The gripping history of Taiwan, from the flood myths of indigenous legend to its Asian Tiger economic miracle--and the renewed threat of invasion by China.

Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a 'ball of mud', Taiwan has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province--merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts.

Jonathan Clements examines the unique conditions of Taiwan's archaeology and indigenous history, and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He delves into its periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, and the transformations wrought by 50 years as part of the Japanese Empire. He examines the traumatic effects of its role as a lifeboat in 1949 for two million refugees from Communism, and the conflicts emerging after the suspension of four decades of martial law, as its people debate issues of self-determination, independence, and home rule.

A powerful and moving history of Asian Americans that spans centuries, from the acclaimed author of A Different Mirror.

In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of picture brides marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate and culture, and Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the model minority.

This is a powerful and moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.

The thirteenth-century cookbook Fiḍālat al-khiwān fī ṭayyibāt al-ṭaʿām wa-l-alwān by the Andalusi scholar Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī showcases the sophisticated cuisine that developed in the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule through its 475 exquisite recipes. Now available for the first time in English, this edition contains al-Tujībī's complete text, based on a newly discovered manuscript now available for the first time in any language. To introduce readers to the wonders of cooking and foodways in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, the translated text is supplemented with an extensive introduction and glossary, illustrated throughout with 218 color miniatures and artifacts, with 24 modernized recipes to give readers a taste of the cuisine. This is a key resource on medieval material culture and the Arab culinary heritage in Iberia, and a delight to all lovers of food and cookbooks.

Origins of the Modern World sets out an analytical framework that is accessible to students while providing a global approach to world history. Remarkable in its presentation of global narratives in such a brief text. Marks's book has a strong emphasis on economic and environmental factors as well as Western coercion and exploitation.

A fascinating romp through the feminine side of the infamous Khan clan (Booklist) by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan

Enticing . . . hard to put down.--Associated Press

The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. The daughters of the Silk Route turned their father's conquests into the first truly international empire, fostering trade, education, and religion throughout their territories and creating an economic system that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.

Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section about the queens from the Secret History of the Mongols, and, with that one act, the dynasty of these royals had seemingly been extinguished forever, as even their names were erased from the historical record.

With The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, a groundbreaking and magnificently researched narrative, Jack Weatherford restores the queens' missing chapter to the annals of history.

Charles Holcombe begins by asking the question 'what is East Asia?' In the modern age, many of the features that made the region - now defined as including China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam - distinct have been submerged by the effects of revolution, politics or globalization. Yet, as an ancient civilization, the region had both an historical and cultural coherence. This shared past is at the heart of this ambitious book, which traces the story of East Asia from the dawn of history to the twenty-first century. The second edition has been imaginatively revised and expanded to place emphasis on cross-cultural interactions and connections, both within East Asia and beyond, with new material on Vietnam and modern pop culture. The second edition also features a Chinese character list, additional maps and new illustrations.

This Book The International Jew The World's Foremost Problem has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

This comprehensive study explores the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture in China and its Asian neighbors. It examines a vast selection of Buddhist printed images and texts, not merely as static cultural relics, but holistically within multicultural contexts related to other cultural products, and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, Buddhist Book Roads.
The author applies interdisciplinary and network approaches developed in art history, religious studies, digital humanities, and the history of the print and book culture to shed new light on Buddhist print culture from visual, textual, social, and religious perspectives.

What type of exchanges occurred between West and East Asia in the first millennium CE? What sort of connections existed between Persia and China? What did the Chinese know of early Islam?
This study offers an overview of the cultural, diplomatic, commercial, and religious relationships that flourished between Iran and China, building on the pioneering work of Berthold Laufer's Sino-Iranica (1919) while utilizing a diverse array of Classical Chinese sources to tell the story of Sino-Iran in a fresh light to highlight the significance of transcultural networks across Asia in late antiquity.

The conquests of the Mongols were arguably the most important event of the last millennium in Eurasia. Yet Genghis Khan has remained an opaque and enigmatic figure, a symbol of cruelty and little else. Jack Weatherford has peeled back the curtain and revealed a complex man and thinker in this path-breaking work of rousing history and scholarship.
-- Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography and Eastward to Tartary

Revisionist history on a grand scale, but one as scrupulously well researched as such an intellectual overhaul needs to be...What is most remarkable about this fine and fascinating book is Weatherford's central claim that the Great Khan's ecumenism has as its legacy the very same rigid separation of church and state that underpins no less than the American idea itself. The United States Constitution's First Amendment is, at its root, an originally Mongol notion.... Weatherford argues his case very well, and in doing so offers further amplification of the notion that so many of the West's claimed achievements in fact have their true origins in the East.
-- Simon Winchester, New York Times Book Review

