Some historians who study medieval Chinese women have tended to neglect the situation of common women who stayed at home dealing with family affairs, preferring instead to examine the far more complete documentation on exceptional women who gained power or prominence outside the home in the largely male-dominated world. In recent years, as more historians have paid closer attention to women's daily life in medieval times, they have made great breakthroughs in drawing on a multiplicity of sources (Ebrey, 1993). Yet sometimes they are still embarrassed by the problem of insufficient materials. The oasis of Turfan, lying on the Silk Road between China and India, contains the Astana-Karakhoja graveyards that have been excavated by different explorers, both Chinese and not, since the beginning of the century. The tombs contain many goods preserved by the dry desert climate, including paper shoes, belts, and hats which Chinese scholars have pieced together to form documents. This paper draws primarily on those materials shedding light on women's activities, which most historians interested in women have yet to utilize.

Before Liberation, the history of the revolution of 1911 fell within the domain of Kuomintang party history. Although numerous publications appeared, some of which possessed historical value, generally speaking an orthodox point of view occupied the dominant position. Many published works were filled with prejudice and distortion and should not be regarded as genuine historical research.

Since the new China was established, research on the revolution of 1911 has gradually become a branch of modern Chinese history, which takes historical materialism as its leading principle.

As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700. However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe 2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands. And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.

The house has stood empty since Partition. Its Muslim family abandoned their Bihari village in India for a new life in West Pakistan, 1,300 kilometers distant. Unlike most other homes left behind by emigrants, this one's doors still open to its owner's keys, since his brothers remained in their homes nearby. One of those brothers follows invitations across north India preaching the Tablighi Islamic revival. In conversation, he demonstrates little interest in the religious traditions of the Hindu majority of his large village. Two decades ago, his son, Farhad, opened one of the first private schools in the area, anticipating the surging demand for education that has overtaken India. Some of the first classrooms built had brick walls pierced by concrete screens decoratively depicting a Quran, crescent moon, and star. Most of the school's students and many of its teachers are Hindu.

In China, as among many of the African and Asian peoples, early nationalism was almost the monopoly of the urban, educated elite. It was nurtured on anti-imperialist sentiment and was brought to maturity by a knowledge of Western civilization rather than a mastery of Chinese tradition. It was often closely associated with the revolt of youth against their fathers, with the younger generation seeking a more rapid modernization than the older generation. Little wonder, then, that student movements punctuate the definition of nationalism and provide exclamation points in its expression.

Seventeenth-century Chinese literature thematizes market segmentation, the idea that functionally similar but different objects can be produced for and marketed to different ranks of people. A 1671 collection of classical essays, Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄 by Li Yu 李漁 (1611–80), has generally been understood to be the most influential of lifestyle guides, containing essays about the theater, everyday life, and material culture. This article argues that price and quality differentiation when it comes to a variety of consumer goods forms a central organizing principle for the volume and provides a prism through which Xianqing ouji discusses social inequity and hierarchy.

Naiza Khan's The Manora Archive (2007–), the product of her long-term engagement with a small island in Karachi's harbor, is exemplary of both Pakistan's vibrant contemporary art and its burgeoning discourse of urban space. Dominated by a naval base and port rejuvenation project, nearly all of Manora's civilian population was bought out by investors in 2006 for a now-abandoned real estate development. Khan has recorded the island's abandoned architecture in photographs and video, documenting its descent into ruins. Her visual archive, which also includes drawings, prints, and paintings based on the photographs, presents Manora's ruins as metonymic of Karachi's colonial and postcolonial histories. This article makes two interlocking claims: first, that Khan's artistic work supplements scholarship on the relationship between violence and urban development by highlighting issues of temporality and bodily experience, and, second, that her work productively exploits the tension between the documentary mode and more traditional artistic media.