East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History

I have previously done a basic course at university on Asian history, but I wanted to learn more about the early history. This is really the perfect book for my purposes: alot of information with interesting pictures and document extracts. The book places an initial emphasis on China's history, but later expands to Japan and Korea. It uses some very interesting literary extracts from documents of the time, for example from poems and philosophical texts. The pictures are really good as well, most of them in color. A very practical thing is that the book uses maps as often as possible to support the text. The book is a textbook and the language is clear and professional, if you want something more causal then avoid books written by professors altogether and get one written by some journalist. What you would miss out on, however, by doing so is alot of information. This is a book for people who seek detailed information on the respective countries' history. If you want a causal afternoon reading this ain't it. There are few new books that combines the cultural, political and social history of this region into a single book, so this book is like three books combined. Most importantly, this book does it very well.

~East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History~ is a fairly well-written overview of East Asian civilization. Broad in scope, it gives depth to cultural, economic, political and social facets of history. The book is decisively China-centric, but the preponderance of materials on China owes to its startling geographic scope and paramount role at influencing East Asian civilization. The treatments of Japan and Korea are pretty in-depth nonetheless. This book covers everything from Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China, to the climatic Battle of Sekigahara, which inaugurated the Tokugawa Dynasty in seventeenth century Japan. Designed as a textbook for college students, all things considered, it's a worthwhile contribution to East Asian historical scholarship.

I don't understand why some reviews were not so good. I thought this book did an excellent job of covering the history of East Asia (mostly Korea, China, and Japan). There are some good photos here too and I liked how there was some analysis on the relations of the countries and not just bland statements or repetitions of other history books (ie-there's some good writing on how Japanese history was influenced by Korean and Chinese culture). The format is easy to read and does not bore you to sleep. I would have bought a hardcover copy if they had one as I liked this very much.

This is a fantastic text book that covers vast amounts of history with great care and detail, yet it is very accessible to a beginning student.

The authors take a grand sweep across half of Asia and thousands of years. They cover 3 countries - China, Japan and Korea. By virtue of geographic size and population, China receives the greatest coverage. Its long sequence of dynasties are covered in impressive detail. Not just in the political and military events of those eras. The book also devotes space to explaining the religious and philosophical changes. Notably the Analects of Confucius, Daoism, the incursion of Buddhism from India into China, which finally adopted it as its own. There is also extensive coverage of Japanese civilisation. While derived from Chinese, it soon adopted its own unique features, including the Shinto version of Buddhism. The book also has memorable titbits of historical detail, some of which may be stick in the reader's memory. Maybe like in medieval Japan, where landlords might segregate toilets by sex, because men's excrement was more highly valued by farmers than women's. Most history books just don't talk about this stuff!