Asia
Continent From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Continent From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Asia (/ˈeɪʒə/ AY-zhə, UK also /ˈeɪʃə/ AY-shə) is the largest continent[note 1][10][11] in the world by both land area and population.[11] It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometers,[note 2] about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population,[12] was the site of many of the first civilizations. Its 4.7 billion people[13] constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.[14]
_without_New_Guinea.svg) | |
| Area | 44,579,000 km2 (17,212,000 sq mi) (1st)[1] |
|---|---|
| Population | 4,694,576,167 (2021; 1st)[2][3] |
| Population density | 100/km2 (260/sq mi) |
| GDP (PPP) | $72.7 trillion (2022 est; 1st)[4] |
| GDP (nominal) | $39 trillion (2022 est; 1st)[5] |
| GDP per capita | $8,890 (2022 est; 4th)[6] |
| Religions |
|
| Demonym | Asian |
| Countries | 49 UN members 1 UN observer 5 other states |
| Dependencies | |
| Non-UN states | |
| Languages | List of languages |
| Time zones | UTC+02:00 to UTC+12:00 |
| Internet TLD | .asia |
| Largest cities | |
| UN M49 code | 142 – Asia001 – World |
Asia shares the landmass of Eurasia with Europe, and of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa. In general terms, it is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. The border of Asia with Europe is a historical and cultural construct, as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them. A commonly accepted division places Asia to the east of the Suez Canal separating it from Africa; and to the east of the Turkish straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black seas, separating it from Europe.[15]
Since the concept of Asia derives from the term for the eastern region from a European perspective, Asia is the remaining vast area of Eurasia minus Europe. Therefore, Asia is a region where various independent cultures coexist rather than sharing a single culture, and the boundary between Europe is somewhat arbitrary and has moved since its first conception in classical antiquity. The division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East–West cultural differences, some of which vary on a spectrum.
China and India traded places as the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 CE. China was a major economic power for much of recorded history, with the highest GDP per capita until 1500.[16][17][18] The Silk Road became the main east–west trading route in the Asian hinterlands while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, but overall population growth has since fallen.[19] Asia was the birthplace of most of the world's mainstream religions including Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and many other religions.
Asia varies greatly across and within its regions with regard to ethnic groups, cultures, environments, economics, historical ties, and government systems. It also has a mix of many different climates ranging from the equatorial south via the hot deserts in parts of West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia, temperate areas in the east and the continental centre to vast subarctic and polar areas in North Asia.
The boundary between Asia and Africa is the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Bab-el-Mandeb.[20] This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai peninsula in Asia and the remainder of the country in Africa.
The threefold division of the Old World into Africa, Asia, and Europe has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus.[21] Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni river) in Georgia of Caucasus (from its mouth by Poti on the Black Sea coast, through the Surami Pass and along the Kura River to the Caspian Sea), a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.[22] During the Hellenistic period,[23] this convention was revised, and the boundary between Europe and Asia was now considered to be the Tanais (the modern Don River). This is the convention used by Roman era authors such as Posidonius,[24] Strabo[25] and Ptolemy.[26]
The border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics.[27]
In Sweden, five years after Peter's death, in 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of Asia. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects.[28] The border between the Black Sea and the Caspian is usually placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, although it is sometimes placed further north.[27]
The border between Asia and Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Indonesia Archipelago, specifically in Eastern Indonesia. The Wallace Line separates the Asian and Wallacea biogeographical realms, a transition zone of deep water straits between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Weber's Line split the region in two with regard to the balance of fauna between Asian origin or Australo-Papuan origin.[29] Wallacea's eastern boundary with Sahul is represented by the Lydekker's Line.[30][31] The Maluku Islands (except the Aru Islands) are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with the Aru Islands and Western New Guinea, to the east of the Lydekker's Line, being wholly part of Oceania, as both lie on the Australian continental plate.[29] Culturally, the Wallacea region denoted the transition between Austronesian and Melanesian people, with varying degrees of intermixing between the two. In general, the further west and coastal a region is, the stronger the Austronesian influences, and the further east and inland a region is, the stronger the Melanesian influences.[32] The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Indonesian Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there (not all European). Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process."[33]
The Bering Strait and Bering Sea separate the landmasses of Asia and North America, as well as forming the international boundary between Russia and the United States. This national and continental boundary separates the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait, with Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States. The Aleutian Islands are an island chain extending westward from the Alaskan Peninsula toward Russia's Komandorski Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them are always associated with North America, except for the westernmost Near Islands group, which is on Asia's continental shelf beyond the North Aleutians Basin and on rare occasions could be associated with Asia, which could then allow the U.S. state of Alaska as well as the United States itself to be considered a transcontinental state. The Aleutian Islands are sometimes associated with Oceania, owing to their status as remote Pacific islands, and their proximity to the Pacific Plate.[34][35][36] This is extremely rare however, due to their non-tropical biogeography, as well as their inhabitants, who have historically been related to Indigenous Americans.[37][38]
St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea belongs to Alaska and may be associated with either continent but is almost always considered part of North America, as with the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain. At their nearest points, Alaska and Russia are separated by only 4 kilometres (2.5 miles).
