67

Narratives of the past are perhaps necessary in all collectivities that seek to constitute themselves as such. Before the modern nation-state, however, these narratives not only embedded differences and contestations, they also bore a relationship to a universal or cosmological time and ideals. The emergence of the modern disenchanted polity converged with the rise of competitive capitalist states which viewed all resources and bio-power in its territory as susceptible to mobilization. The reified idea of bounded, linear histories of the state, nation and civilization was crucial for this mobilization. A good case can be made that the most significant Eurasian historical developments were circulatory and shared. This paper looks at East Asian historicities from a circulatory perspective showing the pathways through which global and regional circulatory forces were converted into tunneled histories of sovereign nations engaged in aggressively competitive relations with each other.