Antje Flüchter Book order

The purpose of this volume is to identify and analyze the mechanisms and processes through which concepts and institutions of transcultural phenomena gain and are given momentum. Applied to a range of cases, including examples drawn from ancient Greece and modern India, the early modern Portuguese presence in China and politics of elite-mass dynamics in the People’s Republic of China, the book provides a template for the study of transcultural dynamics over time. Besides the epochal range, the papers in this volume illustrate the thematic diversity assembled under the umbrella of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” Drawing from both the humanities and social sciences, stretching across several world areas and centuries, the book is an interdisciplinary work, aptly reflected in the collaboration of its editors: a historian and political scientist.

This book enters new territory by moving toward a new conceptual framework for comparative and interdisciplinary research on transcultural state formation. Once more, statehood and governance are highly discussed topics, whereby modern state building is often considered to be a genuinely European characteristic, despite the fact that early modern Europeans knew of, experienced and grappled with highly developed states in Asia. The articles collected in this book discuss how strategies of governance were part of transcultural transfers between the two continents. The first part presents and discusses concepts of statehood in order to provide a set of conceptual tools for analyzing the transcultural appropriation of governmental strategies. The second part is concerned with case studies that examine the transcultural perception of governance, and the third and final part gathers perspectives on political practice in transcultural encounters (e.g. military, administration, and diplomacy)