The Idea of Asia and Its Ambiguities

Summary

Prasenjit Duara's “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times” is a rich and inspiring paper. The distinction between the concept of region and the concept of regionalization shows the author's historical approach. Asia as a region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the result of imperial regionalism and the anti-imperialist regionalization project. The question of Asian “modernity” must eventually deal with the relationships both between Asia and European colonialism and between Asia and modern capitalism. A lot of research has shown Asia as a region from a long historical perspective, but most can be thought of as a modern construction of the early history of Asia in light of imperial or anti-imperialist projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For example, as early as the 1940s, Miyazaki Ichisada began to explore the “birth of Song dynasty capitalism” through the study of wide-ranging historical transportation links, believing firmly that the study of “the development of modernity after the Song has brought us to the point of needing to reflect on modern Western history in terms of the development of modern East Asian history.” That his theory of “East Asian modernity” overlapped with the Japanese idea of a “Greater East Asia” does not obscure the insight inhering in Miyazaki's observations. He saw that from the perspective of world history, the digging of the Grand Canal, urban migration, the ability of the circulation of commodities such as spices and tea to connect European and Asian trade networks, and the promotion of artistic and cultural exchange between Europe and Asia enabled by the expansion of the Mongolian empire not only changed the internal relations in Chinese and Asian societies, but also connected Europe and Asia by land and sea. If the political, economic, and cultural features of “Asian modernity” appeared as early as the tenth or eleventh centuries, was the historical development of these two worlds merely parallel, or more closely linked?