Education About Asia

Archive articles will be added to this new, more user-friendly interface on an on-going basis over the next few months. In the meantime, to view the full run of archives, please visit http://aas2.asian-studies.org/EAA/TOC/index.asp . NOTE: Since understanding a substantial number of articles depends upon images and graphics, all article and essay illustrations may be viewed in the PDFs available on each page.

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Feature Article

Qianlong Meets Macartney: Collision of Two World Views

by John R. Watt

The Macartney mission of 1792-4 is a defining episode in the modern encounter between China and the West. It is the first major event in which British diplomats well read in the ideas of the European Enlightenment came face to face with the leadership of the world's greatest and most populous land power. Before that time, educated Europeans had learned about China mainly through the writings of French Catholic missionaries. Eighteenth-century European philosophers, with the notable exception of ...

Book Review Essay, Resources

The Man Who Divided India: An Insight into Jinnah’s Leadership and Its Aftermath

by Laxman D. Satya, Laxman D. Satya (Reviewer)

By Rafig Zakaria Mumbai, Popular Prakashan, 2001. 276 pages. Hardback. ISBN: 81-7154-892-x This book is written for popular audiences in India, the West, and in the United States. It became a bestseller in India probably because of its secular overtones and nationalist bias. This critical biography analyzes the condition of Muslims in Pakistan after Jinnah’s death (1948), while giving a historical background to the formation of the state. According to Zakaria, Jinnah began his political ...

Feature Article

Top Ten Things to Know about India in the Twenty-First Century

by Ainslie Embree

1 THERE IS NOT ONE, BUT FOUR INDIAS “The first and most essential thing to learn about India,” declared a famous British administrator in 1888, is “that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.”(note 1) The statement sounds startlingly silly until one notices the defining clause, “according to European ideas.” Then one can change it to read, “One of the...

Feature Article

Asian Travelers’ Visions of Britain and Ireland in the Early Modern Period

by Michael H. Fisher

Much of world history, and even Asian history, often appears centered on Europe and on distinctions between Europeans and others. In particular, many prominent scholars have shown how European travelers’ accounts contributed to the post-Enlightenment development of early “modernity” that valued the “discovery” of other peoples and places and that also led to European colonial rule over much of the globe. (note 1) Undoubtedly, European imperialist incursions into Asia linked parts of th...

Feature Article

A Voice for Southeast Asian Muslims in the High Colonial Era: The Third Baron Stanley of Alderley

by Anthony Reid, Helen Reid

The years 1873 and 1874 are seen as a turning point in the colonial advance in Southeast Asia, when Britain and the Netherlands aggressively imposed their rule on areas they had decided between themselves to be their destined territories. An 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty declared that Sumatra was to be a Dutch sphere and the Peninsula (contemporary Malaysia and Singapore) a British one. Another treaty in 1871, following the opening of the Suez Canal, intensified European trade and traffic through the ...

Online Supplement

NCTA Lesson Plan Handouts: “The ‘Opening’ of the East: Differing Perspectives”

by Laura Delmore Lay

For each of the following document passages, provide a brief summary and identify the nationality of the speaker. Include a rationale as to why you chose that particular country....

Online Supplement

Understanding Contemporary Asia through Food

by Eriberto P. Lozada

While once-exotic Asian foods have become a familiar part of American life, the study of Asian food continues to be a sharp lens, giving focus to the broad sweep of history and the complex patterns of contemporary Asian societies. The eating habits and culinary practices (foodways) of Asian societies are both local and global, revealing the historical impact of past events and the everyday tensions of contemporary Asian societies. Humans often use food to distinguish their own group from others....

EAA Interview, Feature Article

EAA Interview with the Authors of “Fragments of the Afghan Frontier,” Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden

by Benjamin D. Hopkins, Lucien Ellington, Magnus Marsden

Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden are, respectively, a historian and an anthropologist. In 2011, they coauthored Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. The book is intended for both the public and scholars. In his review of Fragments, Mark Beautement, former UK Ministry of Defence district political officer in Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan during 2009–10, who worked with British Commandos and US Marines, commented, “Fragments of the Afghan Frontier combines painstaking recent anthrop...

Feature Article

What History Can Teach Us About Contemporary Afghanistan

by Thomas Barfield

Afghanistan has a deep history that shapes the perceptions of the people who live there. Just how deep that memory goes, even among people who are illiterate and informed only by oral tradition, is striking. In the mid-1970s, the nomads I was living with in northern Afghanistan roundly condemned the Mongol invasion of the country—in 1220—and the long-lasting destruction it caused. It was a shame, they complained, that I had not been able to visit their region before that time when its econom...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching Pearl Harbor: A New Japanese Perspective

by Daniel A. Metraux

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the seminal events of American history. It forced America’s entry into World War II and marked this country’s emergence as a world power and dominant actor on the world scene. Until that time, the US had been an economic powerhouse, but a military midget with little interest in pursuing global conquest. Unfortunately, few Americans today have any true understanding of why Japan, a comparatively small nation already engaged in a full scale war in ...

