Prasenjit Duara's “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times” is a rich and inspiring paper. The distinction between the concept of region and the concept of regionalization shows the author's historical approach. Asia as a region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the result of imperial regionalism and the anti-imperialist regionalization project. The question of Asian “modernity” must eventually deal with the relationships both between Asia and European colonialism and between Asia and modern capitalism. A lot of research has shown Asia as a region from a long historical perspective, but most can be thought of as a modern construction of the early history of Asia in light of imperial or anti-imperialist projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For example, as early as the 1940s, Miyazaki Ishisada began to explore the “birth of Song dynasty capitalism” through the study of wide-ranging historical transportation links, believing firmly that...