Genghis Khan, the Mongol warrior who conquered swaths of Central and Eastern Asia in the early thirteenth century, is not commonly considered a paragon of tolerance. But this account of the laws and customs of his court presents a figure who not only believed in freedom of religion but pioneered its implementation. Faced with unifying an empire that encompassed numerous warring religions, the Mongols crafted policies that, Weatherford argues, influenced the architects of the U.S. Constitution...Analysis of Khan's thought bolsters the claim, and adds a welcome dimension to a misunderstood figure.
-- The New Yorker

It's an unexpected connection, that of Genghis Khan -- one of the bloodiest, most ruthless imperialists the world has ever seen -- and the concept that people, including and perhaps especially conquered populations, should be allowed to practice the religion of their choice. This idea, born of the wily Mongol's shrewd perception that the gift of religious liberty could extend the life of his empire far longer than enforced conversion, in turn influenced generations of thinkers, including the American Founding Fathers and, in particular, Thomas Jefferson. -- Chicago Tribune
Few contemporary writers have Weatherford's talent for making the deep sweep of history seem vital and immediate.
-- Washington Post

Weatherford tells the gripping story of how a man rose from nothing to control almost all the known world. That the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, the ultimate self-made man, was also the founder of religious liberty is only one of many surprises in this well-researched and well-written book. Through meticulous scholarship, Jack Weatherford has found tangible echoes of the Founding Fathers' promotion of complete religious tolerance in the thinking of Genghis Khan.
-- Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon

Genghis Khan is best remembered by Voltaire's description: a 'cruel tyrant King of Kings', who butchered and brutalised his way across the medieval world. But in this elegant, original and scrupulously researched book, Jack Weatherford makes the case for a Mongolian warlord as first mover behind the First Amendment freedoms millions of Americans enjoy today. Bold, compelling and tautly argued, this is another fine study of a subject Weatherford knows better than anyone else writing today.
-- Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets

Jack Weatherford returns to Genghis Khan and offers a startling conclusion: that the Western tradition of secularism in fact was enhanced by the religious tolerance of the great Mongolian warlord. An engaging, well-researched--and counter-intuitive--intellectual o...

The phrase silk road evokes vivid scenes of merchants leading camel caravans across vast stretches to trade exotic goods in glittering Oriental bazaars, of pilgrims braving bandits and frozen mountain passes to spread their faith across Asia. Looking at the reality behind these images, this Very Short Introduction illuminates the historical background against which the silk road flourished, shedding light on the importance of old-world cultural exchange to Eurasian and world history.

On the one hand, historian James A. Millward treats the silk road broadly, to stand in for the cross-cultural communication between peoples across the Eurasian continent since at least the Neolithic era. On the other, he highlights specific examples of goods and ideas exchanged between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and China, along with the significance of these exchanges. While including silks, spices, and travelers' tales of colorful locales, the book explains the dynamics of Central Eurasian history that promoted Silk Road interactions--especially the role of nomad empires--highlighting the importance of the biological, technological, artistic, intellectual, and religious interchanges across the continent. Millward shows that these exchanges had a profound effect on the old world that was akin to, if not on the scale of, modern globalization. He also disputes the idea that the silk road declined after the collapse of the Mongol empire or the opening of direct sea routes from Europe to Asia, showing how silk road phenomena continued through the early modern and modern expansion of the Russian and Chinese states across Central Asia.

Millward concludes that the idea of the silk road has remained powerful, not only as a popular name for boutiques and restaurants, but also in modern politics and diplomacy, such as U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's Silk Road Initiative for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

During the 1950s, thousands of mixed race children were born to US servicemen and local Korean women in US-occupied South Korea. Assumed to be the progeny of camptown women--or military prostitutes--their presence created a major problem for the image of US democracy in the world at a time when the nation was vying for Cold War allegiances abroad. As mixed race children became a discernible population around US military encampments in South Korea, communists seized upon the image of those left behind by their GI fathers as evidence of US imperialism, irresponsibility, and immorality in the Third World. Aware of this and keen to redeem the image of America's intervention in Asia, US citizens spearheading the postwar recovery of recently war-torn South Korea embarked upon a campaign in US Congress to bring as many of these children home. By the early 1960s, American philanthropists, missionaries, and voluntary agencies had succeeded in constructing the figure of the abandoned and mistreated Amerasian orphan to lobby US Congress for the quick passage of intercountry adoption laws. They also gained the sympathies of American families, eager to welcome these racially different children into the intimate confines of their homes. Although the adoptions of Korean Amerasian children helped to promote an image of humanitarian rescue and Cold War racial liberalism in 1950s and 1960s America, there was one other problem: many of these children were not actually orphans, but had been living with their Korean mothers in the camptown communities surrounding US military bases prior to adoption. Their placements into American families relied upon dehumanizing constructions of these women as hardened prostitutes who did not even love their own children, South Korea as a backwards, racist society bent-up on Confucian tradition and pure bloodlines, and the United States as a welcoming home in an era of intense racial segregation.

