Bloomsbury Press' list on books on Asia or on an Asian theme

18Brumaire encourages readers to google Bloomsbury Press' website for its lists of very good titles on Asia or on a theme with an Asian connexion. The list is impressive and though written by scholars, the books are accessible to all and in a language devoid of jargon and cant. Especially recommended is the Cambridge University economist Ha Joon Chang's 'Bad Samarita[i]ns'which challenges the cast in bronze school of neo liberalism. His book is most welcome because it is in a way a polemical essay on political economy from the 18 century to today, using Korea as a foil to challenge neo liberal economic progress. Timothy Brook's 'Vermeer's Hat: the 17 century and the dawn of the Global World' is equally of interest. For this Canadian professor who holds the chair of Chinese studies at Oxford, looks for historical details in Vermeer's paintings of his native Delft to tease out unseen connexions with the golden age of the Dutch Republics' far flung trade. We are reminded the works of the economic Carlo Cipolla who is hardly read anymore in the US at least. 18Brumaire suggests Cipolla's 'Clocks & Culture', which might surprise readers that England once was the home of knockoffs before it found its prominence as a world and economic power, and which follows the clocks and dawning manufacturing revolution to the Chinese empire and Japan, and the different adoption of time pieces as either a play thing or a instrument to improve agriculture. Two cheers for Bloomsbury Press!