Big Asia

Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story. The June 2025 issue of the AHR includes, in the History Lab section, a forum titled “Big Asia: Rethinking a Region.” In it, seven forum contributors, and four more historians offering brief responses, tackle a wide range of historical and methodological questions about Asia’s past, the history of the concept of Asia itself, and, of course, what the forum means by the notion of “Big Asia.” UCLA historian Nile Green is among those contributors. Green also penned an introduction to the forum. History in Focus producer Syrus Jin caught up with Green, and they discussed, among other things, the power of the geoconcept of Asia both in the past and in our present moment.

Nile Green
Well, hello. My name is Nile Green, and I hold the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. And I began my research career as a historian of the Iran and Islamic South Asia, India, Pakistan, places where I spent a great deal of time when I was younger. And from there, I branched out into, I suppose, what’s called the larger Persianate world, perhaps a term we might come back to, and the interaction, really, of Muslims with the wider non-Muslim world, partly Europe, but more particularly, other regions and cultures and languages of Asia.

Syrus Jin
So I want to move to my first question: If a Martian landed on Earth, and presumably they made a beeline right to UCLA campus and knocked on your office door and they asked you, “What’s Asia?,” how would you describe it?

Nile Green
I’m going to assume that this Martian can travel through not only space, but through time as well. They’ve got that whole space time travel thing mastered. So that being the case, I would say to our Martian, it depends when as well as where you arrive. If this Martian then arrives in Europe in the 18th century onwards, you’ll get a pretty clear answer of where Asia is. It’s so much of what we would think of as, you know, listeners would think of as Asia today. But if our Martian arrives anywhere outside of the geography of Western Europe or the United States, let’s say, before the Middle Ages, or if our Martian arrives anywhere in Asia or Africa, let alone, you know, kind of other regions of the world before pretty much the modern period, then this word Asia is not going to be understood at all. It’s going to be a completely meaningless concept for most of history and for most of the world. Asia was a meaningless sound, a meaningless term, a meaningless concept. The term was generated, the sort of geographical or geoconcept, let’s say, the geographical label was created in Ancient Greece, but it really referred to what would later be called Asia Minor, what we would now think of as Turkey. And then as Ancient Greeks, or at least Macedonians, the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the subsequent Hellenistic period explored further east, beyond Anatolia, beyond Turkey, this term Asia starts to be used for all these other places further east of the Mediterranean world more generally, so that by the medieval period, and we’re still talking about in Europe here, this much more previously restricted term starts to get used as a catch-all for “Cathay”–China, Japan. But it’s still, through this period, through to the 17th century, it’s still only a term used in European languages by Europeans. It’s only in this period, there, in the 17th, 18th century, that the term Asia, the concept of a great continental space called Asia, starts to move into Asia itself and being adopted into Chinese as yaxiya, into Turkish as asiya, into South Asian languages subsequently. In the 19th century, very recently, then, the term starts to be adopted in the concept, that geoconcept, that idea of space, starts, really, to spread across the planet more broadly. And what I’m trying to push with the history lab is when Asia starts to spread into the regions that we call Asia. As I mentioned, that’s really in the 19th century with the spread of mass education, and what we might call a kind of a textbook revolution, when originally, then previously, European concepts of continental geography, in which the world is divided into continents. The response to that in different regions, then, of Asia, is that some response to that lots of people, then even in the 19th and 20th century don’t really work with this concept “Asia.” When I speak to you know people from Korea or China, I say do you think of yourselves as being from Asia? Is Asia a term that use a lot when talking about your home or other regions in Arabic, in Mandarin, in Korean, and often the answer I get is no. So even today, you know, outside of English or other European languages, Asia isn’t necessarily a kind of a primary self-identifier. So how the term gets used then, there’s a whole range of varied responses, from not used a great deal, at least as a primary identifier or a self or indeed as other. So, depending where and when, even in the 19th and 20th, 21st century, where we go in Asia, the degree to which and the ways and purposes in which Asia is used as a self-identifier, identifier of others is extremely varied. So our Martian then would have to sort of choose their space time coordinates pretty specifically if they want to get an answer to a question in which they’re going to be using the word Asia.

Syrus Jin
This is actually a good segue into the forum itself. Could you tell us a little bit about what were the motivations behind it?

Nile Green
The originator of the panel that generated the forum came from Amy Beth Stanley, who’s one of the contributors, as it turned out, and she was on the AHA conference, the San Francisco conference program committee, and she proposed a panel, and came up with his name, “Big Asia.” I ended up chairing the panel then, and then gave free rein to the contributors to to explore what we might mean by “Big Asia,” whether in terms of broader comparative kind of categories that one could use across Asia as a whole. So I was hoping to, through the panel, and then as I approached Mark Bradley, the editor of the AHR, really trying to get a state of the field. What do we mean by how global history has over the last decades changed how we think about Asian Studies, Asian history, but really in a critical spirit.

