How Asia Found Herself

uropeans created the concept of Asia as a name for the huge swath of territories running from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean. But around the mid-nineteenth century, Asians began to explore each other’s cultures for themselves, aided by new techniques in the printing of Asian languages that had been developed by Christian missionaries and often motivated by the desire to counteract Christian proselytizing with missionizing of their own.

In this fascinating and original study, Green explores sources in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other languages to see how Bahai, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Zoroastrian travelers, merchants, and polemicists tried to understand and influence the societies and cultures of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. What they found was “the illusion of Asia”—a region characterized by enormous diversity and mutual ignorance. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that The Analects of Confucius appeared in Arabic and Urdu and the Koran in Japanese and Chinese, through translations of European versions of these texts. The rise of “Asianism,” whether as a claim of Indian centrality or as an ideology of Japanese expansionism, was based on a myth of a culturally coherent Asia