Engineering Asia traces the history of the economic development of post–World War II Asia. While conventional approaches to this history tend to employ the nation-state as a basic unit of analysis and focus on each nation’s specific conditions, this book is critical of this type of “nation-based miracle narrative” (1) and calls for the incorporation of regional and global factors within the historical contexts of both colonialism and the Cold War into our analysis. The images of postwar Asia’s economic development that the authors of Engineering Asia construct are intriguing in that they underline the immense role that colonialism played, thereby critiquing the widely received historical view that identifies a major break between the period of Japanese empire—until August 1945—and the period of independence, decolonization, and nation-building thereafter.
Engineering Asia consists of nine chapters. In the introduction, Hiromi Mizuno, one of the editors, articulates the conceptual frameworks for the analysis...
