LibGuides: Historical Immersion (Yale-NUS College): Rise of the West and The Great Divergence

Welcome

This guide was designed to introduce and recommend relevant resources for the course, "Rise of the West and the Great Divergence". You may consult your required texts via 2 hour loan course reserves. Consult the recommended books, search the Library catalogue, or browse Yale-NUS's E-Book Central for background information.

Use this guide to identify sources for your assignments, papers and presentations. Many different sources are presented here, including databases where you can search for journal articles and secondary sources, and primary source collections with documents, photographs, and articles from Britain, Europe, China, India, and Japan.

Image from British Library

Suggested Sources

Consult the list of suggested books. Search the Library Catalogue and Yale-NUS's EBook Central for more relevant titles. Also consider browsing the collection using the following subject headings:

The Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West by Eric H. Mielants
ISBN: 9781592135752
Publication Date: 2007-06-28
How the West Came to Rule by Alexander Anievas; Kerem Nisancioglu
ISBN: 9780745335216
Publication Date: 2015-06-20
Historians Debate the Rise of the West by Jonathan Daly
ISBN: 9781138774803
Publication Date: 2014-07-16
Great Divergence and Great Convergence by Leonid Grinin; Andrey Korotayev
ISBN: 9783319177793
Publication Date: 2015-05-21
The Great Divergence Reconsidered by Roman Studer
ISBN: 9781107020542
Publication Date: 2015-02-02
State, Economy and the Great Divergence by Peer Vries
ISBN: 9781472521934
Publication Date: 2015-04-23
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul M. Kennedy
ISBN: 9780679720195
Publication Date: 1989-01-15
Why Europe? by Michael Mitterauer; Gerald Chapple (Translator)
ISBN: 9780226532387
Publication Date: 2010-07-15

Use these recommended databases to search for secondary literature:

Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project Muse is a database which provides access to full text articles from leading Social Science and Humanities journals as well as e-books. This is an excellent source to search for secondary sources specific to the Social Sciences and Humanities.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR offers full-text journal articles from the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences. JSTOR is a journal archive, with access to early issues and sometimes entire back-runs of journals. Note that, as a journal archive: JSTOR does not provide access to many articles published within the last several years.
Academic OneFile | GALE This link opens in a new window
Academic OneFile is an general and interdisciplinary database will full text articles from a wide range of disciplines.
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) This link opens in a new window
This bibliography contains more than 800,000 records on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present. If items are available in the Library collection you will be able to access them from the database's records; materials that are not available in our library can be requested.

Historical Abstracts
Historical Abstracts is an index available on the EBSCOhost platform. As an index it aims to provide comprehensive bibliographic information on History scholarship. While not all titles in this index are immediately available in full text, Historical Abstracts is an excellent tool for discovery when, for example, conducting a literature review. Contact the Library to get help accessing the full text of items found in an index.
Humanities Abstracts
Produced by The H.W. Wilson Company, Humanities Abstracts is a bibliographic database that cites articles from English-language periodicals. Periodical coverage includes some of the best-known scholarly journals and numerous lesser-known but important specialized magazines. Subjects covered include Archaeology, Area Studies, Art, Classical Studies, Communications, Dance, Film, Folklore, Gender Studies, History, Journalism, Linguistics, Literary & Social Criticism Literature, Music.

EconLit (Ovid) This link opens in a new window
EconLit is a comprehensive index of journal articles, books, book reviews, collective, working papers and dissertations in Economics.

19th Century British Library Newspapers
19th Century British Library Newspapers offers 2 million newspaper pages from newspapers selected by experts in the field. Many full runs of newspapers are available and are full text searchable.

China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 This link opens in a new window
The database contains digitized primary source material from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library. It includes letters, maps, and documents on Chinese trade, politics and culture from 1793-1980.

South Asia Archive
South Asia Archive is a digital archive of mostly English-language primary source material from South Asia from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century.
India, Raj & Empire [National Library of Scotland]
This resource is composed of items from the National Library of Scotland's manuscript collection. Sources are organized by topic and include letters, images, government documents and more. It consists of primary sources relevant for those studying the History of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947.
Intelex Past Masters
Intelex Past Masters provides full text digital editions of classic works in philosophy, religious studies, women's students, and others disciplines.
国立公文書館アジア歴史資料センター(Japan center for Asian Historical Records)
A searchable digital database of Asia Related official documents.

The Search for Modern China - A Documentary Collection by Jonathan D. Spence (As told to); Janet Chen (Editor); Pei-kai Cheng (Editor); Michael Lestz (Editor)
ISBN: 0393920852
Publication Date: 2013-06-26
This published volume consists of primary sources selected by scholars of modern China.