In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. Made Modern draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields who write on topics ranging from exploration and infrastructure to the occult sciences and communications. The contributors use histories of science and technology to enrich our understanding of Canadian history and of Canada’s place in a transnational modern world. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, this book explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Modern Erasures is an ambitious and innovative study of the acts of epistemic violence behind China's transformation from a semicolonized republic to a Communist state over the twentieth century. Pierre Fuller charts the pedigree of Maoist thought and practice between the May Fourth movement of 1919 and the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 to shed light on the relationship between epistemic and physical violence, book burning and bloodletting, during China's revolutions. Focusing on communities in remote Gansu province and the wider region over half a century, Fuller argues that in order to justify the human cost of revolution and the building of the national party-state, a form of revolutionary memory developed in China on the nature of social relations and civic affairs in the recent past. Through careful analysis of intellectual and cultural responses to, and memories of, earthquakes, famine and other disaster events in China, this book shows how the Maoist evocation of the 'old society' earmarked for destruction was only the most extreme phase of a transnational, colonial-era conversation on the 'backwardness' of rural communities.

This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies. Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s “multiple modernities” which has triggered a host of conference papers and publications largely within sociology: all the while, it seems that the literatures, for instance, of multiple modernities and alternative modernities are each distinguished by the fact that one ignores the other. It is the principal aim of this edited volume to subject these disciplinary discussions to a more encompassing view, assembling contributions from different scholars who not only work in different disciplines and regional settings, but who also engage with their research topics in a variety of approaches and at different levels of analysis. The volume thus transcends the sometimes narrow boundaries of the debates over modernities within the established academic disciplines and seeks to turn the unavoidable friction brought about by this interdisciplinary setting into most original and insightful scholarship.

In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming. This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform. Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today. This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.

Offering a vital reflection on the unity and diversity of the modern world, this important new book connects with the current debate on multiple modernities and argues that this notion can only be properly understood in a civilizational context. Johann Arnason presupposes the idea of modernity as a new civilization with its specific social imaginary, centred on strong visions of human autonomy but open to differentiation on institutional and ideological levels, as well as in changing historical contexts. The book begins by connecting this perspective to a distinctive framework of social theory, centred on the differentiation of economic, political and cultural spheres. Arnason goes on to deal with Communism as the most important alternative version of modernity, and with East Asian developments as a particularly complex and instructive case of interacting modernities. The book concludes with reflections on globalization theory and ways of reformulating it in light of the civilizational approach.

The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The essays in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions—between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis—which the conventional narrative of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light. The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence—a causal centre. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy, and the maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority, and rural as resources for modernity. This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, Sociology, Cultural Studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian Studies.