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Turning Land into Capital

Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

By Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, Michael B. Dwyer, K. Sivaramakrishnan

In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have rolled back "land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of Cold War–era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at...

Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

By David R. Stroup

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the Party’s great success in ethnic politics....

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of...

Shifting Livelihoods

Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

By Daniel Tubb. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the actual number of snow leopards in the wild...

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

By Erik Mobrand

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State

By Justin M. Jacobs

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295806570

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz,...

The Dust of Life

America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam

By Robert S. McKelvey

The Dust of Life is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years...

Perpetual Happiness

The Ming Emperor Yongle

By Shih-shan Henry Tsai

The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness,” was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City,...

Manchus and Han

Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928

By Edward J. M. Rhoads

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295997483

China’s 1911–12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty...

Heaven in Conflict

Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi

By Anthony E. Clark

One of the most violent episodes of China’s Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising...

Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia

How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region

By Pál Nyíri, Danielle Tan, Wang Gungwu

This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China’s rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents,...

Disarmament Sketches

Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law

By Thomas Graham, Jr.

Thomas Graham Jr. played a role in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement signed by the United States during the past thirty years. As a U.S. government lawyer and diplomat,...

The Anguish of Surrender

Japanese POWs of World War II

By Ulrich A. Straus

On December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was one of a handful of men selected to skipper midget subs on a suicide mission to breach Pearl Harbor’s defenses. When his equipment malfunctioned, he couldn’t find...

Proving Grounds

Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases

By Edwin A. Martini

Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical borders to deepen our understanding of the environmental impact that the U.S. military presence has had at home and abroad. The essays...

War and Politics by Other Means

A Journalist's Memoir

By Shelby Scates

Shelby Scates’s thirty-five-year career as a prize-winning journalist and columnist for International News Service, United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has taken him to centers of action across this country and...

Protracted Contest

Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century

By John W. Garver

Ever since the two ancient nations of India and China established modern states in the mid-20th century, they have been locked in a complex rivalry ranging across the South Asian region. Garver offers a scrupulous...

Women Playing Men

Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

By Jin Jiang

This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male...

Cosmopolitan Capitalists

Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the Twentieth Century

By Gary G. Hamilton

At midnight on June 30, 1997, Hong Kong became part of the People’s Republic of China. The transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from Great Britain to China was an extraordinary historical event, signifying the end...