Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times

Summary

How has Asia appeared as a region and been conceived as such in the last hundred years? While there is a longstanding and still burgeoning historiography of Asian connections through the study of the precolonial and early modern maritime trade, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally not seen as a time of growing Asian connections. The recent rise of interest in Asian connections in the current time is thus unable to grasp the continuities and discontinuities that form the present. Even more, it is unable to evaluate the risks and possibilities of the present moment.

Before launching upon the subject, we need to question how, where, and why a region appears. I will approach this question from the perspective of historical sociology. Scholars have made a useful distinction between a region and regionalization, distinguishing between the relatively unplanned or evolutionary emergence of an area of interaction and interdependence as a “region,” and the more active, often ideologically driven political process of creating a region, or “regionalization.”

While understanding the history of the concept of the Asian region requires us to utilize both of these conceptions and their complex interactions, I believe that there is a more fundamental issue underlying why regions and regionalisms succeed or fail, and also why they take the shape they do, as few will argue that the Asian region reflects a cartographic representation of Asia. After all, Asia was merely the name of the area east of the Greek ecumene in ancient times. I hypothesize that regions and regionalizations tend to follow the dominant or hegemonic modes of spatial production during a period. For the twentieth century, the paradigm of large-scale production of social space was the territorial nation state under conditions of global capitalist production and exchange. Note that this way of formulating the problem may also incorporate the socialist nation state, which sought to industrialize under conditions of global capital accumulation.