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Burma has lived under military rule for nearly half a century. The results of its 1990 elections were never recognized by the ruling junta and Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma's pro-democracy movement, was denied her victory. She has been under house-arrest ever since. Now an economic satellite and political dependent of the People's Republic of China, Burma is at a crossroads. Will it become another North Korea, will it succumb to China's political embrace or will the people prevail? Michael Charney's book- the first general history of modern Burma in over five decades - traces the highs and lows of Burma's history from its colonial past to the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in 2008. By exploring key themes such as the political division between lowland and highland Burma and monastic opposition to state control, the author explains the forces that have made the country what it is today.
"Powerful Learning is the first intellectual history of one of the great Buddhist empires of Southeast Asia, Konbaung Burma before the British conquest. The book challenges the notion of the court and the monastic order as static institutions by examining how competition within and between them prompted major rethinking about the intellectual foundations of indigenous society and culture." --Book Jacket.
This study of warfare in Southeast Asia between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries examines the chief aspects of warfare in the region. It begins with an examination of the cultural features that made warfare in the region unique, followed by a discussion of the main weapons used, and the two major sites of fighting, sieges and naval contests. Three chapters examine the role played by animals such as elephants and horses. The final two chapters examine the shift from mercenary armies and masses of levies to smaller standing armies. The study closes with an examination of the tumultuous nineteenth century, in which European naval power won the coast and rivers, while Southeast Asians held the advantage further inland.
Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia sheds light on attempts by royal engineers to introduce innovations devised in the UK to wartime India, Iraq, and Burma, as well as the initial resistance of local groups of colonial railwaymen to such metropolitan innovations. Michael W. Charney looks at the role of the railways in the First Burma Campaign to show how some kinds of military technology – as an example of imperial knowledge – faced resistance due to 1930s-era colonial insularity. The delay this caused significantly compromised the early defense of the colony when the Japanese invaded in 1942. Charney examines the efforts made by one engineer in particular to revive the railways and shows how this effort was responsible for the development of a truly imperial technology that was suitable for extra-European contexts and finally won acceptance in India. Incorporating newly accessible primary source material from the files of the military Director of Transportation during the Campaign, this book highlights a hitherto unfilled gap in the archival record and explores an ignored but crucial aspect of the 1942 Japanese invasion of Burma.
Charney crafts an intellectual masterpiece--the mystery of three missing masterpieces that sends criminals and curators alike on a rollicking chase through the art galleries and auction houses of Europe.
The study of the overseas Chinese has by now become a global enterprise, raising new theoretical problems and empirical challenges. New case studies of overseas Chinese, such as those on communities in North America, Cuba, India and South Africa, continually unveil different perspectives. New kinds of transnational connectivities linking Chinese communities are also being identified. It is now possible to make broader generalizations of a Chinese diaspora, on a global basis. Further, the intensifying study of the overseas Chinese has stimulated renewed intellectual vigor in other areas of research. The transnational and transregional activities of overseas Chinese, for example, pose serious challenges to analytical concepts of regional divides such as that between East and Southeast Asia.
An anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.
This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In volume II, leading scholars in their fields explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism's interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethno-national identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field whose study was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions.