“A very stimulating book ... It is well researched and well written and its central argument will provoke much debate amongst readers.” —History Now 9 (2003)

“The comparisons of China with its neighboring peoples and civilizations ... give a new and important perspective ... and Holcombe’s work should provide an excellent starting point for further argument.” —American Historical Review, February 2003

“[This book] will be especially useful for teachers of world history who lack specialized knowledge of early East Asia, and for beginning graduate students in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese history as an antidote to the conventional compartmentalization of the region’s past into national histories.” —The International History Review, September 2002

“The interpretive nature of the book and the author’s engagement in contemporary concepts and discourse ... will be sure to stimulate comparative analysis and heated debate; in addition, the documentation and extensive bibliography of Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship are extremely useful for budding scholars.” —Journal of the American Oriental Society 122 (2002)

“This is an important book that will no doubt spark even more debate about the importance of area studies in university curricula, and should force scholars of East Asia to ponder anew the meaningfulness of the modern nation-state as a rubric of research and classroom pedagogy” —Journal of World History, June 2003

“This is a very welcome book—an eye-opener to any specialist and a godsend to all those who teach pre-modern Asian history. For a work of such erudition, the writing is refreshingly informal, almost breezy, perhaps harking back to an earlier incarnation as classroom lectures. The arguments are presented forcefully and with a minimum of clutter.... I warmly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of East Asia.” —Acta Koreana 5 (2002)

The Genesis of East Asia examines in a comprehensive and novel way the critically formative period when a culturally coherent geopolitical region identifiable as East Asia first took shape. By sifting through an impressive array of both primary material and modern interpretations, Charles Holcombe unravels what “East Asia” means, and why. He brings to bear archaeological, textual, and linguistic evidence to elucidate how the region developed through mutual stimulation and consolidation from its highly plural origins into what we now think of as the nation-states of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Beginning with the Qin dynasty conquest of 221 B.C. which brought large portions of what are now Korea and Vietnam within China’s frontiers, the book goes on to examine the period of intense interaction that followed with the many scattered local tribal cultures then under China’s imperial sway as well as across its borders. Even the distant Japanese islands could not escape being profoundly transformed by developments on the mainland. Eventually, under the looming shadow of the Chinese empire, independent native states and civilizations matured for the first time in both Japan and Korea, and one frontier region, later known as Vietnam, moved toward independence.

Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, this study of state formation in East Asia will be required reading for students and scholars of ancient and medieval East Asian history. It will be invaluable as well to anyone interested in the problems of ethno-nationalism in the post-Cold War era.

Charles Holcombe is professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa and author of In the Shadow of the Han: Literati Thought and Society at the Beginning of the Southern Dynasties (UH Press, 1994).

Read the introduction (PDF).

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