Bailey describes how the Sea of Okhotsk area became integrated into a world system of economic and cultural ties between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This happened primarily because of maritime explorations, travel, and trade, which led to increased connections with both Russia and Japan.Individual chapters of the book provide analyses of historical sources which describe cross-cultural encounters and changes in the Sea of Okhotsk area. This includes analyses of explor...

Approaching Recent World History Through Film: Context, Analysis, and Research explores the relationships between twentieth-century world history and film by providing analysis of a diverse range of films organized by global history topics, including war and conflict, decolonization, political economy, and long-distance travel.This insightful text describes how to analyze films as original historical sources and how to carry out research projects using films. The text prov...

**Shortlisted for the ICAS (International Convention of Asia Scholars) Book Prize in the Humanities 2019**Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis.Japan's...

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remai...

The liberal class plays a vital role in a democracy. It gives moral legitimacy to the state. It makes limited forms of dissent and incremental change possible. The liberal class posits itself as the conscience of the nation. It permits us, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define ourselves as a good and noble people. Most importantly, on behalf of the power elite the liberal class serves as bulwarks against radical movements by offering a safety valve for popular...

Japan is arguably today's most successful industrial economy, combining almost unprecedented affluence with social stability and apparent harmony. Japanese goods and cultural products are consumed all over the world, ranging from animated movies and computer games all the way through to cars, semiconductors, and management techniques. In many ways, Japan is an icon of the modern world, and yet it remains something of an enigma to many, who see it as a confusing montage of the alien and the...

**Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges makes a forceful case that liberal institutions have failed Americans by ceding power to self-serving and elitist corporations“Uncompromising. . . . Hedges indicts the press, the Church, the arts, labor unions, universities, and the Democratic Party for failing to protect the middle and lower classes.” —The New Yorker**For decades, the liberal class defended against the worst excesses of power. But the pillars of the...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2021AN ECONOMIST AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020'Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today is the product of the 'underground' which Harper describes with skill and empathy in this monumental work' Rana Mitter, Literary ReviewThe story of the hidden struggle waged by secret networks around the world to destroy Eu...

Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often ...

Geopolitics is a way of looking at the world: one that considers the links between political power, geography, and cultural diversity. In certain places such as Iraq or Lebanon, moving a few feet either side of a territorial boundary can be a matter of life or death, dramatically highlighting the connections between place and politics. Even far away from these 'danger zones' - in Europe or the US for example - geopolitics remains an important part of everyday life. For a country's location an...

The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What exp...

The Pacific’s ‘Indigenous times’ are not just smaller sections of larger histories, but dimensions of their own.Histories of our Pacific world are richly rendered in these essays by Damon Salesa. From the first Indigenous civilisations that flourished in Oceania to the colonial encounters of the nineteenth century, and on to the complex contemporary relationships between New Zealand and the Pacific, Salesa offers new perspectives on this vast ocean its people, its cultures, its pasts and i...