"The Rise of East Asia:
500, 150, and 50 Year Perspectives"
June 27-29, 1998, Hong Kong

East Asia in World Historical Perspective Research Working Group conducted a small international planning meeting in Binghamton on Dec. 6-7, 1996, with support from the ACLS. The conference centered around discussion of a paper jointly authored by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, entitled "The Rise of East Asia in Historical Perspective." Participants included: Mitchell Bernard (York Univ.), Bruce Cumings (Northwestern Univ.), Gary Hamilton (Univ. of Washington), Peter Katzenstein (Cornell), Caglar Keyder (Binghamton Univ.), Philip McMichael (Cornell), Takashi Shiraishi (Kyoto), Robert Wade (Brown), Wang Zhengyi (Nankai Univ., China), Ramon Grosfoguel (Binghamton Univ.), Beverly Silver (Johns Hopkins Univ.) and Immanuel Wallerstein (Fernand Braudel Center).

This was followed by a workshop in Hong Kong in June 1998. This workshop was entitled "The Rise of East Asia: 500, 150, and 50 Year Perspectives."

The workshop proposed an analysis of the emerging East Asian regional political economy along three distinct temporal dimensions, embedded within one another in Russian-doll fashion. The shortest dimension was defined by the reorganization of East Asia in the era of U.S.-Soviet hegemonic rivalry and the resurgence of Asia as a power center in the world-economy; the intermediate perspective was defined by the response of East Asian countries to the devastating nineteenth-century challenge of Western power including colonialism and the rise of Japan; and the long perspective was defined by the legacy of the East Asia tribute-trade system in the intergovernmental and interenterprise relations from the sixteenth century.

The following papers were prepared:

Giovanni Arrighi and P.K. Hui, "Historical Capitalism, East and West"

Stephen Chiu, "Constructing Capitalist Developmental States in East Asia: A World-Polity Perspective"

Bruce Cumings, "East Asia in the World-System"

Takeshi Hamashita, "East Asia: Historical Perspectives on the Sinocentric Tributary Trade System"

Takashi Shiraishi, "The Making of Southeast Asia"

Kaoru Sugihara, "The East Asian Pattern of Economic Development: Origins, Development, and Transformation of Labor-Intensive Industrialization"

Gary Hamilton, "East Asia Business Networks and State Interactions"

Peter Katzenstein, "Regional Orders: Technology in Asia and Europe"

Kenneth Pomeranz, "Households, Markets, and Accumulation: Women and Labor-Intensive Production in East Asia and Western Europe since 1400"

Ho-Fung Hung and Mark Selden, "Social Movements, System Trans- formation, and the Political Economy of East Asia, 1500- 2000"

Suk-Ying Wong and Weihsun Mao, "The Evolution and Meaning of World History Instruction in Three East Asian Societies: A World Culture/Polity Perspective"

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