The Last Bastion Of Civilization

The Last Bastion of Civilization is a scenario analysis in the form of a series of letters and essays from various intellectuals and leading figures written in 2041. Extrapolating from present day events, it chronicles the rise of Japan as the leading superpower of the world by examining relevant economic, cultural, and technological advancements. Coupled with the rise of Japan is the fall of Western society in the wake of massive riots, depressions, and an overall decline in the quality of life. Widespread unemployment, rising illegitimacy, and moral and spiritual decline have led the formerly great United States into a period of extreme mob-driven violence. Europe meets a similar fate, coupled with a decline in the euro and the defaulting of banks. As a work of speculative fiction, The Last Bastion of Civilization offers a critically insightful look at a possible future, a future that will not seem far off from the truth.

"Investigating the late sixteenth through the nineteenth century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Chosŏn state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. Seeking to define the meaning and constitutive elements of the hegemonic group and a particular marginalized community in this Confucian state, the contributors argue that the power of each group and the space it occupied were determined by a dynamic interaction of ideology, governmental policies, and the group’s self-perceptions. Collectively, the volume counters the static view of the Korean Confucian state, elucidates its relationship to the wider Confucian community and religious groups, and suggests new views of the complex way in which each negotiated and adjusted its ideology and practices in response to the state’s activities."

At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.

The first detailed analysis in English of monarchy and governance in Korea during King Chŏngjo’s reign. Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were “early modern”? Was Asia’s early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in the highly contested early modern world. Using a comparative perspective that places Chŏngjo, king of Korea from 1776 to 1800, in context with other Korean kings and with contemporary Chinese and European rulers, Christopher Lovins examines the shifting balance of power in Korea in favor of the crown at the expense of the aristocracy during the early modern period. This book is the first to analyze in English the recently discovered collection of 297 private letters written by Chŏngjo himself. These letters were a vital channel of communication outside of official court historians’ scrutiny, since private meetings between the king and his ministers were forbidden by custom. Royal politics played out in an arena of subtle communication, with court officials trying to read the king’s unstated, elliptically hinted at intentions and the king trying to suggest what he wanted done while maintaining plausible deniability. Through close analysis of both official records and private letters, including Chŏngjo’s “secret letters,” Lovins shows that, in contrast to previous assumptions, the late eighteenth-century Korean monarchs were not weak and ineffective but instead were in the process of building an absolutist polity.

Television shows and movies emphasize gruesome rituals and violent warfare, but what was life really like in pre-Columbian cultures? This book presents a holistic view of Mayan and Amazonian civilizations and includes maps, stunning full-color photographs, and engaging sidebars about key figures. The book separates fact from fiction and demonstrates the rich history of the Americas.

Raymond Williams was “by common consent” one of the “two most commanding intellectual figures in the New Left that emerged in Britain at the turn of the sixties,” the other being Edward Thompson. Williams published in 1961 a text entitled “The Future of Marxism.” In that essay, Williams has some remarkable things to say about imperialism, the successes of actually existing socialism, balanced against its failures, and the continued relevance of socialism as the horizon of human liberation. He also makes a characteristic methodological point: “the relation between systems of thought and actual history is both complex and surprising.” The future of Marxism, that is to say, will not depend on dogma, but will instead rest on historical developments, on how well are able to actualize Marx’s ideals in our own unique conjuncture. This volume takes up the challenge of reading and extending Williams’s thought in light of the actual history that has occurred since his passing but with the same ideal of socialism as its guiding horizon. If there is one thread visible throughout all of Williams’s work, it is the felt presence of a living, thinking individual, of a person continually testing ideas in experience in order to see whether they fit the world they are meant to describe. The aim of this volume, timed to coincide with what would have been Williams’s 100th birthday, is to test his ideas in our own experience and to engage Williams’s work in ways that move past the familiar terrain that has grown around it. We now know that “experience” is a dangerous category, that “community” can be hijacked by the right as much as the left, and that “tradition” contains as much conflict as commonality. Those committed to Williams’s work can easily find textual arguments or developments across his career to answer these charges, and they have. What our volume offers is a set of arguments by younger scholars influenced by Williams’s writings that moves past some of these debates, extending Williams’s work into the 21st century, testing and weighing his ideas in light of recent developments and contemporary intellectual culture. In doing so, we treat Williams’s thought as one of those “resources of hope,” which he famously suggested would sustain us. At a time of deepening inequality and austerity and growing rightward reaction, and yet simultaneously, and with seeming dialectical necessity, a renewed investment in socialism, Williams might be exactly the kind of figure we need.

Time is basic to human consciousness and action, yet paradoxically historians rarely ask how it is understood, manipulated, recorded, or lived. Cataclysmic events in particular disrupt and realign the dynamics of temporality among people. For historians, the temporal effects of such events on large polities such as empires—the power projections of which always involve the dictation of time—are especially significant. This important and intriguing volume is an investigation of precisely such temporal effects, focusing on the northern and eastern regions of the Asian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, when the polity at the core of East Asian civilization, Ming dynasty China, collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. Contributors: Mark C. Elliott, Roger Des Forges, JaHyun Kim Haboush, Johan Elverskog, Eugenio Menegon, Zhao Shiyu.

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.