This course introduces students to modern Asian history. We will focus on the political, religious, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual developments of Asia and how Asia interacts with the rest of the world. Topics include the histories of East, Southeast and South Asia during four periods: the early modernity of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; the age of empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the rise of the nation-state in the first half of the twentieth century; and the new postwar order in the twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed on events taking place after 1850 (change in Japan; India’s independence from colonial Britain; the rise of Nationalism and Communism in China and Vietnam; World War II in Asia; China’s economic growth after the war).