The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

World-systems analyses emerged in the 1970s as attempts to fuse a Marxist-informed critique of developmental economics with historical sociology. They are best known through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), but benefit from multiple others who have contributed to and expanded the topics of interest for the world-systems knowledge movement. This chapter highlights some of the main concerns of world-systems and illustrates their relevance for literary and cultural studies of economics, society, the State, and cultural production. World-systems analyses began as alternatives to forms of developmental and stage theories, both Keynesian-oriented economics in the post-war period, and within post-Russian Revolution Marxism. As a moral protest against the capitalist world-system, world-systems analyses also question the theoretical and epistemological frameworks developed within the modern research university.

This chapter traces the role of Eastern Mediterranean cities and urban society in historiography since the nineteenth century. As Max Weber considered their urban characteristics underdeveloped, many subsequent historians, including those critical of Westernization, concentrated on the state and agrarian society instead. The trend toward a focus on Ottoman urban history since the late 1990s has by contrast focused almost exclusively on microstudies. Therefore the field's overall rich findings have not managed to make an impact upon"big" history of the Middle East, the Ottomans, or nineteenth century in general.