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Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents.[39]
From the time of Herodotus, a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system (Europe, Africa, Asia) on the grounds that there is no substantial physical separation between them.[40] For example, Sir Barry Cunliffe, the emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been geographically and culturally merely "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia".[41]
Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass—Afro-Eurasia—and share a common continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and a major part of Asia sit atop the Eurasian Plate, adjoined on the south by the Arabian and Indian Plate and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the Chersky Range) on the North American Plate.
The term "Asia" is believed to originate in the Bronze Age toponym Assuwa (Hittite: 𒀸𒋗𒉿, romanized: aš-šu-wa) which originally referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. The term appears in Hittite records recounting how a confederation of Assuwan states including Troy unsuccessfully rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE.[42][43][44] Roughly contemporary Linear B documents contain the term aswia (Mycenaean Greek: 𐀀𐀯𐀹𐀊, romanized: a-si-wi-ja), seemingly in reference to captives from the same area.[45][46]
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Herodotus used the term in reference to Anatolia and the territory of the Achaemenid Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. He reports that Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus, but that Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis.[47] In Greek mythology, "Asia" (Ἀσία or Ἀσίη) was the name of a "Nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia".[48] The Iliad (attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians in the Trojan War named Asios (an adjective meaning "Asian");[49] and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as ασιος.[50]
The term was later adopted by the Romans, who used it in reference to the province of Asia, located in western Anatolia.[51] One of the first writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny.[52]
The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia. The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River shared many similarities. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands.
The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into West Asia, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated.
The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large equestrian force; for this and other reasons, the nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.
The Islamic Caliphate's defeats of the Byzantine and Persian empires led to West Asia and southern parts of Central Asia and western parts of South Asia under its control during its conquests of the 7th century; Islam also spread over centuries to the southern regions of India and Southeast Asia through trade along the Maritime Silk Road.[54][55] The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Before the Mongol invasion, Song dynasty reportedly had approximately 120 million citizens; the 1300 census which followed the invasion reported roughly 60 million people.[56]
The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road.[57]
The Russian Empire began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire controlled Anatolia, most of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the mid 16th century onward. In the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. The Islamic Mughal Empire (preceded by the Delhi Sultanate of the 13th to early 16th century)[58] and the Hindu Maratha Empire controlled much of India in the 16th and 18th centuries respectively.[59]
Western imperialism in Asia coincided with the Industrial Revolution in the West and the dethroning of India and China as the world's foremost economies.[60] The British Empire first became dominant in South Asia, with most of the region being conquered by British traders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries before falling under direct British rule after a failed 1857 revolt; the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, which increased British access to India, went on to further European influence over Asia.[61] Around this time, Western powers started to dominate China in what later became known as the century of humiliation, with the British-supported opium trade and later Opium Wars resulting in China being forced into an unprecedented situation of importing more than it exported.[62][63]
Foreign domination of China was furthered by the Japanese colonial empire, which controlled some of East Asia and briefly much of Southeast Asia (which had earlier been taken over by the British, Dutch and French in the late 19th century),[64] New Guinea and the Pacific islands; Japan's domination was enabled by its rapid rise that had taken place during the Meiji era of the late 19th century, in which it applied industrial knowledge learned from the West and thus overtook the rest of Asia.[65][66] One significant influence on Japan had been the United States, which had begun projecting influence across the Pacific after its early-to-mid-19th century westward expansion.[67] The breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century led to the Middle East also being contested and partitioned by the British and French.[68]
With the end of World War II in 1945 and the wartime ruination of Europe and imperial Japan, many countries in Asia were able to rapidly free themselves of colonial rule.[69] The independence of India came along with the carving out of a separate nation for the majority of South Asian Muslims, which in 1971 further split into the countries Pakistan and Bangladesh;[70] Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union strained relations between India and Pakistan and affected Asia more generally.[71] The end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union by 1991 saw the independence of the five modern Central Asian countries.[72]
Some Arab countries took economic advantage of massive oil deposits that were discovered in their territory, becoming globally influential,[73] though stability in the Middle East has been affected since 1948 by the Arab–Israeli conflict and American-led interventions.[74][75] East Asian nations (along with Singapore in Southeast Asia) became economically prosperous with high-growth "tiger economies";[76] China, having undergone capitalistic reforms under Deng Xiaoping,[77] regained its place among the top two economies of the world by the 21st century.[78] India has also grown significantly because of economic liberalisation that started in the 1990s,[79] with extreme poverty now below 20%;[80] India and China's rise has coincided with growing tension between the two, with the Indo-Pacific now an actively contested area between China and counterbalancing forces.[81][82]
Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the longest coastline, at 62,800 kilometres (39,022 mi). Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas.[15][84] It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided into 49 countries, five of them (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) are transcontinental countries lying partly in Europe. Geographically, Russia is partly in Asia, but is considered a European nation, both culturally and politically.
The Gobi Desert is in Mongolia and the Arabian Desert stretches across much of the Middle East. The Yangtze in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world. Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous and deciduous forests lie farther north.
There are various approaches to the regional division of Asia. The following subdivision into regions is used, among others, by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD). This division of Asia into regions by the United Nations is done solely for statistical reasons and does not imply any assumption about political or other affiliations of countries and territories.[85]
Asia has extremely diverse climate features. Climates range from arctic and subarctic in Siberia to tropical in southern India and Southeast Asia. It is moist across southeast sections, and dry across much of the interior. Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent are hot. Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of the Philippines and south of Japan.
Climate change occurs all over the world, and it is particularly important in Asia, as it accounts for the majority of the human population. Warming since the 20th century is increasing the threat of heatwaves across the entire continent.[89]: 1459 Heatwaves lead to increased mortality, and the demand for air conditioning is rapidly accelerating as the result. By 2080, around 1 billion people in the cities of South and Southeast Asia are expected to experience around a month of extreme heat every year.[89]: 1460 The impacts on water cycle are more complicated: already arid regions, primarily located in West Asia and Central Asia, will see more droughts, while areas of East, Southeast and South Asia which are already wet due to the monsoons will experience more flooding.[89]: 1459
The waters around Asia are subjected to the same impacts as elsewhere, such as the increased warming and ocean acidification.[89]: 1465 There are many coral reefs in the region, and they are highly vulnerable to climate change,[89]: 1459 to the point practically all of them will be lost if the warming exceeds 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).[90][91] Asia's distinctive mangrove ecosystems are also highly vulnerable to sea level rise.[89]: 1459 Asia also has more countries with large coastal populations than any other continent, which would cause large economic impacts from sea level rise.[89]: 1459 Water supplies in the Hindu Kush region will become more unstable as its enormous glaciers, known as the "Asian water towers", gradually melt.[89]: 1459 These changes to water cycle also affect vector-borne disease distribution, with malaria and dengue fever expected to become more prominent in the tropical and subtropical regions.[89]: 1459 Food security will become more uneven, and South Asian countries could experience significant impacts from global food price volatility.[89]: 1494
Historical emissions from Asia are lower than those from Europe and North America. However, China has been the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the 21st century, while India is the third-largest. As a whole, Asia currently accounts for 36% of world's primary energy consumption, which is expected to increase to 48% by 2050. By 2040, it is also expected to account for 80% of the world's coal and 26% of the world's natural gas consumption.[89]: 1468 While the United States remains the world's largest oil consumer, by 2050 it is projected to move to third place, behind China and India.[89]: 1470 While nearly half of the world's new renewable energy capacity is built in Asia,[89]: 1470 this is not yet sufficient in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. They imply that the renewables would account for 35% of total energy consumption in Asia by 2030.[89]: 1471
Climate change adaptation is already a reality for many Asian countries, with a wide range of strategies attempted across the continent.[89]: 1534 Important examples include the growing implementation of climate-smart agriculture in certain countries or the "sponge city" planning principles in China.[89]: 1534 While some countries have drawn up extensive frameworks such as the Bangladesh Delta Plan or Japan's Climate Adaptation Act,[89]: 1508 others still rely on localized actions that are not effectively scaled up.[89]: 1534
