Asian Review of Books
187 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 5 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsThe Asian Review of Books is the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced, republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture.
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Episodes
James Uden, "Worlds of Knowledge in Women's Travel Writing" (Ilex Foundation, 2022)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesOn February 1st, 1936, Begum Hasrat Mohani, famed Indian writer and independence activist, sends the first of several letters to her daughter. She’s traveling on the Hajj, passing through Iran and Iraq on her way to Mecca. Along the way, she writes to her daughter, noting the sights and sounds she experiences on her pilgrimage–and give us a glimpse into a different kind of travel writing, from a different kind of travel writer. Those letters are the subject of Daniel Majchrowicz’s chapter in ...
Shiv Kunal Verma, "1965: A Western Sunrise--India's War with Pakistan" (Aleph Book Company, 2021)
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes–and four major wars. The second conflict–the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border–featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union and Pakistan closer to China. But the war didn’t arise from nowher...
Erin Murphy, "Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar's Opening--And Closing" (Association for Asian Studies, 2022)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMyanmar—or Burma, if that’s the name you prefer—is one of a small set of countries: nations that, despite natural bounty and a vibrant population, remain underdeveloped due to conflict, economic mismanagement and international isolation. Yet Myanmar has a habit of enchanting those who have the opportunity to visit the country. One such person was Erin Murphy, author of Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—and Closing (Association for Asian Studies: 2022). Erin had a front-row seat to...
Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng, "China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter" (World Scientific, 2022)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesEuropeans have been writing about China for centuries–ever since The Travels of Marco Polo described it as a faraway and mystical kingdom. European thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu used China to support their own theories of political philosophy, then writers in early modernity tried to explain why China was falling behind–and then, with the rise of Maoist China, how it represented true revolutionary potential. China Through European Eyes: 800 Years Of Cultural And Intellectual Encounte...
Glynne Walley, "Eight Dogs, or 'Hakkenden': Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest" (Cornell UP, 2021)
May 19, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesHakkenden is a classic work of Japanese literature: the story of the eight warriors, born from Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa, has been adapted to manga, movies and anime. And its tropes continue to pop up in Japanese popular culture today. But there’s so much story in Hakkenden that Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2021), a new translation by Glynne Walley, doesn’t even get to the eight warriors before it’s end! Glynne’s translation ...
Abby Seiff, "Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
May 12, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesTonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river. And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations. But the lake is currently...
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan" (U California Press, 2022)
May 05, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutes2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO. Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu. A master voyager in Spain and Portugal, a defeated imperialist in the Philippines–these are just two of ...
Bede Scott, "Too Far from Antibes" (Penguin, 2022)
April 28, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesJean-Luc Guéry is a man down on his luck. Middling journalist, gambling addict, alcoholic. Yet when news of his brother’s murder in Saigon reach him in France, Guéry drops everything and travels to French Vietnam to investigate. Guéry is not the kind of main character you’d think would star in a detective novel like Bede Scott’s Too Far From Antibes (Penguin Random House, 2022)—something that many other characters in Bede’s novel remark on several occasions. Yet Scott drives Guéry through a m...
Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, "Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 21, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesWe often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of...
Karen Cheung, "The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir" (Random House, 2022)
April 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHong Kong is almost impossible to explain to those not from the city. Too often, the city has had to struggle with shorthand used by those writing about the city from afar—for audiences with little understanding of what the place is actually like. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House: 2022) by Karen Cheung is a deep dive into the things that make Hong Kong different, diverse and difficult. In this interview, Karen and I talk about Hong Kong—the home city for both of us—and wh...
Manu Pillai, "False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma" (Juggernaut, 2021)
April 07, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesIt can be easy to think of the recent history of India—especially for those who aren’t from there—as a straight line, from the Mughal Empire, through the British Empire, to independent India. That, of course, is hugely simplistic, missing the mess of competing polities, interests, and people that made up Indian history over the last few centuries. Manu Pillai’s False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (Juggernaut, 2021), looks at a few of these political actors: the Maharajas...
Sherzod Muminov, "Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan" (Harvard UP, 2022)
March 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAt the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender. Those eleven years are the subject of Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Ha...
Jing Tsu, "Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern" (Riverhead Books, 2022)
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesTens of thousands of characters. Countless homonyms. Mutually unintelligible dialects across an entire country. This is what faced the Chinese thinkers, inventors and technicians who had to figure out how to standardize, translate, and adapt the Chinese language for a new country, and for new technologies. Professor Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022) tells the stories of those who worked to transform Chinese for the 20th ce...
Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesOn September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites couterfactuals: was it a warning of things to come? And what might have happened in Afghanistan had the assassination failed? Afghan Napoleon: The Life o...
Arup K. Chatterjee, "Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
March 10, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesLondon has always been a galvanizing factor for the South Asian community—whether due to the machinations of empire, the drive for higher education, or the need to make a living. South Asians make up the largest group of foreign-born individuals in London—and South Asian politicians in the U.K. cross the political divide, from Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel to Sadiq Khan. Many of India and Pakistan’s most important historical figures also passed through London: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Bose all li...
Ira Mukhoty, "Song of Draupadi" (Aleph Book Company, 2021)
March 03, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesThe Mahabharata is one of the central works of Indian literature—its characters, lessons, and tropes are widely known and referenced in Indian popular culture, literary discussions and political debate. And like all classic works, it’s ripe for reinterpretations, deconstructions and adaptations. One such reinterpretation is Song of Draupadi (Aleph Book Company, 2021), written by Ira Mukhoty. Ira’s book puts the Mahabhrata’s female characters front and center, focusing the story around their s...
Claudio Sopranzetti and Sara Fabbri, "King of Bangkok" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesBangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections–yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers. The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press: 2021), written by Claudio Sopranzetti, illustrated by Sara Fabbri and translated from its original Italian by Chiara Natalucci, tells the story of one such m...
Marc David Baer, "The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs" (Basic Books, 2021)
February 17, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesThe Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021) by Professor Marc David Baer charts the rise and fall of the Ottoma...
Paul French, "Bloody Saturday: Shanghai's Darkest Day" (Penguin, 2018)
February 10, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesThe Thirties and Forties were some of the first instances of aerial bombardment of civilian populations—and an indication of their destructive power. We often point to the Nazi bombing in Guernica, Spain in 1937—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—as the first instance of what happens when “the bomber gets through”, to paraphrase then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But just a few months later, across a continent, the world got a glimpse of what bombardment would look like in one of the world’s mos...
Colin Thubron, "The Amur River: Between Russia and China" (Harper, 2021)
February 03, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesIt’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the P...
Catherine S. Chan, "Macanese Diaspora in British Hong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
January 27, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesIn Hong Kong’s Ice House Street, in the heart of the city’s Financial District, is Club Lusitano: one of the city’s premier social clubs, nestled at the top of an office tower. But the club’s roots stretch back over 150 years, when it was originally set up to serve the colony’s burgeoning Portuguese community–including many who hopped over the Pearl River Delta from the Portuguese colony of Macau. It can be hard to remember among the glistening casino lights of modern-day Macau, but the colon...
Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, "On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border" (Harvard UP, 2021)
January 20, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesThe border between Russia and China is one of the world’s longest, spanning thousands of miles. It’s one of the few extended land borders between two great powers, subject to years of history, conflict and cooperation. Yet for such an important division, there are surprisingly few crossings, with not one passenger bridge in operation. On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Caroline Humphrey and Franck Bille, is an in-depth study of this border. Lo...
Sumantra Bose, "Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict" (Yale UP, 2021)
January 13, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour“Kashmir” carries the burden of being known as one of the world’s biggest flashpoints. If a novel, TV show, or video game wants an easy international crisis, there’s a good chance Kashmir will be the crisis of choice. But while Kashmir is globally known, few understand the roots of the conflict—or what the people that live in Kashmir actually think. For those that do, Professor Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021) walks reader...
Cheng Li, "Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement" (Brookings Institution Press, 2021)
January 06, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesIn mid-November, Washington and Beijing mutually agreed to start granting journalist visas again, putting an end to months of reciprocal visa rejections and denials. A perhaps minor, yet still important, thawing among grander narratives of decoupling and worsening relations between the two countries. Cheng Li’s Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (Brookings, 2021) plots out a new way to understand the U.S.-China relationship. Cheng Li’s book attempts to show the importance ...
Saumya Roy, "Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings" (Profile Books, 2021)
December 30, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesIn 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business. Law enforcement immediately blamed scrap dealers who lived alongside the landfill. The pickers are men and women–poor, sometimes very young–who comb the mountain for waste that can be resold: metal,...
