East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (review)

Warren Cohen is a widely respected authority on the history of U.S.-East Asian relations. Most recently, he is author of the entertaining The Asian American Century (Harvard University Press, 2002). In the present volume, he turns his hand to writing a comprehensive history of East (and Southeast) Asia from antiquity to the end of the twentieth century. The inspiration for this boldly panoramic approach came from his observation of thirteenth century Chinese artifacts in Africa. As Cohen rightly insists, East Asia has been engaging with the outside world from the beginning. "Diplomacy, trade, cultural transfer, and warfare . . . ha[ve] been the story of human existence" (p. 59). The resulting book would make an excellent university text, and should prove thought-provoking even for mature scholars, since it draws connections of the broad but important kind too often lost in specialized monographs.

Despite its title, this book does not attempt the kind of radical assertion of East Asian centrality to the premodern world that Andre Gunder Frank does in ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press, 1998). Nor does Cohen rehearse familiar claims of Chinese technological and economic supremacy in the Song era. Instead, he delivers a straightforward chronicle of East Asian history, remarkable chiefly for its emphasis on interstate relations and for its systematic inclusion of Southeast Asia. (Broader connections are consigned mostly to tables highlighting parallel events in world history.) Approximately halfway through the book (p. 245), then, Cohen writes that "time ran out on the peoples of Asia in the course of the nineteenth century." The balance of the book becomes a survey of Pacific-Asia's struggle to find a place in aWestern-dominated modern world where it was clearly no longer central.

Cohen's focus on international relations leaves little room to explore the cultural dimensions of East Asian civilization. This may help explain why Southeast Asia is here treated as a subregion of East Asia. Cohen says he cannot understand why "Southeast Asia, for no compelling reason, is [usually] perceived as a separate entity" (p. xv).

The reasons are cultural.East Asia is the part of the world that traditionally used the Chinese writing system with its accompanying tide of books and vocabulary. Southeast Asia (except for the borderline case of Vietnam) did not participate in this broad "Confucian" interaction zone. This is why Indonesia, to pick one example, is no more culturally part of East Asia than Egypt is of Western Europe, despite similar geographic proximity.

Cohen says nothing about the role of language and literature in shaping premodern Asian civilizations. On Confucianism, he pauses for scarcely a paragraph, concluding that for Confucius "the ends justified the means" (p. 10). As a brief characterization of Confucian thought this seems odd. It is consistent, however, with Cohen's major thesis that, in practice, Chinese statecraft was indistinguishable from that of "all great powers throughout recorded history" (p. 478). To assert that the Chinese are just like everybody else is, in general, both commendable and true. Cohen couches this in terms of a persistent record of Chinese aggression, however, which he illustrates by dwellingupon the careers of a handful of exceptionally expansionistic emperors.This is at least debatable; other observers have been more impressed by China's overall record of unmilitaristic introversion.

Cohen treats the current nation-states of East Asia as permanent fixtures of the historical landscape. At one point he does explain wars between seventh century kingdoms on the Korean peninsula by noting that "of course none of the peoples involved thought of themselves as Koreans" (p. 50), but elsewhere he speaks of Koreans and Vietnamese roaming "for thousands of years before the Christian Era,""maintaining a continuous sense of themselves as not Chinese" (pp...