The Cultural Histories · Bloomsbury Academic
A six-volume history of the human experience in East Asia, from the rise of civilisation to the close of the twentieth century — some three and a half thousand years, read through one continuous cultural field.
Edited from the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo and SOAS University of London. Co-General Editors Takahiro Nakajima and Christopher Gerteis.
Each subject is examined in all six volumes, on a periodisation shared across the series — so a reader can take an era whole, or follow a single theme through time.
A Cultural History of East Asia examines the cultural sphere that developed outward from China across the wider region — what specialists call the “Sinosphere”: a geospatial zone in which the flow of ideas, peoples, and things to and from China moved largely independent of the political controls exerted by any single state.
Across six volumes, the series demonstrates how the ebb and flow of East Asian culture emerged from a cascade of centre–periphery relations that co-produced an evolving sense of shared values and practices. The story is not one of simple diffusion from a Chinese core, but of exchange, contest, and adaptation among China, the Korean peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, and their neighbours.
Fifty-four specially commissioned chapters trace that trajectory from the advent of Shang civilisation around 1500 BCE to the moment when Western imperial power in the nineteenth century prompted peripheral states — Japan and Vietnam among them — to mount their own challenges to Chinese cultural hegemony, and on into the modern age.
The series is distinctive for its editorial base at the University of Tokyo and SOAS University of London, and for bringing into English the work of leading East Asian scholars who do not often publish in the language. Tightly edited and closely quality-controlled, the chapters together present the best of East Asian scholarship on East Asia.
The Six Volumes
Each volume takes one historical era and reads it across the full range of cultural life. Volume periods below are working spans for review.
Vol. I
c. 1500 BCE – 300 CE
From the rise of Shang civilisation to the consolidation of the Han, this volume tracks the earliest formation of a shared East Asian cultural field — writing, ritual, statecraft, and the first movement of ideas and things across the region.
Edited byTakahiro Nakajima & Christopher Gerteis
Cover: the terracotta army of the First Qin Emperor, Xi’an.
Vol. II
c. 200 – 900 CE
The centuries of Buddhist transmission, aristocratic courts, and continental exchange, when religious institutions, script, and administrative models circulated between China, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago.
Edited byPablo Blitstein & Christopher Gerteis
Cover: the Great Buddha hall of Tōdai-ji, Nara.
Vol. III
c. 900 – 1500 CE
Song commerce, Mongol empire, and the maritime networks that reorganised the region — a period in which the cultural sphere was remade by conquest, trade, and the mobility of people and objects.
Edited byItakura Masaaki & Takahiro Nakajima
Cover: portrait of Khubilai Khan, Yuan court.
Vol. IV
c. 1500 – 1800 CE
The Ming–Qing world and its diasporas: print, silver, and scholarship binding Jiangnan, Joseon Korea, and Tokugawa Japan into a densely connected — and increasingly self-aware — early modern order.
Edited byMio Kishimoto & Yasushi Oki
Cover: a Joseon royal procession screen.
Vol. V
c. 1800 – 1900 CE
The arrival of Western imperial power and the crisis it provoked, as peripheral states — Japan and Vietnam among them — began to contest the cultural centrality that had long radiated from China.
Edited byOsamu Takamizawa & Christopher Gerteis
Cover: a Meiji woodblock triptych of the Sino-Japanese War.
Vol. VI
c. 1900 – 2000 CE
Revolution, war, decolonisation, and the reordering of East Asia across the twentieth century — nationalism, mass culture, and new media reworking inherited cultural forms into recognisably modern ones.
Edited byShigeto Sonoda & Xudong Zhang
Cover: the Pudong skyline, Shanghai.
Thematic Architecture
The same eight subjects are treated in each volume, alongside an editorial introduction — the structure that lets a theme be followed across the whole series.
Institutions, law, and the organisation of authority.
Belief, doctrine, and the transmission of ideas.
Text, theatre, and the spoken and written word.
Image, object, architecture, and the made world.
Knowledge of nature, technique, and the body.
Land, labour, markets, and the flow of goods.
Household, community, and social order.
The material texture of daily existence.
Read one volume for a complete portrait of an age; read one strand across all six for the long history of a single dimension of East Asian life.
Editorial Team
The series is directed from the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (IASA), The University of Tokyo, and SOAS University of London, with volume editors drawn from leading institutions across East Asia, Europe, and North America. The result is a collaborative history written substantially from within the region it describes.
Published by Bloomsbury Academic as part of The Cultural Histories, a series of multi-volume histories built on a common structure that allows themes to be compared across periods and regions.
Volume Editors
Pablo Blitstein · Itakura Masaaki · Mio Kishimoto · Yasushi Oki · Osamu Takamizawa · Shigeto Sonoda · Xudong Zhang
Co-General Editors Takahiro Nakajima and Christopher Gerteis also edit volumes. Links go to each editor’s institutional page or ORCID.