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An Ecological History of Modern China

By Stevan Harrell

Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of An Ecological History of...

Governing Water in India

Inequality, Reform, and the State

By Leela Fernandes

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose...

Bhakti and Power

Debating India's Religion of the Heart

By John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, Swapna Sharma

Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as “personal devotion,” bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is...

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism

Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory

By Christoph Giebel

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communisim illuminates the real and imagined lives of Ton Duc Thang (1888–1980), a celebrated revolutionary activist and Vietnamese communist icon, but it is much more than a conventional biography. This multifaceted...

The New Woman in Uzbekistan

Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism

By Marianne Ruth Kamp

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize

Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award

Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association...

Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s Democratic Transformation

By Herbert J. Ellison

Boris Yeltsin is one of modern history's most dynamic and underappreciated figures. In this vivid, analytical masterwork, Herbert J. Ellison establishes Yeltsin as the principal leader and defender of Russia's democratic revolution - the very...

Rural China on the Eve of Revolution

Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950

By G. William Skinner. Edited by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely. Afterword by Zhijia Shen

In 1949, G. William Skinner, a Cornell University graduate student, set off for southwest China to conduct field research on rural social structure. He settled near the market town of Gaodianzi, Sichuan, and lived there...

No Concessions

The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer

By Daniel S. Lev. Introduction by Benedict Anderson

The compelling personal story of human rights lawyer Yap Thiam Hien (1913-1989) brings decades of modern Indonesian history to life. No Concessions is a penetrating analysis of the trajectory of the Chinese minority in Indonesia...

Serbia Since 1989

Politics and Society under Milosevic and After

By Sabrina P. Ramet, Vjeran I. Pavlakovic, James B. Lyon

During their thirteen years in power, Slobodan Milosevic and his cohorts plunged Yugoslavia into wars of ethnic cleansing, leading to the murder of thousands of civilians. The Milosevic regime also subverted the nation's culture, twisted...

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India

By Paul R. Brass

Chronic Hindu-Muslim rioting in India has created a situation in which communal violence is both so normal and so varied in its manifestations that it would seem to defy effective analysis. Paul R. Brass, one...

Days of Defeat and Victory

By Yegor Gaidar. Translated by Jane Ann Miller. Foreword by Michael McFaul

Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister of Russia and one of the principal architects of its historic transformation to a market economy, here presents his lively account of governing in the tumultuous early 1990s....

Building Ships, Building a Nation

Korea's Democratic Unionism Under Park Chung Hee

By Hwasook Nam

Building Ships, Building a Nation examines the rise and fall, during the rule of Park Chung Hee (1961-79), of the combative labor union at the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC), which was Korea's largest...

Modern Clan Politics

The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

By Edward Schatz

Edward Schatz explores the politics of kin-based clan divisions in the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan. Drawing from extensive ethnographic and archival research, interviews, and wide-ranging secondary sources, he highlights a politics that poses a two-tiered...

Confronting Memories of World War II

European and Asian Legacies

By Daniel Chirot, Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel Sneider

The legacy of the Second World War has been, like the war itself, an international phenomenon. In both Europe and Asia, common questions of criminality, guilt, and collaboration have intersected with history and politics on...

A Moveable Empire

Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

By Resat Kasaba

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier...

The Everyday Life of the State

A State-in-Society Approach

By Adam White, Joel S. Migdal

Today there are more states controlling more people than at any other point in history. We live in a world shaped by the authority of the state. Yet the complexion of state authority is patchy...

Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects

By Laurie J. Sears

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field...

Everyday Modernity in China

By Madeleine Yue Dong, Joshua Lewis Goldstein

Is modernity in non-Western societies always an “alternative” modernity, a derivative copy of an “original modernity” that began in the West? No, answer the contributors to this book, who then offer an absorbing set of...

The Found Generation

Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties

By Marilyn A. Levine

In contrast to the Lost Generation of youth in the West, who were disoriented and disillusioned by the First World War and its aftermath, the Chinese youth born between 1895 and 1905 not only believed...

Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey

By Sibel Bozdogan, Resat Kasaba

In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school...