Asian Population History

The study of Asian historical demography has lagged behind that of its European and American counterparts for some time. This volume serves to narrow the gap by drawing together material from scholars specializing in demography across the spectrum of Asian countries. The collection divides into four parts and contains nineteen chapters covering issues on comparative perspective, fertility, disease and mortality, and marriage and family. The geographic coverage of thechapters is also wide, extending from East Asia to South Asia, with specific emphasis on Japan, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. Authors focus on a whole range of social groups, discussing how demographic issues affect and have affected both urban and rural dwellers from theseventeenth to the twentieth century.This volume, which is perhaps the first to bring together a number of in-depth, specialist studies on Asian population history, should prove a useful and engaging tool for both students and academics in the fields of demography, history, and Asian studies.

The volume deserves to be considered as a distinct and much-needed step forward towards developing and consolidating Asian historical demography and in placing demographic processes in these regions in a global comparative perspective., The greatest strength of this book lies in the authors' meticulous attempts at unearthing, stylizing, standardizing, and interpreting the mass of historical information on the demographic phenomena in many different Asian countries.

Ts'ui-jung Liu is Research Fellow and Director at the Institute of Taiwan History, Preparatory Office, Academia Sinica, Taipei.James Lee is Professor in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology.David Sven Reher is Professor in the School of Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.Osamu Saito is Professor at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo.Wang Feng is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine.