Imagined Civilizations

Roger Hart debunks the long-held belief that linear algebra developed independently in the West. Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to translate Euclid’s Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. Most narratives relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view. Using Chinese primary sources, Roger Hart focuses in particular on Xu, who was in a position of considerable power over Ricci. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies. Hart analyzes Chinese mathematical treatises of the period, revealing that Xu and his collaborators could not have believed their declaration of the superiority of Western mathematics. Imagined Civilizations explains how Xu’s West served as a crucial resource. While the Jesuits claimed Xu as a convert, he presented the Jesuits as men from afar who had traveled from the West to China to serve the emperor.

Ravi Dutt Bajpai examines some of the pivotal episodes in the modern history of China and India to argue that their behaviours reflect the self-identity of a civilization-state. The book starts from the progression of China and India into putatively modern polities during the colonial period, as the two indigenous societies imagined their national identities and nationalist aspirations primarily by contrasting their civilizational attributes with the Western colonial occupiers. As newly independent nation-states, both believed that their international status flowed from their civilizational glories. Therefore, despite their material and institutional fragility, China and India decided to pursue complete autonomy to manage their domestic and foreign affairs. Indian Prime Minister Nehru's policy of non-alignment, envisioning an alternate world order beyond the great power competition, was inspired by Indian civilizational ethos. The book also examines the Sino-Indian war of 1962 from a civilization-state perspective and argues that Tibet represented a conflict of civilizational influence. Chapters also explore some of the more recent developments, such as the Indian nuclear test of 1998, China's ambitious Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure project aimed at reviving the ancient Silk Road, and India's campaign to regain its civilizational status of Vishwa Guru, as the continued manifestations of the two civilization-states endeavouring to regain their past glories in the contemporary world.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Contributors to this book argue that everyday struggles for dignity and equality in the states of East Asia provide much of the impetus driving East Asian nationalism. They examine China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which occupy one of the most volatile regions in the world today. Each of them harbors an historical grievance dating back half a century or more which limits its full or effective sovereignty. China seeks to recover Taiwan; Taiwan presses for de jure recognition of its de facto autonomy. Neither of the two Koreas is satisfied to remain separated from the other indefinitely, and Japan is divided over constitutional limits on the sovereign right to wage war. Each of these historical grievances is structured into the politics of the region and into its international relations. They are also embedded in popular memories that periodically spark pride, shame, and resentment – whether over a rocky outcrop, a history textbook, or an alleged US intervention on a sensitive issue of national sovereignty. Everyday struggles for dignity and equality, the contributors argue, should not be overlooked in any search for explanations of nationalist pride and resentment.

Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference examines the role of civilizations in the context of the existing and possible world order(s) from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Contributions seek to clarify the meaning of such complex and contested notions as “civilization,” “order,” and “world order”; they do so by taking into account political, economic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of social life. The book deals with its main theme from three angles or vectors: first, the geopolitical or power-political context of civilizations; secondly, the different roles of civilizations or cultures against the backdrop of “post-coloniality” and “Orientalism”; and thirdly, the importance of ideological and regional differences as factors supporting or obstructing world order(s). All in all, the different contributions demonstrate the impact of competing civilizational trajectories on the functioning or malfunctioning of contemporary world order.

Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.

In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto once again proves himself a brilliantly original historian, capable of large-minded and comprehensive works; here he redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization. To Fernández-Armesto, a civilization is "civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment"...by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2,000-mile-long mountain range in South America have created the mold from which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures. In a grand tradition that is certain to evoke comparisons to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a panorama of cultural history. In Civilizations, the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the thousand-year-long deforestation of the trees that once covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian Ocean has served as the world's greatest trading highway for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives, but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in the summer and the other in the winter. In the words of the author, "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations, it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period, or society by society." Thus, seventeen distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations built on woodlands. Here, of course, are the familiar riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and the Nile; but also highland civilizations from the Inca to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea...even the Bushmen of Southern Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations of Chaco Canyon. More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly told -- of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod's tract on maritime trade in the early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops. Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a remarkable achievement...a tour de force by a brilliant scholar.

Film Genre for the Screenwriter is a practical study of how classic film genre components can be used in the construction of a screenplay. Based on Jule Selbo’s popular course, this accessible guide includes an examination of the historical origins of specific film genres, how and why these genres are received and appreciated by film-going audiences, and how the student and professional screenwriter alike can use the knowledge of film genre components in the ideation and execution of a screenplay. Explaining the defining elements, characteristics and tropes of genres from romantic comedy to slasher horror, and using examples from classic films like Casablanca alongside recent blockbuster franchises like Harry Potter, Selbo offers a compelling and readable analysis of film genre in its written form. The book also offers case studies, talking points and exercises to make its content approachable and applicable to readers and writers across the creative field.