Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Nile Green, "How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding" (Yale UP, 2023)
Description: The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the Asian continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other’s cultures by using the infrastructure of empire for their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, or Chinese or Urdu, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the vastly di...