Chaim Adler - Comparative History of Civilizations in Asia: Volume 1

Volume 1: 10,000 B.C. to 1850

Edward L. Farmer
University of Minnesota
Gavin R.G. Hambly
University of Texas at Dallas
David Kopf
University of Minnesota
Byron K. Marshall
University of Minnesota
Romeyn Taylor
University of Minnesota

First published 1986 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1986 by Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-052370

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-00657-0(hbk)

This book is dedicated to our children:

The day has long since passed when one could seriously question the desirability of including at least an introductory treatment of Asian history in the content of a liberal education. Yet the general reader, the student, or the teacher attempting to come to grips with the history of Asia is faced simultaneously with two formidable problems. The first is the need to assimilate a vast amount of unfamiliar information. The second is the need to order that information into meaningful units, to relate it to the rest of one's knowledge and to decide what is essential and what is less important. The purpose of this book is to help solve these problems by providing a broad framework and flexible method for thinking about the history of the peoples of Asia. The approach adopted, which involves the comparative study of civilizations, is described in detail in the Introduction. Here we will address the questions of why we have written such a book and how we think it can be used in teaching.

It is an understandable, if lamentable, fact that the curriculums and teaching resources of colleges and universities in the English-speaking world are heavily weighted toward the values and institutions of the European and American past. This condition is a natural result of the fact that the study of history, and to a lesser extent the other humanities and social sciences, has been motivated by a desire for self-understanding, by the search for a cultural self-image. Interest in other peoples and other traditions has been relegated to a secondary position. This has been particularly true of Asian studies, as a function of both physical and cultural remoteness from Western life. In recent decades, however, interest in the world outside the West has increased markedly and efforts have been madeto include the history of most areas of the globe within the scope of a liberal education. In part at least this is due to the recognition that self-understanding is achieved through an understanding of the "other." Once one accepts the desirability of including Asian history in the undergraduate curriculum one is faced with formidable practical problems. Prominent among these problems is the question of scale. More than half of the people in the world are Asians. The size and diversity of Asia as a cultural unit is suggested by the fact that thirteen of the twenty principal spoken languages are Asian, while only six are of European origin.

The challenge for an introductory course in Asian history is how to give a meaningful account of this vast sector of the world, with less resources and less class time than is normally devoted to the cultures of the West. Two considerations, one theoretical and one practical, enter at this point. The first consideration is that Asia is too large, too complex,

and too diverse to be treated as a single unit in the way Europe or Latin America can be. It is necessary, therefore, for the purpose of analysis to divide Asia into smaller, more cohesive subdivisions. A reasonable division of the world into regions would separate Asia into five parts: West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia.

Once Asia is broken into manageable and meaningful units the question arises as to how to treatseveral units at once, The approach offered in this series is to view the subdivisions of Asia from a comparative perspective.

The practical consideration that faces the instructor trying to teach a course covering the whole of Asia is the fact that no single individual scholar can hope to acquire a detailed familiarity with all areas of Asia. All too often the solution is to teach about China or India and let the rest go. The virtue of a comparative approach is to create flexibility by allowing one to extend inquiry from the relatively familiar to the relatively unfamiliar while retaining a balanced perspective.

This book is designed for use by an instructor who is more familiar with one subdivision of Asia than with the others. The organization of each chapter is intended to facilitate the extension of inquiry comparatively from known subject matter to the relatively unknown. Structurally, each chapter is composed of a "process" section (abbreviated P) and "pattern" sections (organized from west to east) describing historical events in the various subdivisions of Asia. For example, in the process section (4.P) analyzes the formation of universal empires, while the patterns describe specific empires: the Achaemenids (4.1), the Mauryans (4.2) and the Ch'in-Han (4.3). This combination of process and patterns gives the reader a great freedom of choice in selecting a strategy for using the book.