General works
Graham P. Chapman and Kathleen M. Baker (eds.), The Changing Geography of Asia (1992), offers a country-by-country survey of the continent. Good overviews are found in the Cambridge regional encyclopaedias, including Francis Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives (1989); Trevor Mostyn (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the Middle East and North Africa (1988); Archie Brown, Michael Kaser, and Gerald S. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (1994); Richard Bowring and Peter Kornicki (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Japan (1993); and Brian Hook (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of China, 2nd ed. (1991). A useful overview of Southeast Asia is Clive J. Christie, Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (1998).
Atlases of the regions and countries of Asia include Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (1977– ), a major publication on the Middle East, comprising a geographic atlas covering physical geography and a historical atlas arranged chronologically, with text in both German and English; Richard Ulack and Gyula Pauer, Atlas of Southeast Asia (1989); Joseph E. Schwartzberg et al. (eds.), A Historical Atlas of South Asia (1978; reissued with additional material, 1992); The Population Atlas of China (1987), compiled by the Population Census Office of the Chinese government; The National Economic Atlas of China (1994); P.J.M. Geelan and D.C. Twitchett (eds.), The Times Atlas of China (1974); A. Ebato and K. Watanabe (eds.), Atlas of Japan: Physical, Economic, and Social, 2nd rev. ed. (1974); The National Atlas of Japan, rev. ed. (1990), compiled by the Geographical Survey Institute of the Ministry of Construction; and S. Muthiah (ed.), A Social and Economic Atlas of India (1987), and An Atlas of India (1990).
Up-to-date statistics on demographic, social, and economic indicators are available in Asia Yearbook, published by the Far Eastern Economic Review; and World Development Report (annual), published for the World Bank; as well as in major annuals such as The Asia & Pacific Review; The Europa World Year Book; The Far East and Australasia; The Middle East and North Africa; and Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific, published by the United Nations.
Graham P. Chapman Geologic history
Works dealing with the general geology of Asia include Peter Molnar and Paul Tapponnier, “Cenozoic Tectonics of Asia: Effects of a Continental Collision,” Science, 189(4201):419–426 (August 8, 1975), the classic paper on the subject; Li Chün-yu et al., Explanatory Notes to the Tectonic Map of Asia (1982); International Geological Congress, Tectonics of Asia (1984); A.M. Celâl Şengör, The Cimmeride Orogenic System and the Tectonics of Eurasia (1984), and “Tectonic Subdivisions and Evolution of Asia,” Bulletin of the Technical University of Istanbul, 40:355–435 (1987); A.M. Celâl Şengör et al., “Evolution of the Altaid Tectonic Collage and Palaeozoic Crustal Growth in Eurasia,” Nature, 364(6435):299–307 (July 22, 1993); and S. Maruyama et al., “Mesozoic and Cenozoic Evolution of Asia,” in Zvi Ben-Avraham (ed.), The Evolution of the Pacific Ocean Margins (1989), pp. 75–99. Magmatic and metamorphic development is examined in J.L. Whitford-Stark, A Survey of Cenozoic Volcanism on Mainland Asia (1987); and V.S. Sobolev et al. (eds.), Metamorphic Complexes of Asia (1982; originally published in Russian, 1977). Duncan R. Derry et al., World Atlas of Geology and Mineral Deposits (1980), provides a graphic summary of the mineral wealth of Asia and its relation to its geology.
The following are regional studies. Treatments of North Asia include International Geological Congress, Geology of the USSR (1984); and Victor E. Khain, Geology of the USSR, vol. 1, Old Cratons and Paleozoic Fold Belts (1985). East Asia is analyzed in Robert Orr Whyte et al. (eds.), The Evolution of the East Asian Environment, 2 vol. (1984); Asahiko Taira and Masayuki Tashiro (eds.), Historical Biogeography and Plate Tectonic Evolution of Japan and Eastern Asia (1987); Masaru Kono and B. Clark Burchfield (eds.), Tectonics of Eastern Asia and Western Pacific Continental Margin (1990); and J. Angelier (ed.), Geodynamic Evolution of the Eastern Eurasian Margin (1990), the last two published as special issues of Tectonophysics, respectively, vol. 181 and 183. Discussions of Southeast Asia include Warren Hamilton, Tectonics of the Indonesian Region (1979); Dennis E. Hayes (ed.), The Tectonic and Geologic Evolution of Southeast Asian Seas and Islands, 2 vol. (1980–83); Pham Quoc Tuong et al. (eds.), First Conference on Geology of Indochina (1986); Charles S. Hutchinson, Geological Evolution of South-East Asia (1988); and Dennis E. Hayes (compiler), A Geophysical Atlas of the East and Southeast Asian Seas (1978). South and Southwest Asia are addressed by Harsh K. Gupta and Frances M. Delany (eds.), Zagros, Hindu Kush, Himalaya: Geodynamic Evolution (1981); K. Nakazawa and J.M. Dickins (eds.), The Tethys: Her Paleogeography and Paleobiogeography from Paleozoic to Mesozoic (1985); Peter Molnar, “A Review of Geophysical Constraints on the Deep Structure of the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalaya, and the Karakoram, and Their Tectonic Implications,” in R.M. Shackleton, J.F. Dewey, and B.F. Windley (eds.), Tectonic Evolution of the Himalayas and Tibet (1988), pp. 33–88; A.M. Celâl Şengör et al. (eds.), Tectonic Evolution of the Tethyan Region (1989); M.P. Searle, The Geology and Tectonics of the Karakoram Mountains (1991); Allison Macfarlane, Rasoul B. Sorkhabi, and Jay Quade (eds.), Himalaya and Tibet: Mountain Roots to Mountain Tops, Special Paper No. 328 of the Geological Society of America (1999); and Lewis A. Owen and Frank Lehmkuhl (eds.), “Late Quaternary Glaciation and Paleoclimate of the Tibetan Plateau and Bordering Mountains,” Quaternary International, vol. 65–66, no. 1 (April 2000).
