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JournalISSN: 0026-749X

Modern Asian Studies 

Cambridge University Press
About: Modern Asian Studies is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & China. It has an ISSN identifier of 0026-749X. Over the lifetime, 2251 publications have been published receiving 31980 citations.
Topics: Politics, China, Colonialism, Empire, Population


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The majority of Japanese even today believe that the politico-cultural universe of the Edo period was fundamentally determined by the closure of the country as mentioned in this paper, and they also think that the opening of Japan can be reduced to the development of exchanges with the West, following the birth of the Meiji regime.
Abstract: The majority of Japanese even today believe that the politico-cultural universe of the Edo period was fundamentally determined by the closure of the country. They also think that the opening of Japan can be reduced to the development of exchanges with the West, following the birth of the Meiji regime. It is hard for them to imagine that Japan developed in relation with other Asian countries, since they are hardly used to appreciating Asian cultures.

665 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This Idealism is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions, one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination.
Abstract: Now it is the interest of Spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and (positive) Being generally—or the Idealism of Existence—is established. This Idealism, then, is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions;—one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination. Since, however, it is the abstract and absolute Thought itself that enters into these dreams as their material, we may say that Absolute Being is presented here as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 139).

288 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The law may be seen as a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable.
Abstract: Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.

265 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the field of social and cultural anthropology, the issues raised by European representations of non-European 'others' have recently received an enormous amount of critical attention as discussed by the authors, and this intensified critical awareness goes beyond the familiar ethnographic concern with the development of cultural empathy, to a much more fundamental exploration of the epistemological constitution of nonEuropean and colonial societies as objects of knowledge within the disciplines of western social science.
Abstract: In the field of social and cultural anthropology, the issues raised by European representations of non-European 'others'—of the control of discourses, the production of professional canons for the representation of truth about the other, the epistemological and ethical ambiguities in the position of the ethnographic observer—have recently received an enormous amount of critical attention. This intensified critical awareness goes beyond the familiar ethnographic concern with the development of cultural empathy, to a much more fundamental exploration of the epistemological constitution of nonEuropean and colonial societies as objects of knowledge within the disciplines of western social science. The development of these concerns, and the acceptance and exploration in the last decade of the links between colonialism and the emergence of anthropology as a discipline are traceable in no small part to the attempted iconoclasms of structuralism and its post-structuralist and deconstructive turns, and to the latters' ferocious and many-sided attack upon the presumed sovereignty and universality of the western intellectual tradition: in particular, upon the Enlightenment faith in a rational human subject and an effective human agency. These themes have been brought together with greatest political and theoretical effect, of course, in Edward Said's assault upon the production of histories in which 'the one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe'. These concerns have been rather less well explored

250 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A historian, like any other scholar, incurs many debts as mentioned in this paper, and it is a great privilege to work amongst historians in the University of London, who form arguably the largest group of historians that work together.
Abstract: A historian, like any other scholar, incurs many debts. I am no exception. I would like to begin this occasion by acknowledging some of those debts. I have benefited greatly from the generosity of colleagues—from the generosity of colleagues in my particular field of Islamic and South Asian history in North America, Europe and the Subcontinent, but also from the generosity of historians in general. It is a great privilege to work amongst historians in the University of London, who form arguably the largest group of historians in the world, that work together.

210 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202370
2022127
202178
202057
201965
201858