The final issue of this volume begins with Anne Feldhaus’s Presidential Address, entitled “Biography as Geography.” Feldhaus examines the Līḷācaritra, a thirteenth-century biographical text written in Marathi, as a work of geography. She argues that the text not only includes narratives of the life story of the religious figure Cakradhar but also provides new insights for interpreting the geography of western India by mapping sacred spaces bounded by temple complexes and pilgrimage routes. This geographical conceptualization based on “reading against the grain” of a work of biography opens new directions for studying how individuals imagined their territories, communities, and spaces in the thirteenth century.
In his article, Andrew B. Liu argues for rethinking the debates on the histories of capitalism in China and South Asia at a time when Asia is playing a central role in the global reconfiguration of capitalism. By bringing together key arguments from the historiographies of South Asia and China, Liu offers a critique of Eurocentric histories of capitalism while providing a new contribution to the long-standing India-China comparisons that have appeared in the JAS in years past. Jeremy E. Taylor's work considers British imperial concerns about the impact of Chinese nationalism in Malaya. He explains that the British recruited anti-communist collaborators to resist Chinese threats to their colonial “Malayanization” programs in the mid-twentieth century. Sakura Christmas’s article examines the impact of settler colonialism and ecological imperialism in the Japanese client state of Manchukuo. Through her study of the crisis of selenium deficiency disorder in the soy-producing frontiers, Christmas provides a complex history of a region that is often obscured in histories of nation-states in Northeast Asia.
The issue concludes with a forum organized around the posthumous publication of C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (2018). Bayly was completing the sequel to his seminal text The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2003) when he passed away in 2015. Throughout his career, Bayly was committed to writing histories of the non-Western world in which historical processes in Asia were at the center of history rather than at the margins. As an early critic of area studies, Bayly argued for the need for historians to move beyond their respective temporal and spatial specializations as a way to rethink normative interpretations of economy, society, culture, and politics. He explained that the idea of “beating the boundaries” of the discipline was necessary for reinterpreting historical processes anew. He was also convinced that historical materialism offered the best explanation for historical change on a global scale. The publication of The Birth of the Modern World brought together many of the interests that he developed for understanding the place of non-Western histories—especially histories of Asia—in creating the modern world. The point was to understand the importance of connected histories of empires, nationalisms, religions, and warfare across the globe. Remaking the Modern World continues Bayly's project but further marks another shift in his oeuvre by considering the dynamics of the histories of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The forum is entitled “C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World: Interpretations from Asian Studies” and includes contributions from Sunil Amrith, Antoinette Burton, R. Bin Wong, and Sandria B. Freitag. I would like to thank Susan Bayly and Robert Travers for their assistance in bringing this forum together.
—Vinayak Chaturvedi
