New Books In World Affairs

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year. Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Harvard University Press, 2015) collects essays by historians, art historians, and anthropologists that each take a particular year as an inflection point when “certain major cultural processes changed direction.” These include key turning points in religious, economic, and political formations across land and sea since the sixteenth century, and they bring us into a wide range of localities from Macau to the Dutch East Indies to Yemen, Japan, Bangalore, and beyond. Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (Harvard University Press, 2015) gathers essays that collectively emphasize connectedness and motion by moving beyond regional and national boundaries to look at a series of “spatial moments” that were shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and post-moder