Charles Holcombe is Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa. Having spent a year researching Six Dynasties China at Kyōto University in Japan, his awakening interest in East Asian interconnections led him to write The Genesis of East Asia, 221 BC–AD 907 (2001). He won the Regents' Award for Faculty Excellence at the University of Northern Iowa (2007).

• List of illustrations; List of maps; Pronunciation guide; Timeline; Glossary; Preface to the third edition; Introduction: what is East Asia?; 1. The origins of civilization in East Asia; 2. The formative era; 3. The age of cosmopolitanism; 4. The creation of a community: China, Korea, and Japan (seventh-tenth centuries); 5. Mature independent trajectories (tenth-sixteenth centuries); 6. Early modern East Asia (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries); 7. Dai Viet (Vietnam before the nineteenth centuries); 8. The nineteenth-century encounter of civilizations; 9. The age of Westernization (1900–1929); 10: The dark valley (1930–1945); 11. Cold War East Asia; 12. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Overseas Chinese; 13. Globalization, and the resurgence of East Asia; Character list; Notes; Index.

'Finally, a textbook that makes sense of 2,000 years of East Asian history in a coherent, comprehensive, and easy-to-read narrative. This finely written book is the ideal introduction to the complex history of the peoples, religions, civilizations, and countries that make up today's dynamic region of East Asia.' Patrick Jory, University of Queensland, Australia