Eugenia Lean (Columbia University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to … [Read more...]
Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand
Duncan McCargo (Cornell University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. Watch our interview with Professor McCargo here. Fighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems—and what happened next. … [Read more...]
Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China
Arunabh Ghosh (Princeton University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world’s largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering … [Read more...]
Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border
Sören Urbansky (Princeton University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely … [Read more...]
The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media
Nathan Shockey (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he … [Read more...]
