Title: Labor and imperial democracy in prewar Japan
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Politics | Asian  History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy.Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.   [brief]
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Title: The autobiography of Ōsugi Sakae 
Author: Ōsugi, Sakae 1885-1923
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Autobiography | Asian  History
Publisher's Description: In the Japanese labor movement of the early twentieth century, no one captured the public imagination as vividly as Osugi Sakae (1885-1923): rebel, anarchist, and martyr. Flamboyant in life, dramatic in death, Osugi came to be seen as a romantic hero fighting the oppressiveness of family and society.Osugi helped to create this public persona when he published his autobiography ( Jijoden ) in 1921-22. Now available in English for the first time, this work offers a rare glimpse into a Japanese boy's life at the time of the Sino-Japanese (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese (1904-5) wars. It reveals the innocent - and not-so-innocent - escapades of children in a provincial garrison town and the brutalizing effects of discipline in military preparatory schools. Subsequent chapters follow Osugi to Tokyo, where he discovers the excitement of radical thought and politics.Byron Marshall rounds out this picture of the early Osugi with a translation of his Prison Memoirs (Gokuchuki) , originally published in 1919. This essay, one of the world's great pieces of prison writing, describes in precise detail the daily lives of Japanese prisoners, especially those incarcerated for political crimes.   [brief]
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Title: Re-drawing boundaries: work, households, and gender in China 
Author: Entwisle, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | China | Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Asian  History
Publisher's Description: Representing the culmination of more than a decade of empirical research in post-Mao China, this collection of essays explores changes in the nature of work in relation to changes in households, migration patterns, and gender roles during an era of economic reform. The contributors are respected scholars in fields that range from history and anthropology to demography and sociology. They use a variety of data and diverse approaches to gauge the impact of new economic opportunities on Chinese households and to show how the rise of the private sector, the industrialization of the countryside, and increased migration have affected Chinese workers and workplaces. The collection also asks us to consider how gender roles have been redefined by the economic and institutional changes that arose from post-Mao market reform.   [brief]
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Title: The state and labor in modern Japan
Author: Garon, Sheldon
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | Asian  History | Politics | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this meticulously researched study, Sheldon Garon examines the evolution of Japan's governmental policies toward labor from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and he substantially revises prevailing views which depict relations between the Japanese state and labor simply in terms of . . . [more]
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Title: Fountain of fortune: money and monetary policy in China, 1000-1700
Author: Von Glahn, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | China | Asian  History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this study, the first of its kind in the English language, Richard von Glahn offers a definitive analysis of the economic, political, and social history of money and monetary policy during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. Von Glahn presents a revisionist interpretation of previously held ideas about the effect of money and international trade in bullion on the rise and decline of dynastic power in China.Von Glahn's study also links Chinese monetary history to changing trends in money use and trade in gold and silver in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. China's shift to a silver economy had a decisive influence not only on the growth of a market economy in China, but also on the formation of a global economy in the early modern era.Exhaustively researched from original archival sources, Fountain of Fortune critically examines the many facets of China's domestic and foreign monetary policy: the foundations of Chinese monetary theory; mining and minting of bronze coin; the rise and fall of paper currency; and the transition to silver bullion as the monetary standard. Providing keen insight into the economic and social history of Chinese society, this volume will serve as an indispensable reference for the reader seeking to understand China's distinctive history and its relationship to the world at large.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese history in economic perspective 
Author: Rawski, Thomas G 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian  History | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The essays assembled here represent a turning point in the study of Chinese economic history. Previous work has emphasized the institutional and social bases of economic change. These studies break new ground, bringing Western economic theory to the study of China's economy since the seventeenth cen . . . [more]
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Title: Telling lives, telling history: autobiography and historical imagination in modern Indonesia 
Author: Rodgers, Susan 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia | Asian  History
