate the Persian language primarily with modern Iran and, sometimes, with Islam in general. The Persianate World's fourteen contributors, an international collective of junior and senior scholars specializing in Ottoman, Russian, Central Asian, South Asia, and/or East Asian history, set out to address these issues by documenting "Persographic" culture (the production and consumption of texts in the Persian language) on the [End Page 161] outskirts of the Persianate zone. Their focus on the "frontier" serves two purposes: (1) to denationalize the history of Persianate culture by emphasizing the role of non-native speakers in Persianate literary production; (2) to challenge the image of Persian as an Islamic language by examining non-Muslim participation in Persian written culture. The Persianate World begins with an introduction in which Green describes the geographical spaces, human communities, and chronological periods that made up the Persianate world. Green's history begins in the 800s C.E. after the spread of Islam into Indo-Iranian-speaking regions and ends in the first decades of the twentieth century as new nation states and national movements promoted printing and education in vernacular languages as an alternative to transnational Persographic culture. The Persianate World focuses on the last five hundred years of this history, 1400 to 1900. The book's first section, "Pan-Eurasian Expansion," explores the spread of Persian writing into peripheral regions of the Persianate world in the 1400s–1600s. Murat Umut Inan details the embrace of Persian in the Ottoman Empire's imperial-bureaucratic and religious-mystical circles. Thibaut d'Hubert traces the use of Persian as a ritual language among villagers in Bengal. Graeme Ford draws attention to Ming bureaucrats' use of Persian as a diplomatic language for communications with Central Asia. Devin DeWeese considers the presence and limits of Persian literature in the Middle Volga region and Siberia. The second section, "The Constraints of Cosmopolitanism," teases out the limits of Persian's influence as a literary language and its decline in prestige from 1600 to 1800. Purima Dhavan uses the careers of several Punjabi authors to explore the failure of Persian to overcome factional competition and create a unified, cosmopolitan intellectual world. David Brophy argues that Turkic replaced Persian as the Qing dynasty's language of diplomatic communications with Central Asia. Alfrid Bustanov shows how students traveling to Bukhara were the main conveyors of Persianate literature to northern Eurasia; these students' choice of other educational destinations (Egypt, Istanbul, Moscow) over Bukhara led to the diminishment of Persian-language knowledge among Russia's Muslims. Alexandre Papas argues that the status of Persian in Eastern Turkistan as an erudite language limited the number of people who mastered it and, ultimately, led to Persian being perceived as a language of the occult. The third section, "New Empires, New Nations," offers four case studies of the complicated fate of Persographic culture in the 1800s–1920s. Michael Fisher argues that Persian enjoyed continued [End Page 162] and even increased prestige in India under British rule...

Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray by Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, and: The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia by Johan Elverskog

