East Asia has re-emerged after a long eclipse as a centre of world wealth creation and growth. Over the past four decades the region’s share of world GDP has risen from less than 10 to 30 percent, a ratio that is set to rise to 40 percent by 2030. What has made East Asia’s remarkable ascent possible, and what does this economic rebalancing between East and West mean for world politics? In this insightful and provocative book, Philip Golub addresses these questions, tracing the region’s rise from the early modern European-Asian encounter to the imperial confrontations of the nineteenth century, and China’s state capitalist turn in the latter half of the twentieth century. Together, he argues, the dynamics of imperialism, war and revolution led to the constitution of developmental states that made possible East Asia’s return to a central position in the global economy. Combining rich historical narrative and social theory, this book is an invaluable guide to one of the core issues in world politics today.

The East Asian expansion since the 1960s stands out as a global power shift with few historical precedents. The Resurgence of East Asia examines the rise of the region as one of the world's economic power centres from three temporal perspectives: 500 years, 150 years and 50 years, each denoting an epoch in regional and world history and providing a vantage point against which to assess contemporary developments.

East Asia has re-emerged after a long eclipse as a centre of world wealth creation and growth. Over the past four decades the region’s share of world GDP has risen from less than 10 to 30 percent, a ratio that is set to rise to 40 percent by 2030. What has made East Asia’s remarkable ascent possible, and what does this economic rebalancing between East and West mean for world politics? In this insightful and provocative book, Philip Golub addresses these questions, tracing the region’s rise from the early modern European-Asian encounter to the imperial confrontations of the nineteenth century, and China’s state capitalist turn in the latter half of the twentieth century. Together, he argues, the dynamics of imperialism, war and revolution led to the constitution of developmental states that made possible East Asia’s return to a central position in the global economy. Combining rich historical narrative and social theory, this book is an invaluable guide to one of the core issues in world politics today.

A recent study by the Asian Development Bank notes that by 2050, Asia's per capita income would rise six-fold to reach Europe's levels today, one of many indications of Asia's “re-emergence”. By then, Asia's share of global GDP would have doubled and it would have regained the dominant economic position it once held some 300 years ago before the industrial revolution.What is less well-known is that during the previous eras of globalization, Asia was also regionally integrated and globally connected. During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Asia was divided and fragmented.This unique book argues that, led by the economic dynamism and “re-encountering” between China and India, we are witnessing the “Renaissance of Asia”. As in the bygone eras, Asia is integrating within itself and the global economy is intensifying, now driven by market-oriented production networks and economic policies. Asia is starting to be “re-centered” as trade and investment relations between South Asia and East Asia surge. Asia's rise is a restoration of the past, not a revolution. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the economic development of Asia.

Hokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Komyo (701–760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself. Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, Lori Meeks explores the revival of Japan’s most famous convent, an institution that had endured some four hundred years of decline following its establishment. With the help of the Ritsu (Vinaya)-revivalist priest Eison (1201–1290), privately professed women who had taken up residence at Hokkeji succeeded in reestablishing a nuns’ ordination lineage in Japan. Meeks considers a broad range of issues surrounding women’s engagement with Buddhism during a time when their status within the tradition was undergoing significant change. The thirteenth century brought women greater opportunities for ordination and institutional leadership, but it also saw the spread of increasingly androcentric Buddhist doctrine. Hokkeji explores these contradictions. In addition to addressing the socio-cultural, economic, and ritual life of the convent, Hokkeji examines how women interpreted, used, and "talked past" canonical Buddhist doctrines, which posited women’s bodies as unfit for buddhahood and the salvation of women to be unattainable without the mediation of male priests. Texts associated with Hokkeji, Meeks argues, suggest that nuns there pursued a spiritual life untroubled by the so-called soteriological obstacles of womanhood. With little concern for the alleged karmic defilements of their gender, the female community at Hokkeji practiced Buddhism in ways resembling male priests: they performed regular liturgies, offered memorial and other priestly services to local lay believers, and promoted their temple as a center for devotional practice. What distinguished Hokkeji nuns from their male counterparts was that many of their daily practices focused on the veneration of a female deity, their founder Queen-Consort Komyo, whom they regarded as a manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon. Hokkeji rejects the commonly accepted notion that women simply internalized orthodox Buddhist discourses meant to discourage female practice and offers new perspectives on the religious lives of women in premodern Japan. Its attention to the relationship between doctrine and socio-cultural practice produces a fuller view of Buddhism as it was practiced on the ground, outside the rarefied world of Buddhist scholasticism.

This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): How have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably weak cooperation? How has a group of lesser, self-identified Southeast Asian powers gone beyond its original regional purview to shape the form and content of Asian Pacific and East Asian regionalisms? According to Alice Ba, the answers lie in ASEAN's founding arguments: arguments that were premised on an assumed regional disunity. She demonstrates how these arguments draw critical causal connections that make Southeast Asian regionalism a necessary response to problems, give rise to its defining informality and consensus-seeking process, and also constrain ASEAN's regionalism. Tracing debates about ASEAN's intra- and extra-regional relations over four decades, she argues for a process-driven view of cooperation, sheds light on intervening processes of argument and debate, and highlights interacting material, ideational, and social forces in the construction of regions and regionalisms.

Examines the rise of East Asia as one of the world's economic power centres from three temporal perspectives: 500 years, 150 years and 50 years, each denoting an epoch in regional and world history and providing a vantage point against which to