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Burma is one of the largest countries in Southeast Asia and was once one of its richest. Under successive military regimes, however, the country eventually ended up as one of the poorest countries in Asia, a byword for repression and ethnic violence. The author of this book spent years in the region as a correspondent for The Economist and witnessed first-hand the vicious sectarian politics of the Burmese government, and later, also, its surprising attempts at political and social reform. This enlightening history, from the colonial era on, explains how Burma descended into decades of civil war and authoritarian government. Taking advantage of the opening up of the country since 2011, the author interviewed hundreds of former political prisoners, guerilla fighters, ministers, monks, and others to give a vivid account of life under one of the most brutal regimes in the world. The book also explains why the regime has started to reform, and why these reforms will not go as far as many people had hoped. This book presents a survey of this volatile Asian nation.

This book is about the early twentieth-century institutional formation of the system of penal reformation (ganhua) in China, its subsequent expansion and extension, and the related initial emergence of the modern Chinese state's thought reform regime into the early 1950s. Formulated over several decades by a diverse array of people professing a range of political perspectives and aims and operating within and beyond the formal state in a variety of social-geographic settings, this system became a key constituent part of an evolving mode of modern governance. Subsequently modified and proliferating on a mass scale through party-state projects for social and political transformation and mobilization for total war and revolution, the culminating regime of custodial and noncustodial forms of thought reform emerged as an indispensible feature of mid-twentieth-century Chinese state power. Examined through cases and stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced these systems, this book demonstrates how, in the half century before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the institutional mechanisms and modes of mind conversion were shaped by multiple participants, including central state and local officials, wardens and prison instructors, new academics, local social elites and philanthropists, Confucians, Christians, and Buddhist laity and monks, imperial Qing scholar officials, Nationalists and Communists, as well as by prisoners themselves. The potency of the system ultimately lay not in the attainment of its proclaimed ideal of reforming minds, but rather it inhered in what it justified, controlled, coerced, and compelled in the name and perpetual pursuit of that elusive ideal.

In 1958, China’s revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s grand scheme—like so many other utopian dreams of the twentieth century—proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China’s agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this oral history of modern China’s greatest tragedy, survivors of the cataclysm share their memories of the devastation and loss. The range of voices is wide: city dwellers and peasants, scholars and factory workers, parents who lost children, and children who were orphaned in the catastrophe all speak out. This remembrance of an unnecessary and unhindered catastrophe illuminates a dark recent history that remains officially unacknowledged to this day by the Chinese government and opens a window on a society still feeling the impact of the terrible Great Famine.

For centuries, reports of man-eating tigers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have circulated, shrouded in myth and anecdote. This book documents the relationship between the “big cat” and humans in this area during the 350-year colonial period, recreating a world in which people feared tigers but often came into contact with them because these fierce predators prefer habitats created by human interference. It shows how people and tigers adapted to each other's behavior, each transmitting this learning from one generation to the next. The chapter discusses the origins of stories and rituals about tigers, and explains how the cultural biases of Europeans and class differences among indigenous populations affected attitudes toward the tigers. It provides figures on their populations in different eras and analyses the factors contributing to their present status as an endangered species. The book is a combination of environmental and micro history, interweaving stories about Malay kings, colonial rulers, tiger charmers, and bounty hunters, with facts about tigers and their way of life.

When plague broke out in Manchuria in 1910 due to transmission of marmots to humans, it struck a region struggling with the introduction of Western medicine, as well as with the interactions of three different national powers: Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This book relates how this plague killed as many as 60,000 people in less than a year, and uses the analysis to examine the actions and interactions of the multinational doctors, politicians, and ordinary residents who responded to it. It covers the complex political and economic background of early twentieth-century Manchuria and then moves on to the plague itself, addressing the various contested stories of the plague's origins, development, and ecological ties. Ultimately, the book shows how because of Manchuria's importance to the world powers of its day, the plague brought together resources, knowledge, and people in the ways that enacted in miniature the triumphs and challenges of transnational medical projects such as the World Health Organization. The outcomes still have lessons for all today.

This book is an epic historical consideration of the Mongol conquest of Western Asia and the spread of Islam during the years of non-Muslim rule. The Mongol conquest of the Islamic world began in the early thirteenth century when Genghis Khan and his warriors overran Central Asia and devastated much of Iran. This book offers a fresh and fascinating consideration of the years of infidel Mongol rule in Western Asia, drawing from an impressive array of primary sources as well as modern studies to demonstrate how Islam not only survived the savagery of the conquest, but spread throughout the empire. The book goes beyond the well-documented Mongol campaigns of massacre and devastation to explore different aspects of an immense imperial event that encompassed what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan, as well as Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe. It examines in depth the cultural consequences for the incorporated Islamic lands, the Muslims' experience of Mongol sovereignty, and the conquerors' eventual conversion to Islam.

The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, examining the imaginative and improvisational interpretations of law by which Indonesians navigate dispossession.

This book addresses the history and future of homegrown, mass Chinese Christianity. Drawing on a large collection of fresh sources—including contemporaneous accounts, diaries, memoirs, archival material, and interviews—it traces the transformation of Protestant Christianity in twentieth-century China from a small, beleaguered “missionary” church buffeted by antiforeignism to an indigenous popular religion energized by nationalism and millenarianism. The book shows that, with a current membership which rivals that of the Chinese Communist Party, and the ability to galvanize China's millions into apocalyptic convulsion and messianic exuberance, the popular Christian movement channels the aspirations and the discontent of the masses, and will play an important role in shaping the country's future.

Tea remains the world's most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, this book challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. The book shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract, industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Further, characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, it explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.