Analyzes how the works of Vermeer reflect seventeenth-century life and the birth of globalization, in a historical study that identifies significant objects in key paintings while explaining how they also serve to document their time's growing web of trade throughout the world.

Studies of collaboration have changed how the history of World War II in Europe is written, but for China and Japan this aspect of wartime conduct has remained largely unacknowledged. In a bold new work, Timothy Brook breaks the silence surrounding the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers. Japan's attack on Shanghai in August 1937 led to the occupation of the Yangtze Delta. In spite of the legendary violence of the assault, Chinese elites throughout the delta came forward to work with the conquerors. Using archives on both sides of the conflict, Brook reconstructs the process of collaboration from Shanghai to Nanking. Collaboration proved to be politically unstable and morally awkward for both sides, provoking tensions that undercut the authority of the occupation state and undermined Japan's long-term prospects for occupying China. This groundbreaking study mirrors the more familiar stories of European collaboration with the Nazis, showing how the Chinese were deeply troubled by their unavoidable cooperation with the occupiers. The comparison provides a point of entry into the difficult but necessary discussion about this long-ignored aspect of the war in the Pacific.

Product Description: Until recently, capitalism has been regarded as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. By examining China in these Eurocentric terms, China has been perceived, by Westerners and Asians alike, to be a failed version of the West...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: First published in 1988 in response to the growing need for documentation concerning local history in the late imperial period, Geographical Sources provides bibliographical data regarding two distinct genres: route books, and topographical and institutional gazetteers...read more

As increasing attention is drawn to globalization, questions arise about the fate of "the nation," a political and social unit that for centuries has seemed the common-sense way to organize the world. In Nation Work, Timothy Brook and André Schmid draw together eight essays that use historical examples from Asian countries--China, India, Korea, and Japan--to enrich our understandings of the origin and growth of nations.Asia provides fertile ground for this inquiry, the volume argues, because in Asia the history of the modern nation has been inseparable from global influences in the form of Western imperialism. Yet, while the impetus for building a modern national identity may have come from the need to fashion a favorable place in a world system dominated by Western nations, those engaged in nationalist enterprises found their particular voices more often in relation to tensions within Asia than in relation to more generic tensions between Asia and the West.With topics ranging from public health measures in nineteenth-century Japan through textual scholarship of Tamil intellectuals, the willful division of Korea's history from China's, the development of China's cotton industry, and the meaning of "postnational-ism" for Chinese artists, the essays reveal the fascinating array of sites at which nation work can take place.This will be essential reading for historians and social scientists interested in Asia.Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University. André Schmid is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s.Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.

The Japanese Army's invasion of China in 1937 was the first step toward a hemispheric war that would last until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What ended in one atrocity began with another: the savage military takeover of China's capital city, which quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese Army's conduct from December 1937 to February 1938 constitutes one of the most barbarous events not just of the war but of the century. The violence was documented at the time and then redocumented during the war crimes trial in Tokyo after the war. This book brings together materials from both moments to provide the first comprehensive dossier of primary sources on the Rape.Part 1, "The Records," includes two sources written as the Rape was underway. The first is a long set of documents produced by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, a group of foreigners who strove to protect the Chinese residents. The second is a series of letters that American surgeon Dr. Robert Wilson wrote for his family during the same period. These letters are published here for the first time.The evidence compiled by the International Committee and its members would be decisive for the indictments against Japanese leaders at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. Part 2, "The Judgments," reprints portions of the tribunal's 1948 judgment dealing with the Rape of Nanking, its judicial consequences, and sections of the dissenting judgment of Justice Radhabinod Pal.These contemporary records and judgments create an intimate firsthand account of the Rape of Nanking. Together they are intended to stimulate deeper reflection than previously possible on how and why we assess and assign the burden of war guilt.Timothy Brook is Professor of Chinese History and Associate Director of the Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and is coeditor of Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities and Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia, both published by the University of Michigan Press. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: In recent years, most of the economies of Eastern Asia have been absorbed into global capitalism. Capitalism has transformed these economies, but the process has not been one-way. The cultures of Eastern Asia have in turn shaped how capitalism organizes labor, capital, and markets in ways that could not have been anticipated even ten years ago...read more

Based on eyewitness interviews and a variety of other sources, a reconstruction of the events that led up to the 1989 massacre in Beijing blames the Chinese government for using untrained soldiers as riot police.

Product Description: Brook (history, U. of Toronto) surveys the history of the concept of the AMP (a concept formulated by Karl Marx in the 1850s) in China in relation to debates elsewhere, and examines the particular issues raised in recent Chinese discussions...read more

A mint copy. Clean unmarked pages. Tight binding.