Books in the New Approaches to Asian History series

Li Feng's new critical interpretation provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of China's early history. Based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries from the past thirty years, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to find out more about the foundations of Chinese history and civilization.

For thousands of years China had a vibrant imperial urban civilization, which over the last century has been transformed into the largest urban society in the world. Toby Lincoln offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present.

In this vivid new social history of the Tiananmen protests, Beijing massacre, and nationwide crackdown of 1989, Jeremy Brown explores the key turning points of the crisis in China and shows how the massacre and its aftermath were far from inevitable.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions, especially the complex interactions among its people, other living creatures, and the physical world.

Craig Benjamin introduces the first Silk Roads era, and the imperial states and nomadic empires that were connected by this vast exchange network. As the first book to focus exclusively on this crucial period of world history, this survey will be of tremendous interest to a wide range of readers.

In an illuminating and provocative new study, Kiri Paramore evaluates the dynamics of Japanese Confucianism within a historical context to reveal its many cultural manifestations, as a religion and as a political tool, and as social capital and public discourse, as well as its role in international relations and statecraft.

The first history of epidemics in modern Asia. Robert Peckham considers the varieties of responses that epidemics have elicited - from India to China and the Russian Far East - and examines the processes that have helped to produce and diffuse disease across the region.

The concept of yinyang lies at the heart of Chinese thought and culture. The relationship between these two opposing, yet mutually dependent, forces is explored in this brilliant book. Rooted in the Chinese philosophical tradition, the book also demonstrates how yinyang thought manifested itself in diverse cultural practices from divination to the art of war.

In a journey spanning 2,000 years, this book describes the ties of trade, migration and investment between India and the rest of the world, showing how changing patterns of globalisation reverberated on economic policy, politics and political ideology within India. A global history written on India's terms, this book marks a new approach to the study of Indian history.

China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did this legacy shape notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann shows how attitudes toward sex and gender in China have changed during the twentieth century.

The first social history in English of China's Civil War, 1945-9, which brought the Chinese Communist Party to power. Surveying a period of intense upheaval and chaos, it shows how the Communist Party succeeded in overthrowing the Nationalist government to bring political and social revolution to China.

Religious ideas and actors have shaped Asian cultural practices for millennia and have played a decisive role in charting the course of its history. In this engaging and informative book, Thomas David DuBois sets out to explain how religion has influenced the political, social, and economic transformation of Asia from the fourteenth century to the present. Crossing a broad terrain from Tokyo to Tibet, the book highlights long-term trends and key moments, such as the expulsion of Catholic missionaries from Japan, or the Taiping Rebellion in China, when religion dramatically transformed the political fate of a nation. Contemporary chapters reflect on the wartime deification of the Japanese emperor, Marxism as religion, the persecution of the Dalai Lama, and the fate of Asian religion in a globalized world.

A new history of Asia and Islam from the seventh century to today, approached as an interconnected space of encounters and interactions. Challenging the assumed dominance of the Middle East in the development of Islam, Formichi argues for Asia's centrality in the development of global Islam as a religious, social and political reality.

Migration is at the heart of Asian history, and over the last 150 years, migration within Asia and beyond has been greater than at any other time in history. This engaging and informative book crosses a vast terrain, from the Middle East to India and China, tracing modern migration.

Diana Lary tells the tragic history of China's War of Resistance and its consequences from the perspective of those who went through it. She creates a vivid and highly disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war and the accompanying economic and social disintegration.

Between 1453 and 1526 Muslims founded three major states in the Mediterranean, Iran and South Asia: respectively the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. This book is the first comparative study of the politics, religion, and culture of these three empires between 1300 and 1923.

An account of the partition of India detailing the events that led up to it, the terrors that accompanied it, and migration and resettlement. Accompanied by photographs, maps and a chronology of events, it is intended for students as a portal into the history and politics of the Asian region.

By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.

A concise and accessible history of the Chinese Republic, which was established in 1912 at the end of the Chinese Empire and ended in 1949 when mainland China fell to the Communists. It marked the beginning of a period of intense change as China struggled towards modernisation.

In this concise and compelling survey of internal and external Chinese migration from the sixteenth century to the present day, Steven B. Miles traces the experiences of Chinese migrants and their families. Essential reading for those interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and the history of migration more broadly.

This extraordinarily ambitious book traces the history of the invention of gunpowder by the Chinese in the 800s, and its impact on the surrounding Asian world from the ninth through the twentieth century. It is packed with information about military strategy, interregional warfare and the development of armaments.

This new social history of Maoist China provides a compelling account of the tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule. A multi-faceted approach traces the PRC's efforts at modernization and social change, while not losing sight of the human suffering and political terror that remain for many the period's abiding memory.

An engaging new history of the Muslim merchants who settled in China's port cities from the eighth to fourteenth centuries. As a far-flung trade diaspora bound by a common faith, they contributed greatly to the maritime trade that flourished across maritime Asia and which helped to shape the pre-modern world.