31 January 2012, Tuesday

Christian, David (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

David Christian’s Maps of Time not only rescales our perspective on history, but also makes the natural sciences the central loci of history hitherto seen as an arena largely connected with the social sciences. Beginning with the Big Bang that brought the universe into existence much of the history it documents is the work of physicists, astronomers, geologists, chemists and biologists, before it enters the arena of anthropologists and social scientists.

Maps of Time opens with the origins of the universe, the stars and the galaxies, the sun and the solar system, including the earth, and conducts readers through the evolution of the planet before human habitation. It surveys the development of human society from the Paleolithic era through the transition to agriculture, the emergence of cities and states, and the birth of the modern, industrial period right up to intimations of possible futures.

The work also attempts to point toward a single model integrating natural and human history grounded on the conception of structural similarities across different scales and notions of emergent complexity. Particularly relevant in the context of Asian connections is the notion of collective learning as a process that has advanced human culture, especially the processes of cultural interactions where infusions from different civilizations have fuelled the development of particular civilizations. It raises the question of the extent to which intra-Asian connections and Asian connections with the wider world have driven the processes of collective learning across the globe.

27 February 2012, Monday

Lieberman, Victor (2003) Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, Volumes 1 & 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lieberman attempts to connect Southeast Asian to world history. He argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. In particular it argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a hitherto unrecognized pattern of political and cultural integration that was governed by Eurasian-wide climatic, commercial, and military stimuli. These volumes raise intriguing questions that have yet to be answered – to what extent did connections with Southeast Asia shape the wider processes of change in Eastasia, Southasia, Westasia and Europe? As a region that came to be shaped by the cultures of Eurasia did Southeast Asia in turn play a crucial role in the formation of Eurasian cultures?

26 March 2012, Monday

The Travels of Marco Polo: Edited by Peter Harris with Introduction by Colin Thubron. Everyman's Library Classics (2008).

Lieberman attempts to connect Southeast Asian to world history. He argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. In particular it argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a hitherto unrecognized pattern of political and cultural integration that was governed by Eurasian-wide climatic, commercial, and military stimuli. These volumes raise intriguing questions that have yet to be answered – to what extent did connections with Southeast Asia shape the wider processes of change in Eastasia, Southasia, Westasia and Europe? As a region that came to be shaped by the cultures of Eurasia did Southeast Asia in turn play a crucial role in the formation of Eurasian cultures?

20 April 2012, Friday

Gorski, Philip (2003) The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This study attempts to explain the accelerated expansion and consolidation of state power in early modern Europe by invoking the disciplinary revolution that accompanied and was encouraged by the Reformation. It argues that Calvin and those who followed him created an infrastructure of social control based on religious foundations which became a model to imitate for Europe in the beginning, and the rest of the world much later. These disciplinary disciplinary techniques and strategies included communal surveillance, imprisonment and bureaucratic structures. It leads Gorski to question the prevalent presumption that it is the expansion of the military or the rise of capitalism that is fundamental in accounting for the emergence of the modern state. Nevertheless Gorski’s diffusionist account of the rise of the modern state beyond Europe fails to take into account the impact of Asian institutions on the on the fledgling European state in the modern era.

25 May 2012, Friday

Abu-Lughod, Janet (1991) Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 – 1350: Oxford University Press.

Janet Abu-Lughod’s book Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D 1250 – 1350 argues that before the 16th century, commonly regarded as the onset of the rise of Europe to hegemony in the modern world system, there was a period between 1250- 1350 when the Orient experienced greater prosperity and shaped this system. She further argues that without the significant world economy that had existed in the 13th century connecting major trading cities in the Middle East and the Mediterranean across the Indian Ocean to those of East Asia, Europe would not have had the favorable systemic circumstance upon which its progress, prosperity and later prominence came to be based. The greater influence of the Orient in the 13th century world system had also led to a cultural efflorescence that produced great works of art from the elaborate furniture of Mamluk Egypt to the glorious pottery of China. Yet, by the 16th century, the Orient started to decline whereas Europe began to pull ahead. This was because, according to Abu-Lughod, the geographical, political and demographical context of the Orient by the 16th century had temporarily caused it to be in disarray, thus ushering in and enabling the ascent of Europe. This book not only refutes Eurocentric narratives of the history of the world, but also enables us to understand that world history is significantly about systems of connectivity, especially of trade and culture, and how shifts in these may have significant implications upon it.

25 July 2012, Wednesday

Metcalf, Thomas (2007) Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920: University of California Press.

Thomas Metcalf's Imperial Connections argues that India was not simply one of many British colonies, or a land of subalterns struggling to be free, but that it was also a nodal point from which peoples, ideas, goods and institutions radiated outward. He explains that the existence of the British Raj was highly instrumental to the expansion of British power into the islands of the Indian Ocean, the Malayan Peninsula, the Arabian and Gulf Coasts, and Central, East and South Africa. Consequently, according to Metcalf, a "subimperial" system, with India as its center, came to be formed. Metcalf supports his argument by exploring three colonial themes - conquest, control and governance -in which the British Raj had served as the primary reference and resource point for expanding the British Empire.

For the conquest of new territories, Metcalf shows how the British Raj projected its power overseas by using Indian military personnel to conquer and quell uprisings in the new colonies. Metcalf also argued that the British also constructed the notion of “martial races” which they used to especially conscript Sikhs and Gurkhas for overseas deployment in their imperial pursuits.

For the control of new territories, Metcalf argues that the British experience in India in the construction of identities as an instrument of social engineering led them to similarly define people in the new lands they conquered. This is especially the case for the control of Malaya, where the stereotypical construction of the Malays as “lazy natives” facilitated British induction of colonized “hardworking Indian immigrants” to fill administrative positions.

