ABSTRACT
A new phase of world history began in the sixteenth century when circumnavigation of the globe by explorers from Western Europe established new forms of contacts among the various cultural and political regions. These contacts eventually gave rise to an interdependent world and the origins of a distinctively modern civilization. Although the West had never been wholly isolated from Asia, after 1500 the contacts between the two expanded significantly. This story, so often told in terms of the expansion of the West and its subsequent global hegemony by the nineteenth century, should not, however, obscure the great changes that were taking place in the different regions of Asia during the same period. These changes frequently derived not from Western impact alone, but from indigenous forces working within Asian societies from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.
