Asia Inside Out: Changing Times ed. by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, Peter C. Perdue (review)

This book is the first in a three-volume set that seeks to “redefine conventional understanding” of the vast Asian continent by focusing on specific years, from 1501 to 2008, in diverse regions extending from Yemen to Japan. By asking the contributors to select unconventional dates that indicate “important processes and movements throughout the region,” the editors want to “question the adequacy of conventional dates and spatial conceptions” (6). All of the eleven contributors skillfully place their chapter within this stated framework and make a concerted effort to underscore the importance of the specific year that they have chosen to analyze.

The year 1501, which marks the founding of the Safavid dynasty, is highlighted as a great political and religious transition in Iranian history. The “synchronized revivals” of polities in Burma, Russia, Japan, and India made 1555 a notable year (65). The Ming court granted Macau to the Portuguese in 1557, a “year of some significance” with regard to China’s engagement with the global economy. The years 1636 and 1726 are described as critical for the expansion of Yemini commercial networks dealing in coffee beans and the year 1683 as an important watershed for Vietnamese Zen/Chan/Thi n Buddhism. Indian Ocean connections are showcased with the year 1745 as a staging point. The jump in the Japanese tea trade with America in 1874 and its consequences are examined as a prelude to the developments of the twentieth century.

The next two chapters deal directly with European colonial rule and its related discourse in Asia: In 1900/01, an Indian soldier in the British forces who participated in the attempt to quell the Boxer uprising in China remonstrated about European imperialism. In the same vein, the “high-point” of Dutch rule in Sumatra, Java, and Borneo came in 1910 (227). The chapters about the years 1956 and 2008, each written by an anthropologist—depicting Tamil–Kannadiga divides in Bangalore and changes in the United Arab Emirates’ immigration policy affecting Filipino migrants, respectively—round out the volume.

Although the collection is well written and innovative, and the individual chapters make important contributions to the field in their own ways, the issue of the efficacy or appropriateness of “Asia” as a unit for research is never adequately scrutinized. None of the dates selected pertains to Asia as a whole; as a result, the contributions are often unable to extend beyond subregional analysis. Moreover, notwithstanding the contributors’ different disciplinary backgrounds (eight historians, two anthropologists, and one art historian), the chapters themselves are not overtly interdisciplinary, and the decision to begin the study in the sixteenth century exaggerates the importance of Asia’s (more precisely, subregional Asia’s) connections with Europe and the Americas. Hence, the volume inevitably, and probably unintentionally, perpetuates the problems of “too small” or “too large” in defining Asia as a region or as a field of study rather than resolving them (3).