Asian Review of Books

Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pen...

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India. It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated environment in what A...

Yniga, the main character of Glenn Diaz’s novel of the same name, returns to her unnamed fishing town after her urban neighborhood burns down in a fire–what many suspect is retaliation for the capture of a wanted army general near her house. What follows is a story about activist politics, state retaliation and returning home. Yñiga (Ateneo de Manila University Press: 2022) was the winner of the 2...

In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in particular—in what he’d hoped would be a sequel to his 2001 book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. But plans changed—radically. At the very end of 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerges in Wuhan, leading to chaos as officials frantically try to figure out ho...

North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there–some of whom have been on this show. But both camps present narrow, if not slanted, views of what life is like in the country. Korea expert Victor Cha, along with several other researchers, have put together...

Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and Chinese-made goods the other. But how did the Galleons actually work? Who paid for them? How did buyers and sellers negotiate with each other? Who set the rules? Why on earth did the shippers decide to send just one galleon a year? Juan Jos...

When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced–if not entirely unfounded–details of her time there. China historian Paul French tries to set the record straight with Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and...

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527. T...

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air. For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous H...

Vikas Swarup’s new novel, The Girl With the Seven Lives (Simon & Schuster India: 2024), opens with its main character Devi locked in a room, forced to retell her life’s story. Or, rather, her life’s stories–starting in the slums of Delhi, Devi reinvents herself time-and-time-again, with a new name and a new backstory, as she tries to carve a niche for herself in Indian society–only to be knocked b...

Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam. Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age...

A Slight Angle (India Viking: 2024), the newest novel from Indian writer Ruth Vanita, is a story about love. Difficult love–her six characters are growing up in 1920s India, which takes a dim view of same-sex relationships, and those that transcend religious boundaries. Like Sharad, the jewelry designer who falls in love with his teacher, Abhik–only for the embarrassment to keep them apart for dec...

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager–its fifth in as many years–he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city. John Duffus’s memoir Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Br...

Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator…and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared information on U.S. aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of U.S. capability. The funny thing was, as Ron Drabkin notes in his book Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pear...

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. But as Andrea Be...

Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from. For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestica...

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave (Fourth Estate: 2024), should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as...

From Pashas to Pokemon (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024), Maaria Sayed’s first novel, is a coming-of-age story. Aisha grows up in the Muhammad Ali Road neighborhood of Mumbai in the Nineties–a time when India was starting to grapple with liberalization, globalization, and polarization. In Mumbai and London, Aisha tries to learn what it means to grow up, as an Indian, a daughter, a woman, and a Musl...

On January 16, 1945, dozens of U.S. Navy aircraft took off for China’s southern coast, including the occupied British colony of Hong Kong. It was part of Operation Gratitude, an exercise to target airfields, ports, and convoys throughout the South China Sea. U.S. pilots bombed targets in Hong Kong and, controversially, in neutral Macau as they strove to cut off Japan’s supply chains. They encounte...

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China....

After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neig...

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media. These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islan...

In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians. That event kicks off Rachel Kousser’s book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Mariner Books, 2024), which...

Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy. The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yo...

Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu. These are just a few of the historical topics from Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period (Faction Press: 2024), a collection of 13 essays on stories from Filipino history as a Spani...