Global Asia

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course introduces Asia's quest for nation-building and global modernity to students without prior knowledge of the region and its people. How did Asia since the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries pursue modernity on national and global levels? How and why did those pursuits connect Asian societies and states to the wider world? What motivated Asians to situate themselves within worlds beyond than the family, the village, the city, the nation, the empire or the region? What were the professional channels that connected the emergence of modern Asia to developments overseas? Themes involve systematic comparisons of a wide array of nation-building programs in China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and India. Case studies include how Asian pioneers such as Sun Yat-sen, Ho Chi Minh and many others embraced global connections as a necessity for their professional work, their personal identities and their political causes. Thinking through global Asia since the 1870s ranges across social history, cultural history, political history, economic history, the history of religions, the history of mobility, institutional history and global history. The course will feature classic readings on these topics as well as brand new publications.