Syrus Jin
Can you tell us a little bit about what you think the form means by “Big Asia?” You’ve mentioned that contributors were kind of in free reign to sort of explore it on their own terms. Was there sort of a unifying message about what was meant, or was it simply a different set of different meanings about what “Big Asia” is to them?

Nile Green
A particularly common theme, I think, for around half of the contributors, including myself, is what we might call critical metageography and, indeed, concept history, by which I mean, then, really kind of historicizing this term Asia, and trying to examine how the term Asia was deployed in different times and places of the continent. Or indeed how different alternative conceptions of space, of geography, when the geoconcept of Asia goes into various Asian languages, as I said, as yaxiya, as asiya, ajia, depending which Asian language we’re talking about. Does that immediately just replace older conceptions of space? Not least because, as I’d mentioned, that the concept of Asia isn’t just a word, it comes with an entire system of continent-based geographies of what we’d now take for granted as textbook scientific geography.

Syrus Jin
I do want to know you know what you think is the value of thinking of alternatives to Asia as an analytical category?

Nile Green
Great! Well, I’m really glad you asked me this Syrus, because, in a sense, this, this gets to the heart of what I’ve been trying to do, because I think that analytically, toponyms, place names, what I call geoconcepts, these are charters for action and templates of belonging. They have, then, real, major consequences, both at a public, collective, or let’s say at a state level of state or collective policies, and indeed at the private and the individual level. Place names map and chart relations, interrelations, relations not just with other places, but, of course, with the people, the traditions, the cultures, the languages, the economies that inhabit these other places. So place names and toponyms, geoconcepts, map and chart relations, affinities, hierarchies, claims of control, or the recognition of of independence. For this reason, then, and this is why I’m writing and addressing this History Lab to an audience of historians rather than, let’s say, an audience of geographers, is that historical narratives in all of these Asian languages and Asian traditions, historical narratives are crucial to this process of naming and potentially claiming space. Edward Said and his heirs told us a lot about Europe’s othering and conceptions of Asia. But this was not a unique process. European empires, of course, were only latecomers to a much longer, of course, history of empire building and state building across Asia. And Asia’s own many alternative geoconcepts to Asia tell us a great deal about inter, I suppose, or intra-Asian history, whether Sinocentric, let’s say, or Middle Kingdom, zhongguo, notions of concepts of space, Indocentric concepts of national or regional or larger space. It’s very notable that just last year, in 2024 India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, wrote a book called Why Bharat Matters, and “Bharat’ is an older and ancient Sanskirt term for India. So this is a rejection by a major geopolitical player, India’s foreign minister, saying, we are now called Bharat, and this concept and this place name, this toponym Bharat, has major geopolitical significance for India’s internal relations, and, indeed, as foreign minister, it’s foreign relations. So these variable geoconcepts in different Asian languages are having today, and indeed have had throughout history, major real world historical consequences.

Syrus Jin
I do hope that when readers are getting into the forum that that’s one of the things that they take away is this term “geoconcepts,” what it means, how it can be applicable elsewhere. The whole time, while I was reading the forum, I kept seeing how it was saying much more than just about Asia, but really about global history as a whole. I tried to think of what a graduate student, without very much time, might take away from the forum. And one thing that they might take away from the forum is the easy answer of saying, well, this large macro geographic label of Asia, maybe it has some problems, we need to have more specific kind of labels for regions and so on. And I think most readers can understand that. They’ll be able to see the importance of eschewing or denaturalizing what Asia means. And the forum does a very excellent job of laying out alternatives for thinking about this part of the world. So what value do you think still remains with Asia?

