Page 26 - Changing Living Spaces

Satosthi Murayama

this sense, this book can be seen as an attempt to take a comprehensive
multidisciplinary approach to history and present studies in Eurasia. Not
only in Asia, but also in Europe and the United States, such an academ-
ic approach that combines historical and contemporary field studies in a
Living Spaces concept has not been done before.
Let us revisit the theme of this book. Why did we choose Living Spaces
as our research target? In other words, why ‘Living’ and why ‘Spaces’?
History is mainly concerned with human history, but humans are not
the only living organism on Earth. Microorganisms, bacteria, or virus-
es at the boundary between living and non-living organisms should be an
important topic of historical research. But this book could not deal with
such topics, while crops (agroforestry, agriculture) are treated in several
chapters from an economic-historical perspective. We should be able to
have further discussions when we ask ourselves to what extent crops can
be discussed as living organisms and not as commodities.
Why spaces and not a single space? This point has already been ex-
plained. Places and the spatial relationships of their components are close-
ly related to the concept of ‘transport’, which was the research goal of early
Marx and Engels. Transportation systems that link cities to other cities or
rural areas, and even rural areas to other rural areas, show that space and
local networks have multiple spatial relationships. The concept becomes
even more complex when human relationships are included. Cultural
commonalities associated with spatially distinct territories are important
themes in both environmental and economic history, but the relationship
has even deeper implications: the fact that local administrative capacities
in South Asia have not been fully explored in the Asian studies in this
book has very important implications for habitats. Whether it is historical
research or current fieldwork, research cannot move forward without ma-
terials that provide sufficient information.
Finally, it seems that we can find a point of contact with J. R. Hicks’
theory of administrative revolution, based on his Theory of Economic
History. We are the first to take up his argument, which has not been dis-
cussed, mainly because of the difficulty of discussing modern history ret-
rospectively. It is also necessary to understand modern society in the his-
torical context of state formation and national development, focusing on
Europe and the United States. Hicks points out that it is the ‘administra-
tive revolution’ that can explain the historical breakthrough in all the
historical events discussed: It was the First World War (1914–18). In the
colonized territories, the nation’s ‘governments discovered – to their as-

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