This book discusses the varied geographical aspects of Southeast Asia, an area that has long been of interest to geographers and other academics. This collection identifies, organizes, and presents various scholarly publications on subjects ranging from cultural-social geography, economic geography, historical geography, physical geography, political geography, and urban geography.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

Despite China's obvious and growing importance on the world stage, it is often and easily misunderstood. Indeed, there are many Chinas, as this comprehensive survey of contemporary China vividly illustrates. Now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition that offers the only sustained geography of the reform era, this book traces the changes occurring in this powerful and ancient nation across both time and space. Beginning with China's diverse landscapes and environments, and continuing through its formative history and tumultuous recent past, the authors present contemporary China as a product of both internal and external forces of past and present. They trace current and future successes and challenges while placing China in its international context as a massive, still-developing nation that must meet the needs of its 1.3 billion citizens while becoming a major regional and global player. Through clear prose and new, dynamic maps and photos, China's Geography illustrates and explains the great differences in economy and culture found throughout China's many regions.

The world in the last two decades of the twentieth century fundamentally and radically changed at a speed and on a scale never before witnessed. The challenge posed at the beginning of the third millennium is enormous for governments and people the world over. Globalization, along with globalism, continues its unrelenting and accelerating march as it draws more countries, cities, and people closer into interdependent relationships. Globalization and Networked Societies attempts to tease out some of the salient elements of this process, especially as it has affected urban centers in Pacific Asia over the past twenty years. Globalization and rapid economic growth have transformed the region and its cities on varied spatial scales, bringing new opportunities and challenges for governments, the private sector, and individuals. All countries in Pacific Asia are covered in this work, with special attention given to Hong Kong and to China, a late bloomer in the Asia scene but nevertheless one that has experienced phenomenal growth and accelerated globalization in recent decades. The empirical analyses reveal the outcome, dilemmas, and meanings of globalization in the urban-regional scene.

The book provides the first detailed account of the complex geographical dynamics restructuring China’s manufacturing industries from the evolutionary economic geography perspective. These geographical and industrial shifts have enormous implications in and beyond China for what is possible in the post-crisis global economy. The book demonstrates that the interface between evolutionary economic geography approaches and other approaches (e.g. global value chain, global production network, institutional economic geography) could be a fertile area for further consideration. The two main audiences that this book appeals to are economic geography and regional science. The topics covered in the book are also relevant to development studies, economics, economic sociology and international studies, offering academics, international researchers, post-graduate and advanced undergraduate students in these fields an accessible, grounded, yet theoretically sophisticated account of the evolutionary economic geography in China and its interaction with firm performance and regional economic development. The book is also attractive to national policy makers, since it engages directly with economic and industrial policy issues, such as industrial competitiveness, regional and national development, industrial and employment restructuring, and trade regulation.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the economic geography of the world's financial centres that is as enjoyable to read as it is informative.