Title: Wars of the third kind: conflict in underdeveloped countries 
Author: Rice, Edward E. (Edward Earl) 1909-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Most of the armed conflicts since World War II have been neither conventional nor nuclear, but wars of a third kind, usually fought in the Third World and relying heavily, although not exclusively, on guerrilla warfare. Edward E. Rice examines a number of conflicts of this sort, starting with the American Revolution, but concentrating on the Chinese Civil War, the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, the wars in Algeria and in Vietnam, and the repeated conflicts in Latin America. He explores the origin, organization, and motivation of wars of the third kind, their rural and popular nature, the conversion of guerrilla armies to regular armies, and conceptual approaches to counterinsurgency. Rice concludes with an analysis of the perils of these wars for the great powers.   [brief]
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Title: To have and have not: southeast Asian raw materials and the origins of the Pacific War 
Author: Marshall, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Public Policy | Asian History | Southeast Asia | Economics and Business | Politics
Publisher's Description: Jonathan Marshall makes a provocative statement: it was not ideological or national security considerations that led the United States into war with Japan in 1941. Instead, he argues, it was a struggle for access to Southeast Asia's vast storehouse of commodities - rubber, oil, and tin - that drew the U.S. into the conflict. Boldly departing from conventional wisdom, Marshall reexamines the political landscape of the time and recreates the mounting tension and fear that gripped U.S. officials in the months before the war.Unusual in its extensive use of previously ignored documents and studies, this work records the dilemmas of the Roosevelt administration: it initially hoped to avoid conflict with Japan and, after many diplomatic overtures, it came to see war as inevitable. Marshall also explores the ways that international conflicts often stem from rivalries over land, food, energy, and industry. His insights into "resource war," the competition for essential commodities, will shed new light on U.S. involvement in other conflicts - notably in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.   [brief]
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Title: The political economy of mountain Java: an interpretive history 
Author: Hefner, Robert W 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian History | Sociology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia | Politics
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Title: The travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-Century journey through India 
Author: Mahomet, Sake Deen 1759-1851
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Travel | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole.Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.   [brief]
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Title: The waning of the communist state: economic origins of political decline in China and Hungary 
Author: Walder, Andrew George
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | European History | Asian History | China | European Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays offers a compelling explanation for the decline of communism in the two countries that went the furthest with economic reforms - China and Hungary. Articulating a vision of change that serves as a counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on citizen resistance and protest, the contributors focus instead on the declining organizational integrity of the centralized party-state. The essays illuminate a "quiet revolution from within" that beset the two regimes after they chose to reform their economies and make concessions to the private sector.The nine contributors, three each from the disciplines of sociology, political science, and anthropology, examine key trends that appeared in both countries. The chapters trace political consequences of economic reform that range from the decline of the central state's fiscal dominance to the revitalization of long-suppressed ethnic loyalties.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of Muslim cultural reform: jadidism in Central Asia 
Author: Khalid, Adeeb 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Asian Studies | Asian History | European History
Publisher's Description: Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their own land but also within the larger modern Islamic world.Khalid uses previously untapped literary sources from Uzbek and Tajik as well as archival materials from Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and France to explore Russia's role as a colonial power and the politics of Islamic reform movements. He shows how Jadid efforts paralleled developments elsewhere in the world and at the same time provides a social history of the Jadid movement. By including a comparative study of Muslim societies, examining indigenous intellectual life under colonialism, and investigating how knowledge was disseminated in the early modern period, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform does much to remedy the dearth of scholarship on this important period. Interest in Central Asia is growing as a result of the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and Khalid's book will make an important contribution to current debates over political and cultural autonomy in the region.   [brief]
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Title: Passions of the tongue: language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 
Author: Ramaswamy, Sumathi
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | South Asia | Language and Linguistics | Asian History | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.   [brief]
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Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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