Asia has the largest continental economy in the world by both GDP nominal and PPP values, and is the fastest growing economic region.[93] As of 2023[update], China is by far the largest economy on the continent, making up nearly half of the continent's economy by GDP nominal. It is followed by Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which are all ranked among the top 20 largest economies both by nominal and PPP values.[94] Based on Global Office Locations 2011, Asia dominated the office locations with 4 of the top 5 being in Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul. Around 68 percent of international firms have an office in Hong Kong.[95]
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economy of China[96] had an average annual growth rate of more than 8%. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, India had the world's largest economy during 1000 BCE and 1 CE. India was the largest economy in the world for most of the two millennia from the 1st until 19th century, contributing 25% of the world's industrial output.[97][98][99][100] China was the largest and most advanced economy on earth for much of recorded history and shared the mantle with India.[101][17][102] For several decades in the late twentieth century Japan was the largest economy in Asia and second-largest of any single nation in the world, after surpassing the Soviet Union (measured in net material product) in 1990 and Germany in 1968. (NB: A number of supernational economies are larger, such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or APEC). This ended in 2010 when China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy. It is forecasted that India will overtake Japan in terms of nominal GDP by 2027.[93]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan's GDP by currency exchange rates was almost as large as that of the rest of Asia combined.[93] In 1995, Japan's economy nearly equaled that of the US as the largest economy in the world for a day, after the Japanese currency reached a record high of 79 yen/US$. Economic growth in Asia since World War II to the 1990s had been concentrated in Japan as well as the four regions of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore located in the Pacific Rim, known as the Asian tigers, which are now all considered developed economies, having among the highest GDP per capita in Asia.[103][93]
Asia is the largest continent in the world by a considerable margin, and it is rich in natural resources, such as petroleum, forests, fish, water, rice, copper and silver. Manufacturing in Asia has traditionally been strongest in East and Southeast Asia, particularly in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Singapore. Japan and South Korea continue to dominate in the area of multinational corporations, but increasingly the PRC and India are making significant inroads. Many companies from Europe, North America, South Korea and Japan have operations in Asia's developing countries to take advantage of its abundant supply of cheap labour and relatively developed infrastructure.[104][105]
According to Citigroup in 2011, 9 of 11 Global Growth Generators countries came from Asia driven by population and income growth. They are Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.[106] Asia has three main financial centers: Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore. Call centers and business process outsourcing (BPOs) are becoming major employers in India and the Philippines due to the availability of a large pool of highly skilled, English-speaking workers. The increased use of outsourcing has assisted the rise of India and the China as financial centers. Due to its large and extremely competitive information technology industry, India has become a major hub for outsourcing.[107]
Trade between Asian countries and countries on other continents is largely carried out on the sea routes that are important for Asia. Individual main routes have emerged from this. The main route leads from the Chinese coast south via Hanoi to Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur through the Strait of Malacca via the Sri Lankan Colombo to the southern tip of India via Malé to East Africa Mombasa, from there to Djibouti, then through the Red Sea over the Suez Canal into Mediterranean, there via Haifa, Istanbul and Athens to the upper Adriatic to the northern Italian hub of Trieste with its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe or further to Barcelona and around Spain and France to the European northern ports. A far smaller part of the goods traffic runs via South Africa to Europe. A particularly significant part of the Asian goods traffic is carried out across the Pacific towards Los Angeles and Long Beach. In contrast to the sea routes, the Silk Road via the land route to Europe is on the one hand still under construction and on the other hand is much smaller in terms of scope. Intra-Asian trade, including sea trade, is growing rapidly.[108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115]
In 2010, Asia had 3.3 million millionaires (people with net worth over US$1 million excluding their homes), slightly below North America with 3.4 million millionaires. In 2011, Asia topped Europe in number of millionaires.[116] Citigroup in The Wealth Report 2012 stated that Asian centa-millionaire overtook North America's wealth for the first time as the world's "economic center of gravity" continued moving east. At the end of 2011, there were 18,000 Asian people mainly in Southeast Asia, China and Japan who have at least $100 million in disposable assets, while North America with 17,000 people and Western Europe with 14,000 people.[117]