Publisher's Description: These two memoirs, superbly rendered into English for the first time, provide unique windows into the Sumatran past, in particular, and the early twentieth-century history of Southeast Asia, in general. Originally published soon after the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1949) liberated the island chain from Dutch control, these unusually insightful narratives recall the authors' boyhoods in rural Toba Batak and Minangkabau villages. In reconstructing their own passage into adulthood, the writers inevitably tell the story of their country's turbulent journey from colonial subjugation through revolution to independence. Susan Rodgers's perceptive introduction illuminates the importance of autobiography in developing historical consciousness and imagining a national future.   [brief]
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Title: Marriage and inequality in Chinese society 
Author: Watson, Rubie S. (Rubie Sharon) 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian  History | Cultural Anthropology | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, poli . . . [more]
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Title: Struggling with destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984
Author: Wadley, Susan Snow 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia | Asian  History
Publisher's Description: Susan Wadley first visited Karimpur - the village "behind mud walls" made famous by William and Charlotte Wiser - as a graduate student in 1967. She returned often, adding her observations and experiences to the Wisers' field notes from the 1920s and 1930s. In this long-awaited book, Wadley gives us a work of unprecedented scope: a portrait of an Indian village as it has changed over a sixty-year period.She hears of changes in agriculture, labor relations, education, and the family. But Karimpur's residents do not speak with one voice in describing the ways their lives have changed - viewpoints vary considerably depending on the speaker's gender, economic status, and caste. Using cultural documents such as songs and stories, as well as data on household budgets and farming practices, Wadley examines what it means to be poor or rich, female or male. She demonstrates that the forms of subordination prescribed for women are paralleled by those prescribed for lower castes.Villagers also speak of political struggles in India, and of the importance of religion when confronting change. Their stories, songs, and life histories reveal the rich fabric of Karimpur and show how much can be learned from listening to its people.   [brief]
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Title: The inner quarters: marriage and the lives of Chinese women in the Sung period
Author: Ebrey, Patricia Buckley 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian  History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women's lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.Ebrey questions whether women's situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.   [brief]
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Title: Voyage of rediscovery: a cultural odyssey through Polynesia
Author: Finney, Ben R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | United States History | East Asia Other | Asian  History
Publisher's Description: In the summer of 1985, a mostly Hawaiian crew set out aboard Hokule'a, a reconstructed ancient double canoe, to demonstrate what skeptics had steadfastly denied: that their ancestors, sailing in such canoes and navigating solely by reading stars, ocean swells, and other natural signs, could intentionally have sailed across the Pacific, exploring the vast oceanic realm of Polynesia and discovering and settling all its inhabitable islands. Their round-trip odyssey from Hawai'i to Aotearoa (New Zealand), across 12,000 nautical miles, dramatically refuted all theories declaring that - because of their unseaworthy canoes and inaccurate navigational methods - the ancient Polynesians could only have been pushed accidentally to their islands by the vagaries of wind and current. Voyage of Rediscovery is a vivid, immensely readable account of this remarkable journey through the Pacific, including tales of a curiosity attack by sperm whales and the crew's welcome to Aotearoa by Maori tribesmen, who dubbed them their sixth tribe. It describes how Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson guided the canoe over thousands of miles of open ocean without compass, sextant, charts, or any other navigational aids. In so doing, it documents the experimental voyaging approach, developed by Ben Finney, which has both transformed our ideas about Polynesian migration and voyaging and been embraced by present-day Polynesians as a way to experience and celebrate their rich ancestral heritage as premier seafarers.By sailing in the wake of their ancestors, the Hawaiians and other Polynesians who captained, navigated, and crewed Hokule'a made the journey described here a cultural as well as a scientific odyssey of exploration.   [brief]
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Title: The colonial Bastille: a history of imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940
Author: Zinoman, Peter 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian  History | Southeast Asia | Politics
Publisher's Description: Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant ne . . . [more]
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Title: Leveling crowds: ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in South Asia
Author: Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | Politics | Asian  History | Religion