Metcalf finally maintains that for the governance of new territories India provided inspiration, precedents, and personnel for the British colonial administration. The British experience in India in not only introducing English law, but also respecting and retaining some of the traditional laws of the natives, culminated in the “Indian” codes of law. These came to be adopted and implemented in colonial territories beyond India such as the Straits Settlements, Malaya and even East Africa.

17 August 2012, Friday

Charles Stewart & Rosalind Shaw (eds.)(1994) Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London & New York: Routledge.

19 September 2012, Wednesday

Schiffman, Zachary Sayre (2011) The Birth of the Past. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zachary Schiffman’s The Birth of the Past argues that our modern conception of “the” past originated with the Renaissance. To the Ancients the notion of a singular past was inconceivable since they saw history as multiple pasts that were primarily a sequence of occurrences narrated for what they are: timeless, unbounded, universal and meaningful. Although Herodotus wrote his Histories upon a linear frame of time it only served as a thread to hang his freestanding logoi - disparate narratives, accounts and arguments- into instances of episodic time. Even Thucidides who followed him would also write history through what the modern mind would regard as a pattern of repeated “digressions” that make episodic forays which do not project a singular past but a multiple array of them.

In the Christian era , a new consciousness about the notion of human existence in time was conceptualized by Augustine with his notion of the saeculum. More existential than historical, the saeculum was where the sacred and secular intertwined in the present, the here-and-the-now. Augustine circumscribed the saeculum by anchoring it to a figural interpretation of scripture, especially through the theological notion of redemption. Augustine’s successors - Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede- would later detach this figural view of the world from its scriptural tie by including contemporary and post-biblical events. They would also impart a certain narrative order to the saeculum that would come to constitute the leading edge of the modern temporal idea in which the distinction between past and present subverts the simultaneity of time in the saeculum.

During the period of Renaissance there emerged the notion of a “living past” with fervent interest and effort to learn and understand the works of the past in order to both imitate its achievements and draw upon its universal truths for the present. However, as humanists such as Petrarch and Bodin began to experience the limits of imitation in their works they began to develop a certain consciousness about the past as both distant and discrete. Ultimately the practices that both Petrarch and Bodin promoted - methodical reading, note-taking and the systematization of education- did not invigorate the past for imitation in the present but killed it.

While the Renaissance rendered the past dead and discrete to the present, the Enlightenment sought to contextualize and rationalize it. This came to be promulgated by figures such as Montesquie who believed in the need to understand and connect historical events to their underlying causes as well as relations to other events. It promoted a distance between the past and the present, as well as emphasized that the culture of the past has its own distinctive context, so that things that appear out of place in it have come to be seen as “anachronisms”. According to Schiffman such a notion of contextualized chronological inconsistencies is only possible within the modern conception of the past that emerged with the Enlightenment.

30 October 2012, Tuesday

Mollier, Christine (2008) Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Christine Mollier’s 2008 prize-winning book Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China articulates the ways in which the assimilation of Buddhism in medieval China was characterized by its close interaction with Chinese religious Taoism. It engendered not only significant competition between them but also led both religious traditions to shape and mirror one another over an extended period of time. These changes were motivated by both the need to differentiate one from the other in terms of identity, and the recognition that the best way for consolidating the status of their respective clerical organizations and attracting followers required integrating each other’s popular rituals.

Mollier employs a very detailed analysis of scriptural texts, oral traditions and iconography across five different case studies to defend her themes of ‘competition,’ influence, and integration. All of these involve notions that came to be shared by both religious Buddhism and religious Taoism in medieval China: the "Heavenly Kitchens" that offers divine nutrition to its practitioners, the pursuit of sorcery to counter bewitchment, augmenting one’s “life-account” in the pursuit of longevity, astrological talismans that ensure protection by stellar deities, and the iconography of the boddhisatva – Tianzun for Taoists and Guanyin for Buddhists – patterned on each other. Through such case-studies Mollier shows with precision and detail how medieval Buddhists and Taoists each appropriated and transformed for their own use the rites and scriptures of their rivals.

20 November 2012, Tuesday

Menegon, Eugenio (2009) Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. Harvard University Asia Center.

Eugenio Menegon’s 2009 prize-winning book Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China provides a narrative of how Christianity arrived in China in the 16th century, and gradually became enmeshed with the cultural traditions of the local communities to become a local religion over the course of the next three centuries.

Scholarly work on Chinese society and religions has tended to portray Christianity as an agent of Chinese modernization and a form of cultural and religious imperialism. Both lead to an emphasis on Christianity’s foreignness and the social marginalization of converts by the State. Eugenio Menegon uncovers another story that privileges the experiences of the local communities rather than the State or its elite classes. Focusing on the still-active Catholic communities of Fuan county in northeast Fujian, Menegon addresses three main questions. Why did people convert? How did converts and missionaries transform a global and foreign religion into a local religion? What does Christianity’s localization in Fuan tell us about the relationship between late imperial Chinese society and religion?

Based on a very rich array of sources from Asia and Europe, this book reframes our understanding of Christian missions in China. The implications of this study extend beyond the issue of Christianity in China to the wider fields of religious and social history and the early modern history of global intercultural relations. It suggests that Christianity became part of a preexisting pluralistic, local religious space, and argues that we have underestimated late imperial society’s tolerance for “heterodoxy.” The view from Fuan offers an original account of how a locality created its own religious culture in Ming-Qing China within a context both global and local, and elucidates the historical dynamics that contributed to the remarkable growth of Christian communities in present-day China.