ARTICLES
“Sino-Pacifica”: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History
Andrew J. Abalahin, 659
Conventional geography’s boundary line between a “Southeast Asia” and an “East Asia,” following a “civilizational” divide between a “Confucian” sphere and a “Vietnam aside, everything but Confucian” zone, obscures the essential unity of the two regions. This article argues the coherence of a macroregion “Sino-Pacifica” encompassing both and explores this new framework’s implications: the Yangzi River basin, rather than the Yellow River basin, pioneered the developments that led to the rise of Chinese civilization, and the eventual prominence of the Yellow River basin came not from centrality but rather from its liminality—its position as the contact zone between Inner Eurasia and Southeast Asia.
Disputing the “Iron Circle”: Renan, Afghani, and Kemal on Islam, Science, and Modernity
York A. Norman, 693
This article deals with the criticisms advanced by two leading Muslim thinkers, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) and Namik Kemal (1840–1888), of the free-thinking French intellectual Ernest Renan (1823–1892). All three men wrote in 1883—a moment of rapid colonial expansion—on the places of Islam and science in modern political culture. The article challenges the prevailing theory that Islamic concepts of governance could not be reconciled with reformist thought by reevaluating the insights and legacy of Kemal, the most influential Ottoman political activist of his time.
Gu Hongming as a Cultural Amphibian: A Confucian Universalist Critique of Modern Western Civilization
Chunmei Du, 715
Intellectuals around the world debated the meaning of civilization during the World War I era. This article reexamines the life and ideas of the so-called Chinese sage Gu Hongming. Born and raised in British Malaya, Gu grew up as an English-educated Romanticist, but he ended as a staunch monarchist and eminent Confucian propagandist to the early twentieth-century Western world. In contrast to the traditional label of “cultural conservative,” I propose the new concept of “cultural amphibians” to characterize Gu and his contemporary “spokesmen of the East.” Because of their social “hybrid vigor” and transcultural competence at a time of rapid global transformations, these men were able to forge “authentic” identities across national, ideological, and cultural boundaries. Seemingly rooted in a cultural and ideological confrontation between the West and the non-West, their discourses on “Eastern-Western civilizations” are in fact better seen as marked by a global intellectual syncretism.
Globalization and Global History in Toynbee
Michael Lang, 747
This article traces the intellectual history of Arnold J. Toynbee. It centers on early twentieth-century British social thought and its synthesis of idealism and evolution. Toynbee used this framework to interpret imperial and international affairs, and, like his mentors, he focused especially on the unprecedented, progressive possibilities of global integration. With the failure of the Paris Peace Conference, however, Toynbee began to regard globalization as a contradiction between social unity and spiritual disjuncture. A Study of History, his endeavor to bring historical writing into its global present, followed from this opposition, which he sought to explain and hoped to resolve. By the mid 1930s, world events finally overwhelmed Toynbee’s commitment to the old conceptual synthesis. He returned to such thinking after World War II, but his brief declaration of methodological limitations illuminated for historical study the antinomy of the global scale.
Aliens in Their Native Lands: The Persistence of Internal Colonial Theory
John R. Chávez, 785
In the 1960s “internal colonialism” became an important theory advanced to explain the historical development of ethnic and racial inequality in the modern world. By the 1980s the theory had been dismissed as inadequate. Nonetheless, its influence persisted as more global colonial theories evolved. This article argues that internal colonialism continues effectively to explain the historic subordination of indigenous peoples within larger states dominated by other groups. Furthermore, internal colonialism is applicable globally to dynastic and national states, as well as contiguous empires, from antiquity to the present—a breadth that attests to this theory’s continuing significance.
BOOK REVIEWS
John R. Searle. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization
reviewed by John E. Wills Jr., 811
Kimberly Kagan, ed. The Imperial Moment
reviewed by Alexander Mirkovic, 816
Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor H. Mair. Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia
reviewed by David Christian, 819
Victor Lieberman. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, Vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands
reviewed by Derek Heng, 822
Johan Elverskog. Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road
reviewed by Yang Bin, 825
Don J. Wyatt. The Blacks of Premodern China
reviewed by Maghan Keita, 828
Mark Edward Lewis. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty
reviewed by Charles Holcombe, 830
Youval Rotman. Jane Marie Todd, trans. Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World
reviewed by Richard J. Hoffman, 833
Edward N. Luttwak. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire
reviewed by Richard Greenfield, 836
J. R. McNeill. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914
reviewed by Molly A. Warsh, 840
Glyn Williams. Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
reviewed by Ingo Heidbrink, 844
J. H. Elliott. Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500–1800
reviewed by Matthew James Crawford, 846
Erik R. Seeman. Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800
reviewed by Pablo F. Gomez, 850
John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, eds. Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World
reviewed by Matt Clavin, 853
Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800
reviewed by Ana Schaposchnik, 855
Kristin Mann. Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900
reviewed by Ismael M. Montana, 857
Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds. How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850
reviewed by Meha Priyadarshini, 860
Jennifer Newell. Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange
reviewed by Emily J. Manktelow, 863
Karl R. Appuhn. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice
reviewed by Jason Hardgrave, 867
Francisco Bethencourt. Jean Birrell, trans. The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834
reviewed by Patricia Lopes Don, 870
Peter H. Wilson. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy
reviewed by Mark Charles Fissel, 873
Tillman W. Nechtman. Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
reviewed by Michael H. Fisher, 877
Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery. Ly Lan Dill-Klein with Eric Jennings, Nora Taylor, and Noémi Tousignant, trans. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954
reviewed by Marie-Paule Ha, 880
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914
reviewed by Roberto Mazza, 883
Eugenio Menegon. Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China
reviewed by Jeff Kyong-McClain, 886
Alexander Missal. Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal
reviewed by Julie Greene, 889
Alan Tansman, ed. The Culture of Japanese Fascism
reviewed by Bill Mihalopoulos, 893
Silvio Pons and Robert Service, eds. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism
reviewed by Robert W. Strayer, 895