Publisher's Description: Ethno-nationalist conflicts are rampant today, causing immense human loss. Stanley J. Tambiah is concerned with the nature of the ethno-nationalist explosions that have disfigured so many regions of the world in recent years. He focuses primarily on collective violence in the form of civilian "riots" in South Asia, using selected instances in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India. He situates these riots in the larger political, economic, and religious contexts in which they took place and also examines the strategic actions and motivations of their principal agents. In applying a wide range of social theory to the problems of ethnic and religious violence, Tambiah pays close attention to the history and culture of the region.On one level this provocative book is a scrupulously detailed anthropological and historical study, but on another it is an attempt to understand the social and political changes needed for a more humane order, not just in South Asia, but throughout the world.   [brief]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian  History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: The magic mountains: hill stations and the British raj 
Author: Kennedy, Dane Keith
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian  History | European History | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority.Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters.The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life.   [brief]
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Title: Understanding Vietnam
Author: Jamieson, Neil L
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Cultural Anthropology | Asian  History | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding.Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese - both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither - to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences.By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.   [brief]
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Title: Provincial passages: culture, space, and the origins of Chinese communism
Author: Yeh, Wen-hsin
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian  History | China | History
Publisher's Description: Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly evokes the changing landscapes, historical circumstances, and personalities involved. The human dimension of this transformation is captured through the biography of Shi Cuntong (1899-1970), a student from the Neo-Confucian county of Jinhua who became a founding member of the Party. Yeh's in-depth analysis of the dynamics of change is combined with a compelling narrative of the moral dilemmas in the lives of Shi Cuntong and other early leaders. Using sources previously closed to scholars, including recently discovered documents in the archives of the First United Front, Yeh shows the urban Communist movement as an intellectual revolution in social consciousness.The Maoist legacy has often been associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Yeh's historical reconstruction of a pre-Mao, non-organizational dimension of Chinese socialism is thus of vital interest to those seeking to redefine the place of the Communist Party in a post-Mao political order.   [brief]
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Title: Aryans and British India
Author: Trautmann, Thomas R
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | South Asia | Asian  History | European History
Publisher's Description: "Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry.In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.   [brief]
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Title: Engendering the Chinese revolution: radical women, communist politics, and mass movements in the 1920s
Author: Gilmartin, Christina K
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian  History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Christina Kelley Gilmartin rewrites the history of gender politics in the 1920s with this compelling assessment of the impact of feminist ideals on the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years. For the first time, Gilmartin reveals the extent to which revolutionaries in the 1920s were committed to women's emancipation and the radical political efforts that were made to overcome women's subordination and to transform gender relations.Women activists whose experiences and achievements have been previously ignored are brought to life in this study, which illustrates how the Party functioned not only as a political organization but as a subculture for women as well. We learn about the intersection of the personal and political lives of male communists and how this affected their beliefs about women's emancipation. Gilmartin depicts with thorough and incisive scholarship how the Party formulated an ideological challenge to traditional gender relations while it also preserved aspects of those relationships in its organization.   [brief]
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Title: Dao de jing: the book of the way
Author: Roberts, Moss 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | China | Asian  History | Asian Literature | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Dao De Jing is one of the richest, most suggestive, and most popular works of philosophy and literature. Composed in China between the late sixth and the late fourth centuries b.c., its enigmatic verses have inspired artists, philosophers, poets, religious thinkers, and general readers down to our own times. This new translation, both revelatory and authentic, captures much of the beauty and nuance of the original work. In an extensive and accessible commentary to his translation, Moss Roberts reveals new depths of Dao De Jing. This edition is distinguished by the literary quality of the translation, its new renderings for a number of the stanzas, and by Roberts's knowledgeable contextualizations. Utilizing recently discovered manuscripts and Chinese scholarship based on them, he is able to shed new light on the work's historical and philosophical contexts. This translation shows that Dao De Jing is far more than a work of personal inspiration; it is also a work of universal scope that makes penetrating comments on politics, statecraft, cosmology, aesthetics, and ethics. Roberts brings these themes to our attention, shows how they are integrated into the work as a whole, and demonstrates the relevance of these topics for our own times.   [brief]
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