About this book:

*Language Empires* explores how scripts, translation, and linguistic policies have served as fundamental tools of political power and identity formation across Asia. The book traces a historical arc beginning with the shared "script economy" of the Ottoman and Persianate worlds, where calligraphy and specialized chancery styles functioned as infrastructures of imperial authority. With the advent of print and the pressures of colonialism, these traditional scribal cultures transitioned into a modern era characterized by standardization, the rise of the vernacular, and the emergence of language as a primary marker of national belonging.

A significant portion of the work examines the dramatic linguistic engineering undertaken by modernizing states. Through case studies of the Turkish alphabet revolution, the Soviet East's shifts between Latin and Cyrillic, and the "script partition" of Hindi and Urdu, the author demonstrates how top-down reforms were used to synchronize populations with secular, nationalist, or revolutionary ideologies. These movements often created profound cultural ruptures, distancing new generations from their historical literary heritages while simultaneously enabling mass literacy and administrative efficiency in the service of the state.

The book further investigates the resilience and transformation of indigenous scripts, such as Korea’s Hangul, Thailand’s royal script reforms, and Vietnam’s adoption of the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ. It highlights the role of institutional "gatekeepers"—including missionary presses, colonial schools, and national language academies—in defining linguistic standards. These entities managed the tension between linguistic purism and the need for new technical vocabularies, ensuring that national languages could handle the complexities of modern science, law, and diplomacy while asserting a distinct cultural identity.

Finally, *Language Empires* moves into the contemporary digital landscape, analyzing how the politics of writing has migrated to platforms, algorithms, and encoding standards like Unicode. In this new era, the survival of a script depends on its digital legibility and the economic logic of global tech companies. By treating scripts and translations as material and affective infrastructures, the book argues that the way a society writes remains an essential field of power, determining who can speak, who is heard, and how the boundaries of the modern state are drawn.

What You'll Find Inside:

• Scripts function as political technologies that shape state authority, social hierarchies, and cultural identities across Asian empires and nations.
• Translation operated as a diplomatic and administrative tool, enabling knowledge transfer, treaty-making, and the construction of modern legal and scientific vocabularies.
• Colonial and missionary printing presses standardized vernacular languages, creating new publics and fueling nationalist movements while imposing orthographic reforms.
• Twentieth‑century script revolutions—from Turkey’s Latin alphabet to Soviet Cyrillicization—were top‑down projects aimed at aligning writing systems with ideological and modernization goals.
• In the digital era, Unicode, platform policies, and font design continue the historic politics of writing, determining whose scripts are legible, authoritative, and globally accessible.

Who's It For:

This book is intended for scholars and advanced students of Asian history, linguistics, political science, and language policy who seek to understand how scripts and translation have been used as instruments of power from imperial courts to digital platforms. It will also appeal to policymakers, educators, and language activists interested in the historical roots of contemporary language debates, script reforms, and the sociopolitical dimensions of literacy and standardization across Asia.