The Japanese

'A history that somehow manages to be at once succinct and sweeping: essential reading for anyone interested in this most fascinating of countries' - Tom Holland<BR><BR>'The perfect introduction to [Japan's] intriguing society is Christopher Harding's lively new A Short History of Japan... The book is short, yes - but its scope is long, deep and rich' - Rana Mitter, History Extra, History Books of the Year 2025 <BR><BR>In this enormously enjoyable introduction to a remarkable country, Christopher Harding traces Japan's rich history over several millennia. Beginning with its earliest coastal communities through to the spread of Buddhism, the rise of the warlords, the promise and menace of the West and Japan's own empire-building, Harding explores how a distinctly Japanese society and culture was forged.<BR><BR>Drawing on the latest scholarship, A Short History of Japan moves beyond traditional tourist-board clichés to consider Japan's own view of its past, values and culture, from ceramics and theatre to food and architecture. The result is a sensory, tactile history conveying to the reader much about Japan's special nature. Harding skilfully shows how these everyday details are intimately bound up with the bigger historical picture, as an expression of the values that have been extraordinarily successful in helping the country to cope with centuries of radical change.

'A rich history... Harding writes with energy and insight, wearing a tremendous amount of learning lightly' - Rana Mitter, Financial Times <BR><BR>This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters<BR><BR>From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back.<BR><BR>The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men.<BR><BR>Christopher Harding's captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia's impact on the West in all its variety.

Japan verstehen leicht gemachtIn dieser äußerst unterhaltsamen Einführung zeichnet der Historiker Christopher Harding Japans reiche Geschichte über mehrere Jahrtausende hinweg nach. Angefangen bei den ersten Küstengemeinden über die Verbreitung des Buddhismus, den Aufstieg der Kriegsherren und Samurai, die Verheißungen und die Bedrohung durch den Westen bis hin zum Aufbau des japanischen Imperiums untersucht Harding, wie sich eine distinkte japanische Gesellschaft und Kultur herausbildete. Auf Basis neuester Forschung räumt das Buch mit Klischees auf und eröffnet einen lebendigen, sinnlichen Zugang zu Japans Geschichte, Werten und Kultur - so eindrücklich, als würde man selbst durch das Land reisen, Seide berühren, Tatami riechen oder eine Schüssel Ramen genießen.'Eine Geschichte, die es schafft, prägnant und umfassend zugleich zu sein: eine unverzichtbare Lektüre für jeden, der sich für dieses faszinierende Land interessiert.' Tom Holland, Bestsellerautor und Historiker

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, urgent and unprecedented demands among oppressed peoples in colonial India drove what came to be called 'mass conversion movements' towards a range of Christian denominations, launching a revolution in South Asia's two thousand-year Christian history. For all the scale, drama, and lasting controversy of a movement that approached half a million members in Punjab alone by the end of the 1930s, much actually depended upon a varied range of tempestuous local relationships between converts and mission personnel, based upon uncertain and constantly evolving terms. Making extensive use of Protestant Evangelical and newly-uncovered Catholic mission sources, Religious Transformation in South Asia explores those relationships to reveal what lay behind the great diversity of social and religious aspirations of converts and mission personnel.In this highly accessible study, Christopher Harding overturns the one-dimensional Christian missions of popular imagination by analysing the way that social class, theological training, culture, motivation, and personality produced an extraordinary range of presentations of 'Christianity' in late colonial Punjab. Punjabi converts themselves were animated by a similarly broad spectrum of expectations and pressures, communicated through informal social networks and representing a brand of subaltern consciousness and resistance rarely considered by mainstream Indian historiography. These internal dynamics produced a first generation of rural Punjabi Christianity that was locally variable, highly fluid, and conflict-ridden-testament to the ways in which the meanings of conversion were contested by all sides in an encounter with far-reaching implications for the future of Christianity and religious identity in India and Pakistan.