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Constraints of the Preindustrial World Industrial Evolution, not Revolution? Rethinking Regions Explaining the Industrial Revolution in Europe Emperors and Reign Periods (PDF) Timeline of Chinese Inventions (PDF) Excerpts of Interest

Print Rethinking Regions Map of Asia Showing Qing and Ming Era Borders As we think about Asia in the curriculum and about Asia in world history, we need to rethink regions. Here my concern is with the problems we have now that we're all escaping the conceptual tyranny of constantly thinking in terms of the national state. Scholars, often motivated by the subordination of national states in Europe to the European Union, recognize that the national state isn't going to be around forever, at least in its European form. Whether in the humanities or social sciences, they have moved in one of two directions. Regional Analysis of China There are those who have moved down to the level of the local, and celebrated the uniqueness of whatever they're studying at a micro level. And there are others who have moved up to the scale of the world and alerted us to some common, global human experiences. We have very few conceptual stepping stones between the very local and the global now that the national state is no longer as important as it once was. We need to consider some new kinds of geographical spaces between the local and the global. There are really good reasons to have very flexible notions of region, which can be defined differently for different purposes. In other words, we should recognize that the spatial units within which we do our research and teaching need not always be the national state or, alternatively, always the same region. Regions were often defined in the past as "civilizations" and assumed to share some common or homogeneous traits, but as we have learned that tremendous diversity and variation exist within any large civilization, we can instead think about how common features, such as Confucian ideas in East Asia, supply a number of concepts and institutions from which people can make choices that combine with other more specific themes in their particular settings, be these some part of China, Japan, or Korea. Since we know presently that the development of commercial expansion took place in a variety of locales across Eurasia between 1500 and 1800, we no longer can assert that the Industrial Revolution emerged in Europe because of developments taking place in previous centuries when the same changes also took place in parts of East and South Asia.