The East Asian World-System

E. N. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside.  He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967.  He has done research on ethnobiology, cultural ecology, political ecology, and medical anthropology, in several areas, especially Hong Kong, British Columbia, California, and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  His books include The Food of China (Yale University Press. 1988), Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996), The Pursuit of Ecotopia (Praeger, 2010), Caring for Place (2014), Everyone Eats (2014), Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (2014), and, with Barbara A. Anderson, Warning Signs of Genocide (2012).  He has five children and five grandchildren.  He lives in Riverside, California, with his wife Barbara Anderson and three dogs.

Theoretical Overview.- Cycles and Cycling.- Before Empire: State Formation in China and Proto-states Elsewhere.- The Creation of Stable Dynastic Empires in East and Southeast Asia.- High Empire: The Glory Days of Early Medieval Eastern Asia.- The Rise of Central Asia: Coastal Golden Ages Increasingly Threatened by Conquest Dynasties from the Deep Interior.- The Mongol Conquests of China and Korea and Invasion of Japan.- Long-lived Dynasties: Ming and Its Contemporaries.- The Early Modern Period in the East Asian World-System.- Lessons: Factors Driving the Rise and Fall of Dynasties.- Comparisons: Cycles and Empires in Agrarian Worlds.- What East Asia's Dynamics Teach Us about Climate, Society, and Change in the Modern and Future World.