Remapping The World In East Asia

When European missionaries arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, they entered ongoing conversations about cosmology and world geography. Soon after, intellectuals in Ming China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea selectively encompassed elements of the late Renaissance worldview, leading to the creation of new artifacts that mitigated old and new knowledge in creative ways. Simultaneously, missionaries and their collaborators transcribed, replicated, and recombined from East Asian artifacts and informed European audiences about the newly discovered lands known as the “Far East.” All these new artifacts enjoyed long afterlives that ensured the continuous remapping of the world in the following decades and centuries. Focusing on artifacts, this expansively illustrated volume tells the story of a meeting of worldviews. Tracing the connections emanating from each artifact, the authors illuminate how every map, globe, or book was shaped by the intellectual, social, and material cultures of East Asia, while connecting multiple global centers of learning and print culture. Crossing both historical and historiographical boundaries reveals how this series of artifacts embody a continuous and globally connected process of mapping the world, rather than a grand encounter between East and West. As such, this book rewrites the narrative surrounding the so-called “Ricci Maps,” which assumes that one Jesuit missionary brought scientific cartography to East Asia by translating and adapting a Renaissance world map. It argues for a revision of that narrative by emphasizing process and connectivity, displacing the European missionary and “his map” as central actors that supposedly bridged a formidable civilizational divide between Europe and China. Rather than a single map authored by a European missionary, a series of materially different artifacts were created as a result of discussions between the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese contacts during the last decades of Ming rule. Each of these gave rise to the production of new artifacts that embodied broader intellectual conversations. By presenting eleven original chapters by Asian, European, and American scholars, this work covers an extensive range of artifacts and crosses boundaries between China, Japan, Korea, and the global pathways that connected them to the other end of the Eurasian landmass.

An overarching ambiguity characterizes East Asia today. The region has at least a century-long history of internal divisiveness, war, and conflict, and it remains the site of several nettlesome territorial disputes. However, a mixture of complex and often competing agents and processes has been knitting together various segments of East Asia. In Remapping East Asia, T. J. Pempel suggests that the region is ripe for cooperation rather than rivalry and that recent "region-building" developments in East Asia have had a substantial cumulative effect on the broader canvas of international politics. This collection is about the people, processes, and institutions behind that region-building. In it, experts on the area take a broad approach to the dynamics and implications of regionalism. Instead of limiting their focus to security matters, they extend their discussions to topics as diverse as the mercurial nature of Japan's leadership role in the region, Southeast Asian business networks, the war on terrorism in Asia, and the political economy of environmental regionalism. Throughout, they show how nation-states, corporations, and problem-specific coalitions have furthered regional cohesion not only by establishing formal institutions, but also by operating informally, semiformally, or even secretly.

From the Foundations in Global Studies series, this text offers students a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary entry point to East Asia. After a brief introduction to the study of East Asia, the early chapters of the book survey the essentials of East Asian history; important historical narratives; and the region's languages, religions, and global connections. Students are guided through the material with relevant maps, resource boxes, and text boxes that support and guide further independent exploration of the topics at hand. The second half of the book features interdisciplinary case studies, each of which focuses on a specific country or region and a particular issue. Each chapter gives a flavor for the cultural distinctiveness of the particular country yet also draws attention to global linkages. Readers will come away from this book with an understanding of the larger historical, political, and cultural frameworks that shaped East Asia as we know it today, and of current issues that have relevance in Asia and beyond.

Examines the rise of East Asia as one of the world's economic power centres from three temporal perspectives: 500 years, 150 years and 50 years, each denoting an epoch in regional and world history and providing a vantage point against which to

East Asia has re-emerged after a long eclipse as a centre of world wealth creation and growth. Over the past four decades the region’s share of world GDP has risen from less than 10 to 30 percent, a ratio that is set to rise to 40 percent by 2030. What has made East Asia’s remarkable ascent possible, and what does this economic rebalancing between East and West mean for world politics? In this insightful and provocative book, Philip Golub addresses these questions, tracing the region’s rise from the early modern European-Asian encounter to the imperial confrontations of the nineteenth century, and China’s state capitalist turn in the latter half of the twentieth century. Together, he argues, the dynamics of imperialism, war and revolution led to the constitution of developmental states that made possible East Asia’s return to a central position in the global economy. Combining rich historical narrative and social theory, this book is an invaluable guide to one of the core issues in world politics today.

This accessible collection examines twelve historic events in the international relations of East Asia.

This book documents urban experiences of dissent and emergent resistance against disjunctive global and local capital, technology and labour flows that converge and intersect in some of Asia’s fastest growing cities. Rather than constructing occupants of the city as simply passive victims of globalisation or urbanisation, it presents ways in which people are using everyday strategies embedded in cultural practice to challenge dominant socio-economic and political forces impacting on urban space. Taking the city as a site of contestation and a stage where social conflicts are played out, the book highlights the connections between urban power and dissent; the nature and impact of resistance; how the spatiality and built environment of the city generates conflict and, conversely, how protagonists use the cityscape to stage their everyday and public dissent. The contributors explore the conditions, strategies, and outcomes of such dissent and forms of cultural resistance, and explore the following themes: the impact of urban development, gentrification and ghetto-isation; urban counter narratives and the re-imagining of city spaces; the role of grassroots activism and social movements; cultural resistance in the creation of neighbourhoods and communities; the impact of gender, class and the politics of identity on forms of dissent; the formation of transgressive spaces.

There are six chapters examining the strategic and economic policies of the major external powers towards Southeast Asia and two more focusing on the still unresolved conflict in Cambodia and on the continuing disputes over the ownership of the Spratly Islands. The conclusion assesses the relevance of Southeast Asian experience in the 'New World Order' to the ongoing theoretical debates about democracy, the market, the state and multilateralism.