A.M. Celâl Şengör Lewis Owen Land
Broad surveys of physical features of the continent as a whole or of large parts of it include Dudley Stamp, Asia: A Regional and Economic Geography, 12th ed. (1967); Pierre Pfeffer, Asia: A Natural History (1968); N.A. Gvozdetskiy and N.I. Mikhailov, Physical Geography of the USSR: Asiatic Part, trans. from Russian (1971); Ewan W. Anderson, The Middle East: Geography and Politics (2000), rev. ed. of W.B. Fisher, The Middle East, 7th rev. ed. (1978); C.S. Pichamuthu, Physical Geography of India, 4th ed. (1980); O.H.K. Spate et al., India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography, 3rd rev. ed. (1967); Encyclopedia of New China (1987); Zhao Songqiao, Physical Geography of China (1986); and Jin-bee Ooi, Peninsular Malaysia, new ed. (1976). A useful bibliography of the physical geography of the Indian subcontinent is Thomas A. Rumney, Readings in the Physical Geography of South Asia (1989). Specific ecological characteristics are addressed in R. Misra, “Indian Savannas,” in François Bourlière (ed.), Tropical Savannas (1983), pp. 151–166; Charles A. Reed (ed.), Origins of Agriculture (1977); and Natural Resources of Humid Tropical Asia (1974), a UNESCO research report.
Overviews of environmental zones include T.C. Whitmore, Tropical Rain Forests of the Far East, 2nd ed. (1984); Tropical Forest Ecosystems (1978), a UNESCO report; H. Walter et al., “The Deserts of Central Asia,” in Neil E. West (ed.), Temperate Deserts and Semi-Deserts (1983), pp. 193–236; and Vaclav Smil, The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China (1984). Climatic patterns are examined in William C. Brice (ed.), The Environmental History of the Near and Middle East Since the Last Ice Age (1978); U. Schweinfurth, H. Flohn, and M. Domrös, Studies in the Climatology of South Asia (1970); and Jen-hu Chang, Atmospheric Circulation Systems and Climates (1972). Plant life is treated in Arnold Newman, Tropical Rainforest: A World Survey of Our Most Valuable and Endangered Habitat with a Blueprint for Its Survival (1990); and Harry G. Champion and S.K. Seth, A Revised Survey of the Forest Types of India (1968).
Lewis Owen People
Marvin Harris, Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, 5th ed. (1988), puts the peoples of Asia in comparative ethnic context. Among many works on comparative religions, S.A. Nigosian, World Faiths (1990), provides a cogent and thoughtful description of all of Asia’s major and a number of minor religions; John Y. Fenton et al., Religions of Asia, 2nd ed. (1988), gives a good explanation of East and South Asian religions; and Joseph M. Kitagawa (ed.), The Religious Traditions of Asia (1989), collects essays of leading scholars on the religions of South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia. Ian Charles Harris (ed.), Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia (1999), is a useful overview of the way religion affects contemporary society. Mustapha Kamal Pasha, South Asia: Civil Society, State, and Politics (1997), covers the region’s contemporary politics. For details of ethnicity and language in one very complex region, Roland J.-L. Breton, Atlas of the Languages and Ethnic Communities of South Asia (1997), is a remarkable work.
A comprehensive account of the cultures and history of South Asia is to be found in Graham P. Chapman, The Geopolitics of South Asia (2000). Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly (eds.), Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific (1997), gives an excellent overview of culture and contemporary politics. Peter Beaumont, Gerald H. Blake, and J. Malcolm Wagstaff, The Middle East, 2nd ed. (1988), surveys the human geography of Southwest Asia. Somewhat broader in regional scope is Mushtaqur Rahman, Muslim World (1987), which includes topics of physical geography. Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society (1988), perceptively focuses on the Muslim peoples and their histories.
Urbanization and the growth of great cities as key human processes transforming the lives of millions of Asians are considered in depth in Graham P. Chapman, Ashok K. Dutt, and Robert W. Bradnock (eds.), Urban Growth and Development in Asia, 2 vol. (1999); and Fu-Chen Lo and Yue-man Yeung (eds.), Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia (1996), is also useful.
Economy
Up-to-date accounts of economic development in Asia include Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernisation and Development (1997); Shireen T. Hunter, Central Asia Since Independence (1996); Ross H. McLeod and Ross Garnaut (eds.), East Asia in Crisis: From Being a Miracle to Needing One? (1998); and Christopher Hudson (ed.), The China Handbook (1997). Christopher Howe (ed.), China and Japan: History, Trends, and Prospects (1996), offers a more historical view of East Asian development. A discussion of development in India is Jagdish N. Bhagwati, India in Transition: Freeing the Economy (1993). Frank M. Go and Carson L. Jenkins, Tourism and Economic Development in Asia and Australasia (1997), treats the role of tourism in opening and changing Asia. The linkage between environment and development and, in particular, the problem of water shortages are the focus of Graham P. Chapman and M. Thompson (eds.), Water and the Quest for Sustainable Development in the Ganges Valley (1995); and Nurit Kliot, Water Resources and Conflict in the Middle East (1994).
Graham P. Chapman
