How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

by Nile Green

A pioneering history of cross-cultural knowledge that exposes enduring fractures in unity across the world’s largest continent
 
“Mr. Green has written a book of rigorous—and refreshing—honesty.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
 
The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other’s cultures by using the infrastructure of empire for their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the vastly different regions that European geographers labeled “Asia.”
 
Yet comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter-Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, exposing the roots of enduring fractures in Asian unity.

Genres: History, Asia, Nonfiction, Politics, China, Travel

472 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2022

About the author

Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA, with an interest in the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

In pursuit of the patterns of both global and local Islams, he has traveled and researched in India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Chinese Central Asia, the Caucasus, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Yemen, Oman, Jordan, Morocco, South Africa, Myanmar, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

His seven monographs, seven edited books, and over seventy articles have traced Muslim networks that connect South and Central Asia with the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Japan, Europe and the United States. His most recent book, The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London, was selected by the New York Times Book Review as Editors’ Choice. An earlier book, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, received both the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Award and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Award. His other books include Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam; Sufism: A Global History; and, as co-editor, Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, 1850-1930.

He served for eight years as founding director of the UCLA Program on Central Asia, as well as on various editorial and advisory boards, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has held several visiting positions, such as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and fellowships, including the Luce/ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs. Before moving to the United States from his native Britain, he was Milburn Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. He holds degrees from London and Cambridge.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

FINDING ASIA; As an American who has lived most of the last 50 years in “Asia” - Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia - I found this book to be an absolute jewel. In addition to its scholarly excellence, it seems to me that it completely undermines the “Asian Values” argument that is so often used to resist more liberal social and political change by conservative, not to say authoritarian, politicians and leaders. A must read for anyone hoping to understand the marvelously complex economic changes that are bringing better lives to so many “Asians” while, at the same time, so many others are being crushed by timeless cruelties.

[Danielle]

Listened to author interview on New Books in East Asian Studies