This chapter surveys Japan’s era of civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika), roughly the first decade of the Meiji era (1868–1912). It interprets bunmei kaika as a revolutionary attempt at Westernization intended to overcome the disruption wrought by the globalizing effects of Western imperialism. The chapter covers four categories: first, politics and war, including the Iwakura Mission, the political crisis of 1873, the movement for freedom and peoples’ rights, the invasion of Taiwan, the Saga Rebellion, the incident at Kanghwa Island, the Shinpūren Rebellion, and the civil war of 1877; second, thought, including intellectual societies, the ideas of civilization and the nation, religion, language, and the public sphere; third, society, including household registration, taxes and allowances, the military, education, gender, and law enforcement; and fourth, culture, including the emperor, clothes, food, transportation, and time. It stresses disorder as integral to these transformations of the 1870s.

How did Britishness interplay with rising anti-colonialism and nationalism in twentieth-century Asia? This chapter draws on the experience of Chinese students from Hong Kong, mainland China, and British Malaya at the University of Hong Kong, to explain the transmission of Britishness to colonial subjects and its implications for anti-colonial movements. British officials and the university administration carefully crafted a curriculum and campus life that would, on one hand, educate young Chinese with Western knowledge and British values, and on the other, steer them away from rising Chinese nationalism. This left visible social effects on the students of the University. Using writings produced by officials, University staff, and students and graduates of HKU, I uncover how Britishness shaped the co-existence of various diasporic Chinese identities on campus, and its student body’s curious response to Chinese nationalism. It argues that colonial Hong education – and more widely a colonial milieu – gave birth to a non-radicalism in Hong Kong amidst rising nationalism.

European imperialism in Pacific Asia not only displaced China as the center of its neighbors’ attention but it splintered the region as well. This was sharp connectivity. France established French Indochina, the Dutch tightened their control of Indonesia, the British took over Malaya and Burma, and all of them had pieces of a disintegrating China. Japan avoided colonization and created its own empire, beginning with Korea and Taiwan. China became the vulnerable edge of a global frame, a frame centered on Europe that included the pieces of Pacific Asia. China’s population was now seen as an impediment to modernization, and its artisanal production was swamped by Western mass production. The US replaced European segmented globalization with a hub-and-spoke globalism rimmed by newly sovereign states. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China remained a mostly insignificant other to its neighbors until Deng Xiaoping’s policies took hold. The salience of China’s presence, population, and production began to rise, and China had become a significant other to its region by 1998. But the US remained the center of an unquestioned global order until the financial crisis of 2008.

Chapter 5 explores the visual and rhetorical styles through which Ottoman history was modernized. Faced with enduring Western Orientalism, Turkish authors, architects, and illustrators took a number of distinct stylistic steps to celebrate their history while presenting their relationship to it as an unequivocally modern one. The explosion of popular history magazines and historical novels during the 1950s provided a forum in which the act of reading about the past could itself become a performance of modernity. Whether blending popular history with pulp fiction or encouraging Turkish citizens to approach their country from the perspective of Western tourists, Turkish authors pioneered approaches to re-appropriating their own past that remain popular today.

Chapter 3 explores the ways mid-century writers used art, history, travel, and gender to articulate a vision of Turkish identity that claimed to synthesize Western Modernity and Eastern tradition or transcend this division entirely. While writers from rival ideological backgrounds promoted different versions of Turkish modernity, they nonetheless shared the belief that this modernity should be a synthetic one, combining the best of East and West. In citing American examples to critique European modernity or putting a modern imprimatur on radically different ideas about women’s role in society, these authors demonstrated how creatively Turkey’s clichés could be employed.

Chapter 7 addresses the self-consciously modern religious revival of the 1940s and 1950s. It investigates the way government officials and conservative magazine editors promoted this revival as a part of a broader return to faith that encompassed the Christian West and offered a necessary corrective to the limits of positivist modernity. Across the ideological spectrum, they insisted Islam was fully compatible with modern thought and science, while holding very different ideas of what this meant. Their reform efforts won praise from many Western observers, who saw in the advent of modern religiosity proof that Turkey no longer needed the rigid secularism of the Kemalist era.

The problem of succession to the throne in Russia. Historians have assumed primogeniture, but that was not the case. The practice was rather paternal designation. Succession also involved marriage politics and the education of the heir. That education evolved along with Russian culture, from traditionally Orthodox to entirely Western after 1700.

While cultural practice in the Ottoman port cities showed a rather liberal blending of various shades of modernity, discourse produced by the middle classes intended to rein in the freedom identity development. In chastising mimicry of the West as well as insufficient mastery of modern etiquette, Turkish and Greek bourgeois picked up uponcriticism of port city society by foreign observers. The attribution of class characteristics to nations is also characteristic both of the foreign observers and the local middle class. Attempts to conform to international middle class standards is combined with the need for national distinguishability. Only in rare cases did individuals who did not comply with the conformity the middle class attempt to impose and out themselves as "super-Westernized."

Following the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt, Great Power hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean took on the form of a strong gunboat presence, without initially taking over direct administration of the region. Instead, Western authors projected a future union of Orient and Occident via the Mediterranean. Authors from east of the sea seized upon and further elaborated on how to make use of the impetus from their neighbors to the north and west of the Mediterranean.

Chapter 4 analyzes Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” ("The Auspicious Celebration"), set in the 1930s, drawing on the 1936 police-enforced unveiling decree of Reza Shah. The narrator’s father, a cleric, has been invited to Reza Shah’s organized event for the Emancipation of Women where he will have to take his wife unveiled. To avoid this, he decides to contract a sigheh for two hours with a friend’s more modern daughter, so he can attend without violating the royal command, but able to disobey the state’s unveiling decree by not attending it with his formal wife. Al-e Ahmad shows how female sexuality is regulated and the female body is exploited under a religious façade to the benefit of the sociocultural, religious, and political institutions during the early years of the Pahlavi regime. Al-e Ahmad addresses the issue of modernization, how it intersects with anxieties over losing or sacrificing indigenous culture, and the role of women within this new nation-state, which is heading toward a Western model of modernization. In so doing, “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” depicts how modern Iranian womanhood came to be defined through the struggle between religion and politics, as well as the interaction between modernity and tradition, among other factors.

In the late eighteenth century, Swiss Cantons had been ruled by privilege, inequality, and conflicts; yet thirty years later a modern political nation was born that quickly caught up with developed England. Was this an internally-driven miracle or the most successful improvement in governance known in history following an external intervention? Chapter 1 deconstructs the transformation of Switzerland during the French Revolution and Empire, to inquire why a similar Napoleonic ambition seems to have met with less success in our own times.