In the final chapter, we review the framework for perspective taking that we have developed in the book and highlight what we feel are the most important elements. In that context, we return to the questions raised in the introductory chapter about the relationship between perspective taking in reading literature and perspective taking in real life. We conclude that although the effects of literary perspective taking on general social cognition are debatable, there is much clearer evidence for effects on specific prosocial attitudes. We also suggest future directions for further empirical research.

Although our ultimate goal is an analysis and theory of perspective taking in literature, an important insight is that perspective taking in reading literature is subject to the same factors and constraints and may depend on the same types of processes as perspective taking in real life. In Chapter 3, we review research in social and personality psychology that is applicable to literary perspective taking and that can help us advance our understanding of how readers make sense of fictional minds. Under the general umbrella term of “mind reading,” theory of mind, theory theory, and simulation theories offer competing explanations of how individuals make sense of other minds. We argue that interpreting these ideas in terms of analogy provides the basis for a more coherent analysis. We also consider the problem of empathy and how it is related to mind reading. Our analysis is that empathy should be thought of as emotional perspective taking, and we apply our analogical inference approach here as well. Finally, we consider the neural bases of perspective taking and discuss how different brain networks may be related to the components of perspective taking by analogy.

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the notion of Greater India has a long prehistory but is primarily a legacy of the knowledge production momentum that climaxed in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the postwar era, a rapidly shifting geopolitical scenario undermined the transimperial knowledge networks that had energized this field of scholarship. A long-drawn out and atrocious decolonization process saw the Dutch East Indies transformed into Indonesia (adding the Greek suffix “nesia” to make this another version of the “Indian Islands”) and French Indochina birthing the states of Cambodia, Laos and a divided Vietnam. As colonial archaeological surveys were reorganized along national lines, a few Dutch and French scholars continued to play an important role in the process of transition. In the Indonesian case, Bernet Kempers headed the nationalized Djawatan Poerbakala Repoeblik Indonesia Serikat (Archaeological Service of the United States of Indonesia) until he was succeeded, in 1953, by the Javanese archaeologist R. Soekmono.1 In Cambodia, Henri Marchal remained deeply involved with the research and conservation efforts at Angkor. He eventually retired in the vicinity of Angkor’s archaeological complex where he passed away, in 1970, at the ripe old age of 93.

This chapter addresses how Greater India featured in the Hindu nationalist imagination and B.K. Sarkar’s oeuvre. Disavowing Indian exceptionalism, Greater India became a tool to trace and project the Hindu nation as a historical actor making its mark on the world. Magna India was imagined as a colonial sphere where the vigorous, manly Hindu imposed his national will. The twin objectives of challenging the East-West civilizational dichotomy and ‘restoring the nation to the world’ rested on reclaiming a form of historical agency that had been forgotten or ignored in British accounts. By stressing equivalence with the West and emphasizing the secular and ‘national’ agency of ‘world historical figures’ such as Ashoka and the Buddha, Sarkar sought to puncture the ‘myth’ of Indian civilization as other-worldly and mystical, and argued that ancient India had been a great colonizing, civilizing and secular power on a par with ancient Greece and Rome. Writing India into world history on decidedly Eurocentric terms inspired presentist calls for Young India to compete with the West. Such visions of a ‘Modern Greater India’ were linked to debates about the fate of Indian diaspora communities.

Chapter 12 is a brief chapter that sets out the research aims, design and processes of several collaborative research projects conducted by a large team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Nazarbayev University. It covers the three-year period from 2018 to 2020 to describe the rationales and methods used for data collection alongside the philosophies of reporting applied in forming three regional case studies. It ends by signalling how the case studies and earlier research findings from 2018 combine to allow for contrasts between regions and layers in the educational system that inform on the variations and commonalities found pursuant to systemic educational reform.

“Seeking Salvation and a Chinese Nation” follows similar themes as the previous chapter, tracing parallel efforts by Chinese in the Philippines to invest in and protect the Chinese nation. Shifting to equally prominent community leaders and China Banking Corporation founders Albino Z. Sycip and Guillermo Cu Unjieng, as well as another outside ally, Filipino politician Manuel L. Quezon, this chapter explores how these prominent individuals used their connections to influence Chinese politics and expand their business opportunities. Wealthy Chinese from the Philippines created and expanded fictive families, building a network of support that they could call on in times of need. Manuel Quezon, a leading Filipino politician, working with Chinese allies in the Philippines, met with the leading political figure in Republican China, Chiang Kai-shek, which lent him a type of legitimacy as a spokesperson for his still colonized country. This chapter concludes by examining how the national exigency of Japan’s invasion led the founders of the China Banking Corporation to place concomitant efforts to construct Hokkien nationalism on hold and work toward greater Chinese liberation.

This chapter describes two major action research projects undertaken with teachers in Kazakhstan. The aim was to promote teachers’ engagement in curriculum reform and teacher professional development through action research in schools. The two settings were very different and both researched using multiple sources of evidence to explore what we have learned about the conditions for and blocks and facilitators to action research in Kazakhstani schools. A key learning was that the political task of providing the enabling conditions is a top priority if action research is to fulfil its huge potential, and this will determine whether it becomes embedded or not.

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.