Asian Port Cities 1600 1800

This book presents extensive new research findings on and new thinking about Southeast Asia in this interesting, richly diverse, but much understudied period. It examines the wide and well-developed trading networks, explores the different kinds of regimes and the nature of power and security, considers urban growth, international relations and the beginnings of European involvement with the region, and discusses religious factors, in particular the spread and impact of Christianity. One key theme of the book is the consideration of how well-developed Southeast Asia was before the onset of European involvement, and, how, during the peak of the commercial boom in the 1500s and 1600s, many polities in Southeast Asia were not far behind Europe in terms of socio-economic progress and attainments.

A fascinating history of nineteenth century Eastern Mediterranean port cities, re-examining European influence over the changing lives of their urban populations.

This book takes the reader on an epic journey across maritime Asia and the Indian Ocean, stopping at 60 port cities along the coasts and rivers of China, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, the Middle East and Africa. The timeframe of the book is equally sweeping, reaching back some two thousand years to port cities of the distant past and forward again to those of the present. The stories of these great port cities are brought alive through explorations of artworks in museums, literature, architecture, food, fashion and popular culture. Every chapter is illustrated with photographs, maps or archival material.

This edited volume moves beyond the traditional examination of the treaty ports of China and Japan as places of cultural interaction. It moves ‘beyond the Bund’, presenting instead the history of material culture, the everyday life of the residents of the treaty ports beyond the symbology of Shanghai's waterfront. Bringing for the first time together scholars of China and Japan, museum curators, legal, economic and architectural historians, it studies the treaty ports not only as sites of cultural exchange, but also as sites of social contestation, accommodation and mobility, covering topics as varied as day to day life itself, such as family, property and law, health and welfare, travel, visual culture and memory. The call of this volume is to peel the multiple layers of the encounter between East and West in the treaty ports of China and Japan.

Translation, History and Arts: New Horizons in Asian Interdisciplinary Humanities Research is a collection of selected research papers originally presented at the Todai Forum in October 2011 in Lyon, France, under the auspices of the University of Tokyo, Japan. Papers selected for inclusion in this book stand at the frontier of interdisciplinary humanities research, and are concerned with translation and cross-cultural studies, social and art history, and comparative area studies. A central theme of the papers is the development of a new discursive narrative of local histories against the backdrop of world history. Through case studies of historical and modern socio-cultural events occurring in different regions and countries, this book strives to advance our understanding of the dynamic and complex interactions among distinct social and cultural systems in world history.