ASIA 1103 - Asia and the World

Asia's immense impact on the world over the last 2-3,000 years has often been obscured and is rarely part of Australian common knowledge. Asia and the World provides all students, but especially those doing International Studies and Asian Studies, with a basic introduction to the notion of Asia, its proud history of imperial superpowers, its importance to Europe and the West in many diverse ways, and the interactions of its modern states with the West. Asia and the World details important aspects of Asia's profound influence on the world, in the forms of cultural exports of philosophy (Confucianism) and religion (like Buddhism), its long-standing technical and organisational supremacy and subsequent dominance of world trade as well as Asian empires' expansion of their military and diplomatic influence (from the Mongols' attempts to conquer Europe to Japan's attempts to take all of Asia). Asia and the World highlights the irony of how Asian inventions were adapted by Western states and used to dominate the region. The subsequent rise of independent Asian nation states is reviewed and contextualised. Finally, the growing economic, diplomatic and military roles of these modern states in the world are surveyed and Asia's contemporary importance assessed.