ICAS BOOK PRIZES 2007 CITATIONS
Kuala Lumpur 2 August 2007, Crowne Plaza Hotel

For the second time the ICAS Book Prizes were awarded. They were established in 2004 with the aim to create by way of a global competition both an international focus for publications on Asia while at the same time increasing the visibility worldwide.All scientific books published in 2005 and 2006 pertaining to Asia were eligible. Four prizes were awarded. Best study in the field of the humanities; best study in the field of social sciences; best dissertation in the field of Asian studies and the Colleagues Choice Award.

The Reading Committee reviewed 80 books and 10 dissertations. The members of the Reading Committee were: Anand Yang (Chair, director Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and past president Association for Asian Studies), Jennifer Holdaway (Program Director Social Science Research Council), Christopher Reed (Associate Professor, Department of History of The Ohio State University and winner of the IBP Humanities 2004), Guobin Yang (Associate Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University) and Paul van der Velde (Secretary, Senior Consultant IIAS and Secretary ICAS).

HUMANITIES

Madeline Zelin's, The Merchants of Zigong (Columbia University Press 2006)

This path-breaking study of industrial enterprise in the 19^th and early 20^th century China is based on extensive archival research and focuses on private entrepreneurs in Zigong, the largest industrial town in its time in northern China. Zelin shows convincingly that lineage-based clan groups provided the basis for effective business organization, capital investment, industrial management, and business innovation. This finding challenges long-standing claims about state monopoly of the salt industry in late imperial China and demonstrates the capacity of entrepreneurs to pool financial resources through lineage-based trusts to organize and manage their businesses through customary contracts. Magisterial in scope and subtle and intricate in historical analysis, this work forces us to rethink not only the history of economic development of modern China, but of modernity itself.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas. Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke University Press 2006)

This is an important contribution to the sociology of international migration, globalization, the intersections of gender and class in domestic work. Based on careful ethnographic research and interviews, Pei-Chia Lan provides a rich account of the daily life experiences of foreign guest workers in Taiwan. The analysis of the relationship between guest workers and their Taiwanese employers in the context of immigration policy sheds light on the broader picture of global inequality. The book also shows how the host society draws discrimatory boundaries against the foreign "other" and how foreign domestic workers, who are poor but often well-educated, negotiate their identities using their cultural capital (such as superior English language skills). The concluding part links the ethnographic story to broader issues of general theoretical concern. Well-written, and full of humane sympathy, the book will be read widely.

DISSERTATION

Karen Laura Thornber, Negotiating and Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Lieterature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones: Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan (PhD Harvard University)

Drawing on dozens, even hundreds of works of literature and biography written in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, as well as a vast secondary literature in multiple languages, Thronber ties loose cultural, literary, and biographical strands held in memory together with many sources she has discovered herself to create an ecumene of polyintertextual East Asian hybridity, competition, and exchange. Never before has the Reading Committee read a dissertation so clearly destined quickly to become an influential book (or two, since it is nearly a thousand pages long!). Starting from the stance that literature travelled widely and was frequently contested and rewritten, Thornber has composed a densely empirical account that shows Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers reading, borrowing from, and recasting literary vernaculars in the (semi)colonial context of the 1895-1945 years. Her accomplishment took the Reading's Committee breath away.

COLLEAGUES CHOICE AWARD

Nordin Hussin, Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780-1830 (NIAS Press 2006)

Without doubt Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka is a truly pioneering study of urban history and breaks much new in the context of Malaysian studies. It is a fine-grained social history, one that we rarely see in Southeast Asia. This study compares Melaka and Penang in the context of overall trends, namely, policy, geographical position, nature and direction of trade, morphology and society, and how these factors were influenced by trade as well as policies. The study is exhaustively researched and the arguments presented are supported by a close study of archival documents that will make new material available to other scholars. By documenting the impact of imperialist ambitions on the economy and society of two major trading centres, this book breaks new ground and will provide a point of reference for all future research concerning the period.

 

Reading Committee ICAS Book Prizes