The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers to adoptive US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, Yuri W. Doolan reveals how the Amerasian is not simply a mixed race person fathered by a US serviceman in Asia nor a racial term used to describe individuals with one American and one Asian parent like its popular definition suggests. Rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose rescue has been utilized to repudiate accusations of US imperialism and achieve sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won by the military. From such constructions, Americans lobbied Congress twice: first, in the 1950s to establish international adoption laws that would lead to the placement of hundreds of thousands of Korean children in the United States, then, later in the 1980s, when the plight of mixed race Koreans would be invoked again to argue for Amerasian immigration laws culminating in the migrations of tens of thousands of mixed race Vietnamese and their relatives.

Beyond Cold War historiography, this book also shows how in using the figure of the mistreated and abandoned Amerasian in need of rescue, Americans caused harm to actual people--mixed race Koreans and their mothers specifically--as children were placed into adoptive homes during an era where few regulations or safeguards existed to protect them from abuse, negligence, or racial hostilities in the US and many Korean mothers were coerced, both physically and monetarily, to relinquish their children to American authorities.

Volume 1 of a 2-volume set: This annotated translation of Han Feizi introduces one of China's most controversial political texts. Generations of Chinese literati have deplored Han Feizi's cynical assault on moralising discourse, blatant authoritarianism, and gleeful derision of fellow intellectuals. Yet many were attracted to the text's practical advice, especially its advocacy of reliance on impartial standards rather than on the personal qualities of the leaders (who may be dupes, selfish, or both). And many more admired the text's incisiveness, wit, humour, and realistic approach to politics.
The new translation makes the text's political philosophy and its literary gems accessible to the interested readers.
For Volume 2 see: brill.com/edcollbook/title/71794.

How Maoism Was Made focuses on the history of the early years in China after 1949, featuring new scholarship by academics across Europe and North America. The field of early PRC history has been transformed by the unprecedented accessibility of archives from the 1990s to the early 2010s. Sixteen contributors show how the revolutionary system was built and maintained by the efforts of non-elite actors, including scientists, farmers, designers, artists, cadres, and ordinary citizens. By abandoning the Cold War political work of vilifying or celebrating Chinese communism, How Maoism Was Made aims to render the history of the Maoist system comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike, by viewing it through the lens of people who made it. Chinese communism is revealed to be a set of beliefs and practices that inspired millions of people to (re-)build their country and find a new life within it.

India's near east encompasses Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Indian states of the 'Northeast'--Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Celebrated as a theatre of geo-economic connectivity typified by India's 'Act East' policy, the region is key not only to India's great-power rivalry with China, which first boiled over in the 1962 war, but to the idea(s) of India itself. It is also one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on Earth. Rent by communal and class violence, the region has birthed extreme forms of religious and ethnic nationalisms and communist movements. The Indian state's survival instinct and pursuit of regional hegemony have only accentuated such extremes.

This book scripts a new history of India's eastward-looking diplomacy and statecraft. Narrated against the backdrop of separatist resistance within India's own northeastern states, as well as rivalry with Beijing and Islamabad in Yangon and Dhaka, it offers a simple but compelling argument. The aspirations of 'Act East' mask an uncomfortable truth: India privileges political stability over economic opportunity in this region. In his chronicle of a state's struggle to overcome war, displacement and interventionism, Avinash Paliwal lays bare the limits of independent India's influence in its near east.

The story of Musahib Ud-Din Khan is not a run of the mill tale of rags to riches. It is rather an inspirational narrative about the potential of education as a vehicle for upward mobility and for realization of individual potential in the face of poverty and adversity. The success of Professor Khan as a scholar and contributor to nation building is worth reading. He lived, struggled and triumphed in a very difficult time in a newly minted postcolonial nation of Pakistan strapped for resources and opportunities. His efforts to help others to replicate his success is praiseworthy and we see it reflected in his progeny. The story is especially powerful because it is written by a devoted son whose accomplishments are befitting the legacy of Professor Khan. Children of immigrants, especially those from South Asia must read this book. It will not only inform them of the challenges that their grandparents had to overcome but also help them recognize that their own identities and fortunes are a product of those struggles decades ago.