Albert Samaha, "Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes" (Penguin, 2021)
December 23, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutesOne of the first members of Albert Samaha’s family introduced in his memoir Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books, 2021) is his uncle Spanky: a baggage handler in San Francisco’s airport. Spanky emigrated to the United States from his home country, the Philippines, where he lived a very different life as a rockstar: one of the founding members of VST & Co., one of the country’s most famous bands. That’s merely one of the family members Albert Samaha profiles in Concepcio...
James Kelly Morningstar, "War and Resistance in the Philippines 1942-1944" (US Naval Institute Press, 2021)
December 16, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutesDecember 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on December 12th: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon. That invasion marked the four-year war over the Philippines: the surrender of American forces on May 8th, 1942; the invasion of Leyte by MacArthur on October 20th, 1944; and the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945. But what happens in between these...
Amish Raj Mulmi, "All Roads Lead North: China, Nepal and the Contest for the Himalayas" (Context, 2021)
December 09, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourOn the sidelines of COP26, Nepali Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi as part of an effort to find a way to rebuild ties between Kathmandu and New Delhi--which had grown sour in the recent years, with a boundary dispute between the two as its low point. Around the same time, China trumpeted a donation of 1.6 million COVID vaccine doses to Nepal, as the country stays around a 30% vaccination rate. Discussions of Nepal often reduce it to a country sitting ...
Thane Gustafson, "Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change" (Harvard UP, 2021)
December 03, 2021 09:00 - 48 minutesWith COP26 and high fossil fuel prices, energy is back in the headlines. And Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, is part of the conversation--most recently, in Putin’s refusal to expand oil production to ease global prices. The world is coming up on three major transitions—peak use of fossil fuels, renewables competing with non-renewables, and a warming climate likely to surpass the 1.5 degree threshold set by the IPCC. What do those trends mean for Russia: a grea...
Melissa Macauley, "Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier" (Princeton UP, 2021)
November 24, 2021 09:00 - 51 minutes“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many colonial cities throughout Asia--while also making sure that their own communities back home benefited. Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton University Press: 2021), written by ...
Xavier Naville, "The Lettuce Diaries: How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables In China" (Earnshaw Books, 2021)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesMany Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market. One of these entrepreneurs was Xavier Naville, who moved to China in 1997 where he built Creative Food. Unlike many others, his venture was a success. It's now a key supplier to major r...
Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (PublicAffairs: 2021)
November 11, 2021 09:00 - 46 minutesThe Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point. But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion. War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies...
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp, "Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters" (Harvard UP, 2021)
November 04, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesGlobalization is possibly the most important economic phenomenon of the past several decades. Opening borders, increasing trade and deepening integration has transformed our economies, our societies and our politics. Globalization changed establishment politics; the reaction against it transformed those against the establishment. But there’s a world of difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ critiques of globalization. And those who have concerns about globalization due so for dif...
Tim Hannigan, "The Travel Writing Tribe" (Hurst Publishing, 2021)
October 28, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesAs most of us are stuck at home, whether due to lockdowns or border closures, some of us have returned to the idea of travel writing: nonfiction that charts someone’s journey to a different land, a different people, and a different culture. Once a mainstay of bookstores in the eighties, travel writing has fallen behind a bit, both commercially and academically, as scholars critique some of the assumptions and perspectives that drove much of that writing. Tim Hannigan, author of The Travel Wri...
Halimah Marcus, "Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond" (Harper Perennial, 2021)
October 21, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutesWe’re celebrating our one-year anniversary with this interview, and so I wanted to introduce a special guest for today: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, talented writer, journalist and dear friend. We’re going to talk—mostly—about Nur’s latest work: an essay for the collection Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond (Harper Perennial: 2021), edited by Halimah Marcus. Horse Girls confronts, investigates, and fleshes out the trope of the “horse girl”: the idea that al...
Elizabeth Lacouture, "Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960" (Columbia UP, 2021)
October 14, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesTo call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC. Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960, published by Columbia University Pres explores this history by looking at Tianjin: a city divided into nine foreign concessions, and perhaps, at the time, t...
Timon Screech, "The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 07, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesAn English mission to Japan arrives in 1613 with all the standard English commodities, including wool and cloth: which the English hope to trade for Japanese silver. But there’s a gift for the Shogun among them: a silver telescope. As Timon Screech explains in his latest book, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020), there was a lot of meaning behind that telescope. It represented an English state trying to c...