Reviewed by: Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray by Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, and: The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia by Johan Elverskog Leslie E. Sponsel Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray by Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 234. $125.00 hardcover, $30.95 paper, $20.99 e-book. The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia by Johan Elverskog. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 176. $55.00 hardcover, $49.95 e-book. Eco-Buddhism, also called ecodharma, green Buddhism, and Buddhist environmentalism, is increasingly pursued. There were only around ten publications about eco-Buddhism prior to 1970, but more than two hundred were published during the decade 1990–2000 alone.1 Some scholars assert that Buddhism is inherently environmental.2 This idea is challenged by Johan Elverskog based on his selection and interpretation of passages from sacred texts and numerous other sources cited in his forty-eight pages of notes. Elverskog marshals his argument in meticulous detail in ten main chapters foreshadowed by a preface and an introduction. Elverskog writes that Buddhism is the only religion that spread throughout Asia (p. 1). He attempts an ambitious survey of the entire environmental history of Asia, with exclusive attention to Buddhism. His temporal focus is the premodern period (500 BCE–1500 CE). He argues that during this time, Buddhism became a major force in the commodity frontier, responsible for resource extraction, deforestation, agricultural expansion (especially [End Page 321] wet rice production), and urbanization. Buddhists substantially transformed the natural landscape, which contributed to the development of protocapitalism in Asia. This environmental transformation of Asia was driven by Buddhism’s “prosperity theology” (p. 3). Elverskog claims that prosperity theology was the core of Buddha’s teachings, and it was rigorously pursued by followers. Wealth evidenced the accumulation of good karma and the elevation of spiritual status. Donating wealth to monasteries increased merit. Premodern Buddhism glorified wealth production, as reflected in audacious monastery construction and ornamentation. This rapacious materialism was necessary to sustain a growing number of monasteries as Buddhism spread throughout Asia. In some cities, hundreds of monasteries were occupied collectively by thousands of monks supported by laity. Buddhism transformed Asia’s natural landscapes. It was an expansive religious, social, economic, and political system based on generating wealth. Elverskog says that these remarkable phenomena are grossly neglected by scholars studying the history of Asia, its environment, and Buddhism. Contrary to the common image of premodern Buddhism in contemporary imagination, this omission is not purely ascetic and apolitical. Elverskog asserts that this new understanding does not necessarily undermine the utility of modern eco-Buddhism. Yet he also casts doubt on “ecoBuddhist fantasies” (pp. xiii, 5) in various ways, criticizing eco-Buddhism for its purportedly mistaken view of history. There are serious problems with Elverskog’s book. Generalizing about all of Asia, Buddhism, and 2,500 years of history is problematic. Elverskog’s generalizations involve complex, diverse, and dynamic phenomena. But Buddhism was modified in adapting to regional and local circumstances. Elverskog claims that there is a “unified environmental history of Asia” (p. 73). Nonetheless, he recognizes the need for detailed local considerations (p. 118). For instance, Thailand’s environmental history does not accord with Elverskog’s interpretation of the sequences and consequences of the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia: Buddhism became the dominant religion in Thailand by the twelfth century, but massive deforestation did not start until the mid-twentieth century with so-called Westernization.3 Given the multitudinous [End Page 322] contexts in which Buddhism spread, any unified environmental history is unlikely. Buddhism is not the only religion influencing Asian history and environments. Islam in Indonesia and Shintoism in Japan as well as Daoism and Confucianism in China are ignored by Elverskog’s Buddhism-centric history. Elements of other religions, such as animism, are often incorporated in or added to Buddhist beliefs and practices. Religious hybridization occurred throughout Asia in premodern times. Moreover, prosperity theology contradicts core principles of Dharma.4 Buddha’s Four Noble Truths consider greed to be among the main causes of suffering, even...

Author's Response: Reconsidering How We Think about Proxies

Author's Response:Reconsidering How We Think about Proxies Yelena Biberman (bio) I am thankful to Asia Policy for inviting Gambling with Violence: State Outsourcing of War in Pakistan and India to be the focus of this book review roundtable and to the reviewers for their deep engagement with the ideas and evidence presented in my work. As Tamanna Salikuddin astutely observes, proxies are all the rage in academic and policy circles. The book's publication coincides with the release of several works exploring how states can effectively manage their local partners and the complications that invariably arise in proxy warfare.1 Much of the fascination stems from questions and anxieties surrounding the United States' global decline. Proxy warfare is widely viewed as one of the key instruments through which powerful states will either try to maintain or achieve great-power status in a new era of geopolitical competition.2 New ideas about state-proxy relations are in high demand, but we must keep in mind that history, and certainly South Asian history, has much to teach us. As Samir Puri points out, novel-sounding ideas like "hybrid war" would be deeply familiar to military philosophers as diverse as Leo Tolstoy and Kautilya. Rashmi Singh identifies as an "enormous contribution" that my new framework "refuses to privilege the interests and power of one side over the other in the process of alliance formation." A pattern that continues to strike me in the literature and policy conversations about proxies is the state-centric orientation, which implicitly privileges the state's dominant narrative. This may in part stem from the relationship between one's level [End Page 193] of education and attitude toward state violence.3 Drawing on U.S. data from the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, sociologist Landon Schnabel found that those with more education are more likely to consider state-sanctioned violence (specifically, war and police violence) justifiable. He posits that "schooling socializes people to establishment culture, identity, and interests, thereby legitimating ruling authority and its actions." 4 We tend to see things from the perspective of the state because we are more likely to identify with the state than with those it is most likely to abuse—marginalized groups and foreign actors. While much of the existing scholarship is methodologically meticulous, the "problems" it seeks to solve seem to privilege powerful states and their needs. This was the point I emphasized in the policy recommendations section in my book's concluding chapter, and one that the reviewers welcomed. The Machiavellian impulse to advise and give the benefit of doubt to those with the most power—be it the prince or the state—can not only weaken scholarly impartiality but also, especially in times of conflict, blunt our humanist instincts. Take some of the news coming out of Afghanistan in late 2020. It includes atrocities carried out not just by the Taliban, but also by state actors and state-backed proxies. In November 2020 the New York Times described how "the elite of the elite among Australian soldiers" in the Australian Defence Force had carried out "a methodical campaign to kill helpless Afghans and cover it up."5 In December 2020, the Intercept made public the atrocities committed by U.S.-backed Afghan "death squads," paramilitary units (known as 01 and 02) outside the control of the Afghan government.6 What problems or puzzles do these events raise for scholars? We should reflect on the questions that are often asked in scholarly research and the underlying assumptions that motivate them. My book brings into the limelight the nonstate actors—their interests, agency, and experiences—by making them central to its theoretical framework and empirical inquiry. Singh is correct to remind us that state actors are no less diverse and interesting, and I interviewed dozens of government, military, and intelligence officials for their sides of the story. [End Page 194] Their accounts were certainly vital and complex, and often quoted in the book. But the existing accounts of the counterinsurgency operations detailed in the book have, I would argue, already done justice to the conflicting motives and predicaments of these individuals, who are typically quite accessible for...

