The Asia’s Transformations series is a flagship series for Routledge Asian Studies, with around 100 titles exploring the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia’s twentieth and twenty-first century transformations. Series editor Mark Selden has chosen a selection of influential titles from the series and for this month only Routledge are offering these as free to view to online!

About the Series

The Asia’s Transformations series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyze the antecedents of Asia’s contested rise. Asia’s Transformations aims to address the needs of students and teachers with a diverse selection of books offering a comprehensive view of Asia in the 21st century.

The following titles are available to read online for free, in their entirety, until 31st August 2014. These titles have been selected by series editor Mark Selden to offer a taste of the diverse selection of books offered through the series – simply click on the links below for each book, hit the blue “View Inside this Book” button and start reading!

You can view the entire series in our online catalog here – and we are pleased to offer a special 20% discount off all books in the series until the end of July for all orders through www.routledge.com. Simply enter the code ASIAST2014 at the checkout.

Free to View Online – Simply click the link on the books below and hit the blue “View inside this Book” button

The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives
Edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden
The East Asian expansion since the 1960s stands out as a global power shift with few historical precedents. The Resurgence of East Asia examines the rise of the region as one of the world’s economic power centres from three temporal perspectives: 500 years, 150 years and 50 years, each denoting an epoch in regional and world history and providing a vantage point against which to assess contemporary developments.

Korean Society
Civil Society, Democracy and the State, 2nd Edition
Edited by Charles K. Armstrong
While most analyses of Korean politics have looked to elites to explain political change, this revised edition of Korean Society examines the role of ordinary people in this dramatic transformation. Taking the innovative theme of ‘civil society’ – voluntary organizations outside the role of the state which have participated in the process of political and social democratization – the essays collected here examine Korea as one of the most dramatic cases in the world of ordinary citizens participating in the transformation of politics.

Chinese Politics
State, Society and the Market
Edited by Peter Gries and Stanley Rosen
Written by a team of leading China scholars this text interrogates the dynamics of state power and legitimation in 21st Century China.

Japan’s Quiet Transformation
Social Change and Civil Society in the 21st Century
Jeff Kingston
‘Kingston has provided a well researched and also readable synthesis of developments in Japan since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989….The fact that Kingston happens to be a rare example of an academician who can combine sound analysis with entertaining prose makes it possible to recommend this book to just about anyone interested in contemporary Japan.’ – International Herald Tribune

Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia
Edited by Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-Ari
This volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Chinese Society
Change, Conflict and Resistance, 3rd Edition
Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden
‘This first rate collection will be indispensable reading for Scholars of Chinese society. Each of the book’s uniformly excellent well-written and substantive chapters open by providing enough historical background onits specific topic to make it comprehensible enough to advanced undergraduates as well as the general informed reader.’ – The China Journal

Japan’s Comfort Women
Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the U.S. Occupation
Yuki Tanaka
Japan’s Comfort Women tells the harrowing story of the “comfort women” who were forced to enter prostitution to serve the Japanese Imperial army, often living in appalling conditions of sexual slavery. Using a wide range of primary sources, the author for the first time links military controlled prostitution with enforced prostitution.

Global Shanghai: 1850-2010
A History in Fragments
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
‘Adopting a global rather than Eurocentric perspective, Wasserstrom has produced a fascinating, well-researched and empirically grounded study that sheds much needed light on Shanghai’s emergence, and re-emergence, as a cosmopolitan city of global importance. Highly Recommended.’ – History News Network

Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China
Great Transformations Reconsidered
Francesca Bray
In this book, Francesca Bray explores subjects such as technology and ethics, technology and gendered subjectivities (both female and male), and technology and statecraft to illuminate how material settings and practices shaped topographies of everyday experience and ideologies of government, techniques of the self and technologies of the subject.

Mapping China and Managing the World
Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times
Richard J. Smith
This book brings together a selection of essays by Richard J. Smith, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Mapping China and Managing the World focuses on Chinese constructions of order and examines the most important ways in which elites in late imperial China sought to order their vast and variegated world, and will be welcomed by Chinese and East Asian historians, as well as those interested more broadly in the culture of China and East Asia.

Decoding Subaltern Politics
Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics
James C. Scott
This book brings together James C. Scott’s most important work on peasant religion and ideology; everyday forms of peasant resistance; and state technologies of personal identification. In a collection of interrelated essays Scott introduces the major concepts that lie at the core of his work and illustrates, through ethnographic and historical work how they can be understood through practical examples.

Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy
A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750-1950
Carl Trocki
‘…a very important argument with implications beyond the social history of drugs, into the broader history of the founding of empire.‘ – Professor Nigel South, University of Essex