Debates on human behavioral evolution have largely focused on African and European records, while Asia’s contribution remains underrepresented. Despite the significance of the Asian Pleistocene fossil record, its behavioral insights have been hindered by limited taphonomic research, restricted dissemination, and shifting academic trends. Many key Chinese archaeofaunal sites, particularly in karstic contexts, contain complex palimpsests that challenge traditional taphonomic methods prone to equifinality.

Advancements in artificial intelligence and computational archaeology now offer new ways to address these challenges. Machine learning classifiers, computer vision through convolutional neural networks, and 3D deep learning architectures enable precise discrimination of bone surface modifications. These techniques refine carnivore agency identification down to the taxon level and provide mathematical certainty in agency attribution, aiding in disentangling complex palimpsests.

This study highlights key Chinese archaeofaunal records, particularly Zhoukoudian, and proposes methodological approaches to improve their resolution. By integrating these cutting-edge techniques, the Asian Pleistocene record can take a more central role in discussions on early human behavioral variability. This research aims to establish a model for applying the “new taphonomy” globally, enhancing our understanding of hominin activities and their ecological contexts.

The contemporary expansion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Asia has been unparalleled in the world. While London and other traditional forums remain a vital jurisdiction for Asian parties, those constructing ADR regimes in Asian jurisdictions increasingly turn to their neighbors – other Asian jurisdictions. This chapter analyzes the interactions between the prominent ADR hubs in Asia and their neighboring jurisdictions. Topics include the race between Singapore and Hong Kong for the crown, Singapore’s impact on Vietnam, and the implications of Singaporean promotion of mediation on the practice of ADR in Asia. The chapter argues that ADR centers, viewed from the perspective of legal transplantation, provide successful models for secondary markets, although such transplantation is far from seamless. This chapter suggests that Singapore and Hong Kong, as established hubs, will remain influential and play a critical role in shaping ADR legal developments in Asia, although competition may result in disparate effects.

As part of a scholarly endeavor to explore the micro-foundations of international relations amid the evolving dynamics between China and the United States, this chapter examines the Chinese public’s perceptions of the United States. A theoretical framework is established to investigate the cognitive, evaluative, and affective dimensions underlying public views of a foreign country. The findings indicate a declining perception of US influence in Asia, accompanied by an increased awareness of the negative impacts of the United States on China. Additionally, the perception of the United States as a model country has diminished among the Chinese populace. The interplay between China’s engagement with the global community and the Chinese authorities’ manipulation of political socialization represents two competing forces that shape the Chinese public’s view of the United States.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, this chapter surveys and compares how Chinese youth perceive China’s rise in relation to their Asian counterparts. The findings reveal that Chinese youth exhibit greater optimism regarding political stability and nationalism associated with China’s rise. However, they also demonstrate a willingness to acknowledge various social problems that accompany economic growth. Regarding China’s international influence, the majority of Chinese youth express strong confidence in the notion of China’s peaceful rise, while simultaneously recognizing perceived threats from other countries – factors often overlooked in the prevailing China threat thesis. Moreover, Chinese youth tend to attribute the negative evaluations of China by their Asian peers to external factors rather than interpreting them as reflections of China’s “problematic” foreign policy. Interview materials show why and how Chinese foreign policy is justified among Chinese young people.

China’s engagement with the global arena and its economic modernization are anticipated to foster democratization and alignment with the liberal international order. However, despite several decades of economic development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China’s foreign policy has become increasingly assertive. This chapter aims to unveil the micro-foundations underlying the unexpected trajectory of China’s rise by examining the public’s nationalist and international orientations. The findings indicate that international orientations exert a limited influence on popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, whereas nationalist orientations significantly bolster public support for the authoritarian regime and China’s assertive foreign policy. Additionally, intergenerational variations in public opinion are evident, with the Xi generation displaying a distinct pattern of political values compared to preceding generations.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter offers a survey of cities in Asia formed by European-based state or company rule, that is, subjected to power structures originating, more or less directly, from Europe, during the period from 1500 to 1800. Some cities that hosted European trading posts while remaining under Asian sovereignty, or cities with merchant communities only loosely attached to European-based power structures, are included tangentially. The combined surveying of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, Danish and French power bases in the region runs counter to a long-established tradition of studying them within separate ‘national’ traditions. In this sense, the epithet ‘European’ stakes a claim for methodological renewal. At the same time, however, doubts persist about the pertinence of designating composite gateway conurbations as ‘European’ in the face of their profound intertwinements with Asian societies.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

After independence, the United States as a new nation can be said to have “re-encountered” the world from 1787 to 1800. The Treaty of Paris (1784) and the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 meant that it navigated a world it once knew as a new political entity. The United States in its early years forged new relationships or attempted to maintain older ones, hoping to potentially “make the world anew,” while also contending with leftover, unfinished colonial-era business. Although the new nation re-encountering the world beyond its borders constituted the first forays by the United States in the process of becoming a nation with global reach and influence, the process was a long, fraught one. This chapter argues that, though far from being the globalizing power it would subsequently become, the United States put out global feelers while also being globalized at home.

The Mongol Empire became a chief destination for European travellers in a very specific moment of the medieval period, roughly framed by two events: Ögedei Khan’s European campaign of 1240−41, and the formal fall of the last Yuan Mongolian emperor in 1368, which marked the takeover of the Chinese Ming dynasty and the opening of a new social and political paradigm in Asia. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mongol rule brought about an unprecedented geopolitical stability across Eurasia, traditionally referred to by historians as Pax Mongolica. The general safety of the roads and the relatively smooth administrative system of the Mongol khanates allowed for a productive period of economic and cultural interconnections between Europe and the Far East, whose protagonists were traders, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. While merchants exploited the safety of the Silk Road to reach territories both within and beyond the Mongol area, the Mongol Empire was the express destination of several diplomatic and missionary expeditions, carried out by Franciscan and Dominican friars.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.