Book Review Essay, Resources

China and the World Economy

by Edward Friedman (Reviewer)

The Great Rebalancing Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy By MICHAEL PETTIS Princeton University Press, 2013 The Globalization Paradox Democracy and the Future of the World Economy By DANI RODRIK  W. W. Norton & Company, 2012 The Leaderless Economy Why the World Economy System Fell Apart and How to Fix It By PETER TEMIN AND DAVID VINES Princeton University Press, 2013   The global impact of China’s rise, as presented by these in...

Feature Article

“Give Me Blood, and I Will Give You Freedom”: Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, and the Uses of Violence in India’s Independence Movement

by Thomas Lamont

Last April, two Indian students visited my high school for a few weeks and joined my world history class. One day, during a discussion of the Indian independence movement, I asked all of my students in the class to hold up their hand if they had ever heard of Bhagat Singh or Subhas Chandra Bose. Only two hands went up, those belonging to our visitors from India. Our Indian guests expressed shock and dismay that their American peers had never heard these two names that are so familiar to Indians....

Feature Article

When the World Came to Southeast Asia: Malacca and the Global Economy

by Michael G. Vann

Situated in the west coast of the Malay Peninsula on the strait that bears its name, the port of Malacca is adjacent to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Today’s Malacca (Melaka in Malay) is a small port city with few obvious signs of its former glory. Despite a growing tourist trade, most visitors are ignorant of the city’s spectacular maritime past as one of the most important trade centers in the early modern global economy, a past that put Malacca in the same league with Venic...

Book Review Essay, Resources

The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by James Holmes (Reviewer)

One of the great questions preoccupying Asia watchers today is whether continental powers such as China, India, or Iran can go to sea by amassing enough overseas commerce, merchant and naval fleets, and forward outposts to support voyages spanning the seven seas. And if they can, how will they do business in great waters, and how should established maritime powers interact with the newcomers to safeguard longstanding interests? Commerce, bases, and ships: these are the lineaments of sea power...

Curriculum Review

The Choices Program: “Indian Independence and the Question of Partition”

by William J. Tolley (Reviewer)

I was first introduced to The Choices Program in 2006 during a weeklong intensive seminar on controversial issues in the social studies classroom, led by Diane Hess from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since then, for the past eight years, I have enjoyed introducing my students to the same compelling content and the same interactive process: first in my AP World History courses in New York City and then in my IB History courses—and more broadly in the social sciences—with my students in...

Columns, EAA Interview

Interview with 2014 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Winners for “Indian Independence and the Question of Partition”

by Lucien Ellington

This is our eighteenth consecutive interview with the recipients of the AAS Franklin Buchanan Prize. This year’s winners are Leah Elliott (writer), Maya Lindberg (writer), and Tanya Waldburger (videographer), who developed the curriculum unit Indian Independence and the Question of Partition, published by The Choices Program, a national education initiative at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Choices Program curriculum developers also won the Buchanan Prize in 2...

Feature Article

Vivekananda and Okakura On What East Offers West

by David B. Gordon

When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East?1 —Okakura Tenshin, The Book of Tea As the turn of the twentieth century approached, Western nations had come to control much of the globe. These powerful nations regarded themselves as comprehensively superior to the non-Western peoples over whom they ruled. Such a dual reality—Western control plus the swaggering confidence that accompanied it—created an excruciating challenge for those on the receiving end: should they e...

Feature Article

Asia, Power, and Robes of Honor

by Stewart Gordon

  More than three decades ago, my wife and I ventured overland from Istanbul to Delhi. At Herat, on the western border of Afghanistan, my wife met a group of women—a matriarch, her daughters, and daughters-in-law. Although they shared no common language, my wife accompanied them over several days while they bought and sold in the markets. The matriarch liked my wife and on the day we left insisted that she accept her old, black, beautiful, fully embroidered cloak. The women showed her ...

Feature Article

Inspiration in India for a New Generation of Entrepreneurs

by Ken Schoolland

Business schools everywhere are looking to inspire budding new entrepreneurs. Always in question: Can entrepreneurship be taught, or must it spring from practical experience? Alan Rosling is convinced that practical experience of successful entrepreneurs can inform the education of others through his book, Boom Country? The New Wave of Indian Enterprise. Rosling’s book is also potentially useful for instructors and students who are interested in understanding important factors influencing entr...

Feature Article

Boom Country? An Interview with Alan Rosling

by Nimish Adhia (Interviewer)

Alan Rosling is an entrepreneur and strategic adviser who has had a deep engagement with India over the past thirty-five years. He is co-founder of ECube, an investment manager dedicated to raising standards of environmental social and governance compliance. He cofounded Kiran Energy after leaving the Tata Group, where he was the first non-Indian Executive Director of Tata Sons (the holding company of the Tata Group), charged with internationalization of the company. His earlier career included ...
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