Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia [Paperback]

Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asiaaddresses provocative themes concerning the experience of particular nations and of East Asia as a whole. It explores the turbulent process of integrating Asian societies and political systems into a global order dominated by the West over the past two centuries.

The authors show that important changes were already underway before the western advance, which had their own internal logic and staying power. They describe how people in China, Japan, and Korea redefined and defended indigenous traditions even as they disagreed over what these traditions were and how to transform them. They make it clear that nationalism was a powerful motivating force in the modern development of these countries, but they stress that a wide variety of nationalisms emerged and collided in the dramatic history of modern Asia.

[This book] is a highly stimulating collection, designed to make undergraduates think, but one which should appeal to an informed audience well beyond universities...[It undoes] a fair amount of the conventional wisdom about East Asia in the modern period, showing that there were other possibilities and other options for the development of these societies than the one that eventually emerged...the quality of the writing is uniformally high, making each chapter a pleasure to read.In these original essays, distinguished scholars of modern East Asia distill from long years of research interpretive accounts of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Japan, and Korea. All of the contributors describe particular features of the modern experience of East Asian countries, while also addressing common themes.