Jeevan Vasagar, "Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
September 30, 2021 08:00 - 27 minutesEveryone looks to Singapore as a role model for what they want their country to be. Several countries from China to Rwanda hope to emulate its high administrative competence, standard of living, and “social harmony.” Post-Brexit Britain wants to copy the city-state’s assertive and independent position in the world economy and its aggressive support for international business. Housing policy advocates look to Singapore and its 90% home ownership rate. But these are all simplistic views of the ...
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture" (U Washington Press, 2021)
September 23, 2021 08:00 - 38 minutesOne would think that comparing civilizations as far removed in time and space as Ancient Egypt and Ancient China might not reveal much. Yet Professor Tony Barbieri’s Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021) gleans much from a deeply-researched comparison of political structures, diplomatic relations, legal systems, ideas of the afterlife, and other aspects. In other words, despite being separated by thousands of years and thousands of k...
Yashaswini Chandra, "The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback" (Picador India, 2021)
September 16, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesThe horse is an important symbol in India’s culture, as shown by the many stories and works we see of Indian royalty and adventurers on horseback. As noted by Mughal chronicler Abu Fazl, “The horse is a means of attaining personal excellence.” Yet the horse isn’t native to India, with thousands of horses imported from Central Asia and the Middle East to meet the demands of India’s riders Yashaswini Chandra’s The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback (Picador India: 2021) uses the...
Edmund Richardson, "Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City Beneath the Mountains" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
September 09, 2021 08:00 - 36 minutesThe story of Alexander the Great has inspired conquerors and would-be conquerors throughout history. Alexander’s sweep through the Middle East and Central Asia left behind evidence of his mark on history--namely, in the several cities that he founded, and that sprung up to govern the kingdoms he left behind. One man looking for evidence of Alexander was Charles Masson: a deserter from the East India Company who reinvented himself as an archaeologist and scholar in Afghanistan. Academic, trave...
Lindsey Miller, "North Korea: Like Nowhere Else" (September, 2021)
September 02, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesIt’s a cliche to call North Korea the most isolated country in the world. Those of us living outside the country often have very little idea of what life there is like, often only seeing what its government would like us to see: military parades, missile launches, and joyous crowds. Yet Lindsey Miller, author of North Korea: Like Nowhere Else: Two Years of Living in the World's Most Secretive State (September Publishing: 2021) is a window into how ordinary North Koreans live. They are more th...
Jagjeet Lally, "India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World" (Oxford UP, 2021)
August 26, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesWhen we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology. Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders trave...
Jason M. Kelly, "Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China's Capitalist Ascent" (Harvard UP, 2021)
August 19, 2021 08:00 - 36 minutesWe think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today. Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Harvard University Press, 2021) Jason M. Kelly is a historian of modern Chi...
Pornsak Pichetshote, "The Good Asian, Volume 1" (Image Comics, 2021)
August 12, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutesEdison Hark, the star of The Good Asian (Image Comics: 2021), the new comic series written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Alexandre Tefenkgi, never signed up to investigate a murder in Chinatown. As the only Chinese-American law enforcement officer in the United States, he travels to San Francisco in 1936 to help find a Chinese maid who has run away from the household of the man who raised him. But he stumbles upon a crime scene that harkens back to an old crime legend: a hitman fo...
Tom Lin, "The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
August 05, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesIt’s a common tale: a gunman out for revenge in the American West, whose six-shooter leaves a trail of bodies behind him. But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), the debut novel from Tom Lin, takes a novel twist on the genre by having its gunman be Ming Tsu: a Chinese man, orphaned in the United States, out on a journey to murder those who press-ganged him to work on the railroads. But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is more than that, as it delves into the supe...
Chris Miller, "We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin" (Harvard UP, 2021)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesRussia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve. Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East A...
Tonio Andrade, "The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China" (Princeton UP, 2021)
July 22, 2021 04:00 - 54 minutesOn January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous ...
Suchitra Vijayan, "Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India" (Melville House, 2021)
July 15, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesBorders are “important”: they define, in legal terms, who we are, our identity, and our rights. Except borders are rarely imposed with any thought to the people actually living there. And once a border is imposed, it can radically change the lives of those who live alongside it, dividing communities forever more. India’s border, imposed by colonial authorities and disputed by successor governments, makes this clear. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Context / Melville Ho...
Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
July 08, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutesMost of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on. Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard University Press: 2021), the empire that he built continued to shape, incubate and grow the political cultures it c...