The Making of Early Modern Asia : A Polycentric Approach

A wide-ranging synthesis dealing with societies and states in Asia in the years from circa 1400 to 1800, using ideas of both comparison and connection.

Drawing on recent literature in a variety of languages, the book challenges existing narratives of the "Rise of the West", while seeking to historicize (and thus de-romanticize) the nature of developments in the area fromthe Ottoman Empire to Japan.

Recent years have seen a number of challenges, typically mounted by historical sociologists and practitioners of world-history, to the dominant paradigm of the "Rise of the West", which was linked to modernization theory.

However, these views have usually focused exclusively on either cultural questions, or on economic ones.

This work, presented in the form of a longargumentative essay, but which can equally be used as an introductorytext to courses on comparative Asian history, argues that the years from 1400 to 1800 saw the crystallization in Asia of a new set of developments both at the levels of states and societies.

To these social, economic and cultural features, we can legitimatelygive the name "early modern". Drawing on the author's own extensive research on early modern Indian Ocean trade and South Asian state formation, and contemporary historiography, the book offers insights into the history of societies from the Far East and South East Asia, to South Asia, Central Asia, Iran and the Ottoman Empire.