Nile Green
Well, Syrus, I’m a linguistic pragmatist. I think life can get very confusing when, as indeed is happening of late in the US, as in many parts of the world in which I’ve traveled, of constantly changing place names, that the maps one has in one guides book no longer actually map onto place names or anywhere you can actually tell a taxi driver. So I’m a linguistic pragmatist. I’m not going on to say, “we can’t use Asia in any of our textbooks or teachings anymore.” I think it’s a useful generalization. Having said that, I think actually, as a world historian, at the teaching world history or, you know, the world history survey, I think Eurasia is a more useful historical space. And I think that’s pretty common in many world history textbooks anyway. But even that pragmatism aside, I think it’s important that as educators and indeed as researchers, we use the term Asia critically with that kind of awareness of the high stakes and indeed the often, in a sense, ahistoricism, really, of using the term Asia. We tend to use a term that was very big, I think, perhaps when I was a graduate student, there’s a danger, I think, in reifying Asia, of thinking of projecting back an Asian consciousness, a pan-Asian, an inter-Asian consciousness. When I was writing my own book, How Asia Found Herself, I began that project by looking for ways in which people from the regions of Asia where I can understand some languages, my research language is South Asia and the Middle East, I wanted to understand their inter-Asian ways of understanding and connecting with the people, the cultures, the languages of East Asia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia. But I actually realized that, as I actually started to, you know, read my primary materials, that what I’d originally predicated my research on—a notion that there was some larger container, larger geoconcept called Asia, that people felt they belonged to—that really wasn’t there. So in short, then I think that the term Asia still, and indeed Eurasia, are a useful generalization, but we shouldn’t reify it, project it back. We should use it critically. And I think as educators, even in one of these world history courses, or indeed any part of Asian Studies, I think, pay a little bit more attention, at least, even in the survey, to these other conceptions of space, these geoconcepts, as I’ve been calling them, and the ways in which they have, as I said, previously been used as charters for action, templates for belonging. Because to me, as an intellectual historian, at least for a day or two of the week, I think it’s really fascinating how a term like the Silk Road, invented by a Prussian German geologist mapping coal mines in late Qing China, travels through Swedish then into English, then gets translated into Japanese and then Chinese, and has this extraordinary set of consequences, certainly unintended by von Richthofen, the geographer, the geologist who invented it. And to me, this is fascinating history. But I think as the major Belt and Road Initiative, which uses the language of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road indeed, has really huge, multibillion dollar consequences for much of Asia and indeed Africa as well in the present day.

Syrus Jin
I did want to transition into the final question that I had for you, which is, let’s go back to that Martian who knocked on your door. They’ve heard your description of what Asia is, and presumably they want to study Asia as a historian. So traveling through time and space clearly wasn’t enough for them. What are some of the questions that you would encourage them to consider as they get started?

Nile Green
Well, I’m glad we’ve come back to our Martian, and I think that’s a really good device, Syrus, for explaining things. And as I’ve said, I’m going to take it for granted that our Martian could travel through time as well as space. So that being the case, then I would say to our budding Martian historian that I would recommend that they go back in time, very deep in time, and to some, let’s say, more geographically remote regions of Asia, Highland Asia, mountain Asia, indeed insular, different islands than many, many islands of of this space we now call Asia, and to actually try to investigate many of the small, the little Asian geoconcepts that have been lost to human historical knowledge. And indeed, so many of those had, and I’m thinking here really again of the link between ideas and action, what Habermas called the lebenswelt, the lived world of experience in which the human actor in history can actually reach out and touch the lebenswelt, the life world that they inhabit. So these little geoconcepts that have existed in so many places. I’d also then recommend that our Martian historian looks at older, earlier, pre 19th century, let’s say, big, perhaps hegemonic geoconcepts used in Asia before the rise, the spread of the notion of Asia, of scientific or continental geography, and to try to investigate the consequences, then, the ways in which these different big Asian geoconcepts were used, were deployed, but played out, as I said, perhaps as charters for historical action. And thirdly, and this is particularly germane, though, to having a Martian—what a great research assistant this would be, a Martian investigator, would be to investigate not just the different geographies, but also the many cosmographies, because there’s anyone who, of course, has studied premodern Buddhist or Hindu, Pali, Sanskritic, classical Chinese, concepts of geography, they’ll soon realize that, hang on, this is actually tied into a larger cosmography. The geo, the Earth, is part of a larger map and a model of the cosmos in which the heavens and the earth, the terrestrial time and eternity kind of play into one another. There are real-world consequences on this Earth for the ways in which cosmography has been mapped and in which the Earth, or the realm of human action, has been mapped into the larger realm of the cosmos of deities or larger forces. Not just Asian geographical writings, but Asian language historical writings. Asia’s own many historiographies have dealt not only with little and big space, but they’ve also dealt with big time, whether the Sanskritic yugas, the cosmic epochs, or the Confucian historiographical dynastic time that goes back to the mythical Yellow Emperor, the Emperor Huangdi. So thinking about Big Asia, then, I think, allows us to recalibrate our scales of chronology as well as geography, and to recognize how the Euro-American concept of Asia is only one of many competing geoconcepts, one of many competing ideas and charters of space that have been deployed over time, and still are in the present day between Istanbul and Manila.

Daniel Story
That was producer Syrus Jin in conversation with historian Nile Green about the upcoming forum titled “Big Asia: Rethinking a Region,” which you’ll find in the History Lab section of the June 2025 issue of the AHR. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by Syrus Jin and me, Daniel Story. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.