The Politics of “Greater India,” a Moral Geography: Moveable Antiquities and Charmed Knowledge Networks between Indonesia, India, and the West

AbstractSince the nineteenth century, today's South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. Thesemoral geographiesof “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This article explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how networks of scholars, intellectuals, and art collectors linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shaping these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism by following object-biographies and focusing on knowledge exchange via the networks they connected, and by exploring the possibilities, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. The article conceptualizes moral geographies as a heuristic device to understand how people have imagined their belonging to atransnationalspace—in this case Greater India—whether they live inside or outside of that space. It examines the impact these moral geographies have on processes of inclusion and exclusion, particularly their common disregard for Indonesia's Islamic cultures. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows, as these can exaggerate the region's cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

History in the Inks of West: Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe as Self-Fashioning of History

First performed in 1587, Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe can be considered the first English play to have brought Turk and Mongol characters on stage for the audience dealing with the Mongol-Turkish war fought between Taimur, the Mongol sovereign and Bayazid I, the Ottoman emperor. It goes on to show the heights of savagery and brutality along with the ambitious nature of Taimur in the play which perhaps had little historical relevance. The play for this reason was considered to be Orientalist in nature, as majorly the stereotypical vision of the East tainted the character of the Mongol emperor. Marlowe goes on to bend the characters to appear as an image of the West moreover, attributing and endowing him grandly to surface as an avenger of the defeats that the West faced at the hands of the Turks. In the process, the Mongol emperor Timur, cast by Marlowe as the central figure of the play was turned into a Renaissance Man of the English fancy, losing its Eastern lustre as a figure from Central Asian history and heritage. Tamburlaine autonomously represented the history that was loose and had little to no authenticity in it, while intending to create a dramatic masterpiece astounding the audience. Thus, this paper reads it through a New Historicist perspective highlighting the self-fashioning of the characters like Taimur, Bayazid I, along with history in totality by the hands of Marlowe. It shall read the play alongside the historical background and display how the Elizabethan playwright deviated from history to present a barbaric character, very much tainting facts while mingling it with fiction. Further, it shall stress the self-fashioning of the east during the Renaissance by the triumphant Tamburlaine over the meditative and philosophical Timur.

Silsilat as-salatin as a historical source

Manuscripts play a significant role to disclose unknown pages of history. Hajji Mir Muhammad Salim's work “Silsilat as-salatin” is one of those providing huge and valuable information on some aspects of Central Asian history in the XVI - early XVIII centuries. Mainly, the work provides historical data on the types of land ownership, properties, measuring the length and distances, routes of communication and trade. Besides, the work contains information about waqf property and the chain of main religious personnel.

(Mis)reading Chinese Texts in Southeast Asian History: “Moliu”, Duoluomo and the Lure of “Srivijayan” Conquests

(Mis)reading Chinese Texts in Southeast Asian History: “Moliu”, Duoluomo and the Lure of “Srivijayan” Conquests

Buranjis and the Asian History Writing Tradition

The historiographical tradition of Assam called Buranji reached the Northeast of India with the coming of Ahoms in the first quarter of thirteenth century. The history of pre-colonial Assam is largely constructed on the basis of buranji and most modern historians mainly from the region have engaged with the buranji literature reproduced and interpreted by native scholars after the coming of the British. While the main focus of modern historians have been on the relevance and importance of buranji in the historical study of Assam, no significant study is visible in tracing the historical journey of this tradition itself. This article, thus, is an attempt to locate the buranji tradition in a trans-regional context by linking it with the historiographical practices of East and Southeast Asia, particularly by looking at the Chinese historical tradition to propose that certain similarities found in them are highly suggestive of a more active historical interaction between the Tai (Shan) and the Chinese, bearings of which can be seen in the buranji tradition.