Big Asia

* Article: Nile Green, Big Asia: Rethinking a Region, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 2, June 2025, Pages 646–651,

URL = https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf178

Description

"In recent years, after decades of increasing specialization, new approaches have emerged in Asian studies that focus on larger units of analysis. Some are predicated on transnational or transimperial spaces, whether based around language (the “Persianate world” and “Sinosphere”), geography (the Indian Ocean or “Silk Road”), or networks (whether forged by commercial, political, or cultural actors). This attention to networks has in turn fostered interest in “inter-Asian” developments, and in methods that are at once micro and macro in scale by following small numbers of people, concepts, or commodities across the continent at large. Correspondingly, the rise of not only global history but also environmental and “big history” has encouraged studies of the entire continent, or large sections of it, by way of steppes and mountain ranges as much as river systems and seas. Such big spaces have in turn linked the study of individuals and communities in Asia to their associates or counterparts in the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific, framing Asia within the larger geography of the “Pacific Rim,” “Asia-Pacific,” “Indo-Pacific,” and “Eurasia”—concepts that have found political as much as scholarly purchase. “Big Asia,” then, begs big questions about not only the methodological how but also the fundamental where and who of Asia’s past, and their implications for the geopolitical present."