Chiang Kai-shek’s Critical Years analyzes an enigmatic figure at the peak of his influence, revealing an improvisational approach to political problems that brought remarkable successes alongside ultimate defeat.

Not Just a Man’s War uncovers the extraordinary stories of ordinary Chinese women during the horrific fourteen-year War of Resistance against Japan, from 1931 to 1945.

Canada and the Korean War synthesizes Canadian and global perspectives on a watershed conflict to explore its profound influence on international, diplomatic, and military history, public memory, and contemporary affairs.

Frontier Fieldwork exposes the transformative power that early-twentieth-century fieldwork had in placing the Sino-Tibetan borderlands at the centre of China’s nation-making process and race to modernity.

Featuring a collection of translated texts written by writers who lived through the occupation, Translating the Occupation challenges and deepens our understanding of the tensions and transformations that Japanese invasion wrought on Chinese society.

While other studies focus on the role of diplomats and the military, Constructing Empire demonstrates that building the Japanese empire also required civilian participation.

This first major comprehensive study of Yuan Shikai in more than half a century explores the controversial life of one of the most important figures in China’s transition from empire to republic.

This critical reassessment of the Quaker-sponsored humanitarian nursing convoy in 1940s China will deepen understanding of the ethical, cultural, and political barriers to delivering humanitarian assistance then and now.

Beyond the Amur charts the pivotal role that an overlooked frontier river region and its environment played in Qing China’s politics and Sino-Russian relations.

In the first Western language history of Liangshan, Joseph Lawson argues that the region was not inherently violent but made violent by turmoil elsewhere in China.

This unique analysis of Manchuria’s environmental history provides an overview of the climatic and imperialist forces that have shaped an area of ongoing geopolitical importance.

Through newly accessed labour farm archives and recently uncovered Chinese-language sources, this book brings to life the experience of political exiles in Mao’s China.

A history of the convergence of Western and Chinese medical practices in modern China.

Presenting a historical survey of China’s boundary disputes and settlements, Hyer demonstrates that its approach to territorial disputes has been pragmatic and strategic.

A study of the Samsui women who migrated from China to Singapore, where they have been commemorated as nation-builders.

The first critical analysis of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople whose entrepreneurial endeavours in China and Southeast Asia the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the cultural sphere.

The voices of Chinese immigrants who settled in the pre-1950s Canadian prairies come alive in this extraordinary record of migration, settlement, and community life.

An engaging study of the rapid urbanization of a former village subsumed by the expanding city of Hanoi.

Milestones on a Golden Road examines works of fiction written in China between 1945 and 1980, when the arts were required to reflect a Maoist vision of history and society.

This is the first English-language book to record the experiences and testimonies of Chinese women abducted and detained as sex slaves in Japanese military “comfort stations” during Japan’s 1931-45 invasion of China.

This book explores the many challenges that faced the early production and sale of beer in Japan, including its evolution from a uniquely Western beverage into a thoroughly domestic Japanese commodity by the post-Second World War era.

This book explores the casting of China’s earliest female Olympians as celebrities within the context of a national crisis, born of internal conflicts and external attack by Japan.

An in-depth examination of how the Chinese imperial state impacted the social order of southwestern China’s minority peoples and redefined their histories and culture.

An investigation into the intersection of Japanese imperialist politics and left-wing, avant-garde arts and culture in 1930s and ’40s Manchukuo.

Merry Laughter and Angry Curses investigates the proliferation of late-Qing-era tabloid journalism and the tabloids’ role in subverting the political and intellectual establishment.

Examines how alcohol, opium, and addiction were portrayed in the culture of China’s Northeast during the first half of the twentieth century.

Engaging with topics central to scholarly debates on modern China, this book shows that China’s early twentieth-century school system, a product of negotiation and compromise, was more successful than previous scholarship has allowed.

This collection moves beyond the geopolitical sphere to examine the multiple fronts – personal, social, and institutional – on which wars in modern China have been fought, experienced, and remembered.

By exposing Catholicism’s long-term influence in Japan, this volume disrupts conventional assumptions about tradition, modernity, and Christianity in the East and the West.

Eating Bitterness reveals what the Great Leap Forward meant for ordinary men and women in Maoist China.

This collection argues that minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif are not powerless in the face of economic and political change in the region – they are drawing on ethnicity and culture to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods.

An investigation into the 1936 execution of a Cantonese official leads to a reassessment of regional and national politics and state-led industrialization in Republican China.

A revisionist history of a unique administrative experiment – the Chinese administration of Manchuria’s Russians in the 1920s – that supports a more nuanced view of Chinese nationalism and China’s relationship with minority cultures.

This book explores how Japanese Canadians living in an isolated mountainous valley in the province of British Columbia worked together to transform the village where they lived for over fifty years from a site of political violence into a space for remembrance.

Challenges received notions about women’s political involvement and engagement with the state in Meiji Japan by exploring the activism of members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

This book brings big geopolitical issues to life through the narrative of a particular region and its people.

Investigates the impact of American Protestant missions on modern Japan and Japanese-American relations.

Deeply researched and eloquently written, Settlers on the Edge ... makes an important and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of who belongs in the North.
– Farley Mowat

History accelerated.

This innovative account examines the social and political impacts of Chinese teacher's schools in the early 20th century, their role in a society in transition, and their production of grassroots forces that lead to the Communist Revolution.

A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book argues that Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and China's other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime.

Charts the introduction of Christianity to Japan through the life of Uchimura Kanzô, was one of Japan’s foremost thinkers, whose ideas influenced contemporary novelists, statesmen, reformers, and religious leaders.

Gutenberg in Shanghai demonstrates how Western technology and evolving traditional values resulted in the birth of a unique form of print capitalism whose influence on Chinese culture was far-reaching and irreversible.

This book represents the first attempt to piece together all existing accounts of the December 1941 Battle of Hong Kong and the fighting between the Garrison and the invading Japanese.

A forceful look at the long-term social and psychological impact of warfare on modern China’s civilian population.

This book offers a concise history of the Sri Lankan Tamil nation, examining its culture and political evolution.