|
|
|
Book Review
East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World. By WARREN I. COHEN. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 516. $35.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
|
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. |
1
|
|
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 a Western-dominated modern world where it was clearly no longer central. |
. . . |
There are about 680 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
