Routledge East Asia in the World: An Introduction (Foundations in Global Studies)

From the Foundations in Global Studies series, this text offers students a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary entry point to East Asia, with an emphasis on the globalizing processes the region is undergoing. After a brief introduction to the study of East Asia, the early chapters of the book survey the essentials of East Asian history and offer an overview of the region’s languages, economic development, and global connections. Students are guided through the material with relevant maps, resource boxes, and text boxes that support further independent exploration of the topics at hand. The second half of the book presents an interdisciplinary portrait of the region through a set of case studies that explore key aspects of the cultural, economic, and political life in specific countries, sometimes holding up a mirror to the region as a whole. Readers will come away from this book with an understanding of current issues that have particular relevance in East Asia as we know it today and of the larger globalizing forces shaping the region and beyond. About the Author Anne Prescott is the director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies in Massachusetts and a national director for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, a leading provider of professional development training on East Asia. Trained as an ethnomusicologist specializing in traditional Japanese music, she spent eight years in Japan. She has been an administrator at area studies centers since 2002.