If you want to discover the captivating history of East Asia, then keep reading...

Four captivating manuscripts in one book:

• History of China: A Captivating Guide to Chinese History, Including Events Such as the First Emperor of China, the Mongol Conquests of Genghis Khan, the Opium Wars, and the Cultural Revolution
• History of Japan: A Captivating Guide to Japanese History, Including Events Such as the Genpei War, Mongol Invasions, Battle of Tsushima, and Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• History of Korea: A Captivating Guide to Korean History, Including Events Such as the Mongol Invasions, the Split into North and South, and the Korean War
• History of Taiwan: A Captivating Guide to Taiwanese History and the Relationship with the People's Republic of China

Here are just some of the topics covered in part 1 of this book:

• The Land of the Yellow Emperor
• Imperial China Emerges
• The Supremacy of the Han, 202 BCE-220 CE
• The Golden Age: The Tang Dynasty, 618-907
• The Song Dynasty, 960-1279
• Kublai Khan: The Yuan Dynasty, 1271-1368
• The Great Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644
• And much, much more!

Here are just some of the topics covered in part 2 of this book:

• Children of the Sun
• Warring Clans
• The Two Imperial Courts
• Edo Japan: Part One-1603 to 1638
• Edo Period: Part Two-1638 to 1868
• The Meiji Restoration
• Foreign Relations
• And much, much more!

Here are just some of the topics covered in part 3 of this book:

• Land of the Bear
• The Dragon of the East Sea
• Dynasties Rise and Fall
• The Joseon Dynasty of Goryeo
• Foreign Invasions
• Merchants, Farmers, and Foreigners
• And much, much more!

Here are just some of the topics covered in part 4 of this book:

• Formosa: Beautiful Island
• The Arrival of the Chinese and Their Religion
• The Dutch Trading Years
• The Ming, The Qing, and Japan: The War Years
• Japanese Taiwan
• The Sino-Japanese War & World War II
• Taiwan After World War II
• And much, much more!

So if you want to learn more about the history of East Asia, scroll up and click the add to cart button!

While European civilization stagnated in the Dark Ages, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion. Linked together by a web of spiritual, commercial, and intellectual connections, the distant regions of Asia's vast civilization, from Arabia to China, hummed with trade, international diplomacy, and the exchange of ideas. Stewart Gordon has fashioned a compelling and unique look at Asia from AD 700 to 1500-a time when Asia was the world-by relating the personal journeys of Asia's many travelers.

In the Shadow of Great Powers is the second volume of Christoph Baumer's History of the Caucasus. It covers the period from the Seljuk domination of the Southern Caucasus around 1050 CE to the present day. After the Kingdom of Georgia's golden age of independent power and cultural blossoming in the 12th and early 13th centuries, the Caucasus was overrun by the Mongols and soon disintegrated into innumerable smaller kingdoms, principalities and khanates. At the same time, an Armenian kingdom in exile maintained a precarious independence in Cilicia, today's southern Turkey, by applying a three-way diplomatic policy balanced between the Mongol Il-Khanate, the Crusader states and, to a lesser degree, the Mameluke Empire. Then followed four centuries during which the highly fragmented polities of the North and South Caucasus became political pawns of the regional great powers, above all the Ottomans, Iran and Russia.

In the wake of World War I the South Caucasus enjoyed a short-lived independence whereas its northern neighbours were engulfed by the Russian civil wars. But by 1921 the Soviet Union had re-established Russian dominance over the whole region and, from a Western perspective, the region 'disappeared' behind the Iron Curtain. Nevertheless, the Caucasian nations kept their pronounced identities even under Soviet rule, giving rise at the dissolution of the Soviet Union to a number of internecine conflicts. Whereas the Russian Federation managed to maintain its supremacy over the North Caucasus - albeit at the cost of bloody wars and insurrections - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia succeeded in more or less gaining control over their destiny. Of these three republics, only Azerbaijan secured a wide-ranging independence thanks to its fossil fuel resources. Following Russian interference, Georgia lost control over two of its provinces while Armenia remains dependent on Russian support in the face of its notoriously antagonistic relations with neighbouring Azerbaijan and Turkey over the unresolved issue of Karabakh. In the Shadow of Great Powers includes some 200 full-colour images and maps which further bring the turbulent history of this region to light.