A Financial Times Best Book of the YearThe definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People’s Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss—Chairman Mao.Zhou Enlai spent...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring China is a country of huge economic influence, with ambitions to alter the balance of power between East and West. At the same time, many of its citizens live in poverty, while others occupy...

Winner, The Lionel Gelber Prize Silver Medal, Arthur Ross Book Award For decades, China's rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China...

A revisionist account arguing that Indian nationalism served as a laboratory for fascist ideas that continue to animate the Hindutva political movement of today. Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive...

This tripartite study of the monkey metaphor, the monkey performance, and the 'special status' people traces changes in Japanese culture from the eighth century to the present. During early periods of Japanese history the monkey's nearness to the...

"The Third Edition, entirely revised and featuring new scholarship throughout, brings the history of modern China up-to-date through the drastic changes of the last decade, including China's vast social and economic transformation, participation in the...

In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world and overturned assumptions that large-scale conventional war was inconceivable in the twenty-first century. On the other side of the planet, democratic Taiwan faces the rising threat of a...

A probing investigation of Southeast Asia’s online scam industry – told through the voices of survivorsRunning the gamut from the infamous ‘pig butchering’ romance con to sophisticated online extortion and investment fraud, Southeast Asia has emerged as...

Spanning nearly 4 million square kilometers, the Tibetan river system--including the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red, and Yangzi--forms the largest contiguous network of rivers on the planet, stretching across eastern South Asia, mainland...

A provocative book that demystifies China’s great democratic leap backward under Xi Jinping, revealing why the country’s embrace of capitalism has given rise to hard authoritarianism, mass surveillance, and one-man rule instead of democracy as many in...

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and, on behalf of 68 million compatriots, announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an...

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment; formidable...

The true story of an audacious international movement to liberate India from colonial rule during World War I.WANTED: Brave soldiers to stir up revolt in India;REMUNERATIONS: Death;PRIZE: Martyrdom;PENSION: FreedomIn November 1913, a recruitment notice...

The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history "A superb history of China's transition into and out of the Cultural Revolution. . . . Chen and Westad--two of the best archival historians of Communist China...

The description for this book, Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, will be forthcoming.

When the robe becomes a weapon, who can stop the violence? We think of Buddhism as a faith of peace--rooted in compassion, patience, and nonviolence. But across South and Southeast Asia today, the robe is being turned into a weapon as radical monks and...