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 to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long story of world history, showing how societies across the region worked around–or even shrugged off–empires to create a system of international commerce that persists today. Allen James Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is author of Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press: 2012) and Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press: 2010) and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Center of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 decades. Ruth Vanita is the author of many books, most recently The Broken Rainbow: Poems and Translations (Copper Coin Publishing: 2023); the novel Memory of Light (Penguin Random House India: 2022); The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (Oxford University Press: 2022); Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (Penguin Books India: 2005). She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including Mahadevi Varma’s My Family (Penguin Books India: 2021). She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India, and edited and translated On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (India Viking: 2023). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Slight Angle. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars (Blacksmith: 2024) charts his life from running the Philharmonic, bringing acts like the Three Tenors and Cats to Asia, and his thoughts on the Hong Kong Cultural Center and the West Kowloon Cultural District. John joins the show today to explain what the general manager of an orchestra actually does, the trickiest problems he had to solve in Hong Kong and China, and his thoughts on whether Hong Kong is truly a “cultural wasteland.” You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Backstage in Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 Pearl Harbor (William Morrow, 2024), that most people were pretty sure that the boisterous Rutland was spying for someone. But for a variety of reasons—misplaced priorities, bureaucratic infighting, embarrassment over a British national spying on the U.S., or just bewilderment that someone so open and outgoing could pull off something as secretive as espionage—everyone left utland alone until it was too late. Ronald Drabkin is the author of Beverly Hills Spy and peer-reviewed articles on Japanese espionage. His obsession with espionage history started when he was as a child in Los Angeles, where he vaguely understood that his father had been working for the US military in counterintelligence. Later he discovered that his grandfather had also been in “the business,” and it drove a voyage of discovery into previously classified documents on three continents. His career prior to writing was at early stage startups in the US, where he was an early adopter of Google and Facebook advertising. (The Japanese edition of the book can be found here) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beverly Hills Spy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru. Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-century international history at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nehru’s Bandung. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species of horse altogether. Even a lot more recent horse domestication has a less certain starting date, with recent studies suggesting that the Plains Indians domesticated horses at least a century earlier than originally thought. William T. Taylor is Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. He was part of several archaeological expeditions to test some of the proposed starting points for horse domestication—some of which are portrayed in his latest book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press: 2024) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hoof Beats. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff.” Rohit Manchanda is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology. His first novel won a Betty Trask Award, was published with the title In the Light of the Black Sun and was republished in 2024 titled A Speck of Coal Dust. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, coming decades after his first published work. In this episode, Rohit and I talk about his writing career, the themes of The Enclave, and the very real struggle of wanting, but not having the energy, to write. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Enclave. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 Muslim. In this interview, Maaria and I talk about the Nineties, how filmmaking differs from writing a novel, and her long process in getting From Pashas to Pokemon completed. Maaria Sayed is a writer and filmmaker based in Mumbai and Northern Italy. She’s worked as a writer for networks such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Fox. Her shorts “Aabida” and “Chudala” screened at film festivals such as Raindance, Izmir Kisa, BFI Flare and Busan. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of From Pashas to Pokemon. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 encountered fierce resistance: Japan said it shot down ten planes, four pilots were captured. The Jan. 16 raids are the centerpiece of Steven Bailey’s Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024), which tells the story of the U.S. Navy’s raids on Hong Kong, starting with the Japanese invasion in 1941 to the final recovery of the airmen that were lost. Steven K. Bailey is an established author and tenured faculty member of Central Michigan University (CMU) with expertise in nonfiction writing, the history and culture of Hong Kong, the Second World War, and U.S. military aviation. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Target Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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. Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of Consul Reeves (Blacksmith Books, 2024). Using Reeves’ own unpublished memoir and research in the national archives, Peter tells a tale of how Reeves—a largely unremarkable man—managed to hold things together in the Portuguese colony until Japan’s defeat in 1945. Peter Rose is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Yale Law School. He first practiced law in Washington DC. It was during a posting in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs as its Asian Head of Public Affairs that he started to visit Macau and became fascinated with the story of this incongruous piece of Portugal on the edge of China. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good War of Consul Reeves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 neighbors. Persia, India and China all burned cash trying to sustain their own herds of horses–-with little success. And it all starts from humble beginnings: Horses domesticated for their milk, too small for anyone but children to ride. David Chaffetz, regular Asian Review of Books contributor, member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and author of A Journey through Afghanistan and Three Asian Divas, has traveled extensively in Asia for more than forty years. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Raiders, Rulers and Traders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination. In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together. Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its inception. In 2006, she returned to Manila and the Asia Pacific region, reporting from the frontlines of armed conflict and climate change as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera. She is the editor of I, Migrant, an online platform which showcases writing from the diaspora, advocating a universal humanity beneath people’s differences. Follow Marga on Twitter and Instagram. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of God’s Ashes. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 tells the story of how Alexander—the unbeaten military genius and the most powerful man in that part of the world—decided to keep going, chasing rebellious ex-Persians and launching an unprecedented invasion of India. But what drove Alexander to keep marching? What was the kind of empire Alexander wanted to build? And why did he eventually turn back at the Indus River, his soldiers begging for him to return home? Rachel Kousser is the chair of the Classics department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, Destruction (Cambridge University Press: 2017) and Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical (Cambridge University Press: 2008). She can be followed on Instagram at @rkousser. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Alexander at the End of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn why Shanghailanders’ core family is just so dysfunctional. In this interview, Juli and I talk about Shanghai, her decision to write the book in reverse chronological order, and what we gain when those from a non-white perspective write about expatriates. Juli Min is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University, and she holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She was the founding editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and served as its fiction editor from 2016 to 2023. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghailanders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 Spanish and then American colony. All the stories come from Lio’s podcast, The Colonial Department, which features long-lost stories from the country's past under Spanish, British, American, and Japanese rule. In this interview, Lio and I talk about what inspired his essay collection, his conversation with Albert Samaha (an earlier podcast guest!) and what’s missing in how we talk about the Philippines Lio is also the editor in chief of publishing house Summit Books, and is based in Manila. Find him on Instagram at @liomangubat and @thecolonialdept. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic. Roger Crowley, in his new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press: 2024) covers six decades of exploration, conflict and conquest, starting from the Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511 to the Spanish founding of Manila and the start of the galleon trade in 1571. Roger Crowley is a narrative historian of the early modern period. He is the author of five celebrated books, including City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (Faber & Faber: 2011) and Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (Random House: 2015). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Spice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about what it portends. Just over a week later, Amarendra is dead—of plague. India had not had a case of plague in a dozen years: Was Amarendra’s death natural, or premeditated—perhaps orchestrated by Benoy, his half-brother and competitor for the family riches? The case is the subject of Dan Morrison’s book The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World (Juggernaut, 2024), who investigates how an Indian prince was able to get his hands on the plague, the scandalous murder trial that followed, and Benoy’s surprising post-independence epilogue. Dan Morrison is an editor at USA TODAY's Washington bureau. His reporting from around the globe has appeared in outlets including National Geographic, the New York Times, BBC News and PRX's The World. He is also the author of The Black Nile (Viking: 2010), an account of his voyage from Lake Victoria to Rosetta, through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Poisoner of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Melville Jacoby was a U.S. war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from Chongqing, Hanoi, and Manila. He was also a relative of Bill Lascher, a journalist–specifically, the cousin of Bill’s grandmother. Bill has now collected Mel’s work in a book: A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books: 2024), with photos detailing Mel’s early days as an exchange student in China, then his later work as journalist…and propagandist for Chiang Kai-shek in wartime Chongqing, then as a correspondent for Time and Life in the Philippines right as the Japanese invade. Bill is also the author of the 2016 book Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two World War II Correspondents and their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow: 2016), also about Mel Jacoby and his wife Annalee Jacoby. He is also a freelance journalist. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Danger Shared. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”? Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of Islam and Theravada Buddhism, and ending in the present day. Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press: 2006) co-author of Attitudes and Awareness Towards ASEAN: Findings of a Ten-Nation Survey (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: 2008) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? Update of a Ten-nation Survey (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute: 2016), and co-editor of Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices (NUS Press: 2019) and Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam University Press: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Story of Southeast Asia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three seminal cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, ran a famous cooking academy and even provided important culinary advice to those making packaged food and airline meals. And this all starts from humble beginnings, when she was an amateur–and not very good–home cook arriving in Taiwan from mainland China. In this interview, Michelle and I talk about Fu Pei-Mei, her humble beginnings and rise to the heights of Chinese cooking, and what Fu’s work tells us about Chinese cuisine. Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She can be followed on Instagram at @michtking. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chop Fry Watch Learn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 2009, Fudan University launched China’s first MFA program in creative writing, spurring a wave of such programs in Chinese universities. Many of these programs’ founding members point to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, specifically, its International Writers Program, which invited dozens of Mainland Chinese writers to take part between 1979 and 2019, as their inspiration. In her book, The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China (Association for Asian Studies, 2024), Jin Feng explores why Chinese authors took part in the U.S. programs, and how they tried to implement its teaching methods in mainland China–clearly, a very different political and cultural environment. In this interview, Jin and I talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Chinese authors that attended, and the surprising links between U.S. and Chinese academia. Jin Feng is Professor of Chinese and Japanese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College, USA. She has published four English monographs: The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press: 2004), The Making of a Family Saga (SUNY Press: 2009), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Brill, 2013), and Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), three Chinese books such as A Book for Foodies and numerous articles in both English and Chinese. You can read an excerpt of The Transpacific Flow here. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Transpacific Flow. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 2016, journalist Clare Hammond embarked on a project to study the railways of Myanmar–a transportation network that sprawls the country, rarely used and not shown on many maps, and often used at the pleasure of the country’s military. In her book On the Shadow Tracks; A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar (Allen Lane: 2024), Clare travels the lengths of Myanmar’s railways, from the south of the country through the conflict-riven border areas, finally ending up at Naypyidaw, the nation’s planned capital. In this interview, Clare and I talk about Myanmar’s railways, her travels along them, and how they act as a symbol for Myanmar’s governments, past and present. Clare Hammond is a British journalist. Based in London, she works for non-profit Global Witness, investigating issues relating to natural resources, conflict and corruption. In Yangon, where she lived for six years, Hammond was most recently the digital editor of Frontier, Myanmar's best-known investigative magazine, where she oversaw daily news coverage. Those in London can join a photo exhibition of Myanmar’s railways on July 5-6, with prints sold to raise money for educational charity Prospect Burma. Details (and ways to buy prints for those in not in London) here. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On the Shadow Tracks. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Running and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern India before rapidly declining in the eighteenth century. But how did the Mughals get their money? Often, it was through wealthy merchants, like the Jhaveri family, who willingly—and then not-so-willingly–funded the empire’s activities. Dr. Sudev Sheth writes about this relationship in Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Dr. Sheth is Senior Lecturer in History at the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies and in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches across the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School. His writings have appeared in top academic journals and popular outlets, including The Conversation, Economic & Political Weekly, Mint, Knowledge at Wharton, and Harvard Business Publishing. P.S. The Jhaveri family eventually founded the Arvind Group, a major India-based textiles company. Read Sudev’s interview with the MD here! You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bankrolling Empire. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

For two centuries, the Xiongnu people–a vast nomadic empire that covered modern-day Siberia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang—were one of the Han Dynasty’s fiercest rivals. They raided the wealthy and prosperous Chinese, and even forced the Han to treat them as equals—much to the chagrin of those in the imperial court. There’s not much known about the Xiongnu: Even their name is in Chinese, which literally translates to “"fierce slave", which is unlikely to be what the actual people called themselves. But writer and historian Scott Crawford set himself the challenge of writing about the over two-centuries of politics, alliances and conflict between Han China and the Xiongnu empire, in his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD: The Struggle of China and a Steppe Empire Told Through Its Key Figures (Pen & Sword, 2023). In this interview, Scott and I talk about the Xiongnu people, the threat they presented to Han China, political shenanigans at the imperial court, and just how far geographically the conflict expanded. Scott is a novelist and historian. He wrote the historical novel Silk Road Centurion (Camphor Press, 2023) and numerous articles and works of fiction exploring relations between China and its steppe neighbors. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Han-Xiongnu War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the U.S. But unlike the trials at Nuremberg, now seen as one of the touchstones of modern international law, the trials at Tokyo were a messy affair. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, with two judges dissenting. Indian judge Radhabinod Pal even chose to acquit everybody. The judges couldn’t agree on anything, the prosecution made significant mistakes, and the defense constantly complained about not having enough time and resources. Gary Bass tells the entire story of the trials at Tokyo—from their formulation at the end of a long World War by a triumphant yet weary U.S., to the eventual decision to let many sentenced defendants out on parole as Japan became a close Cold War ally of Washington—in his book Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf: 2023) Gary Bass is also the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissenger and a Forgotten Genocide (Vintage: 2014), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, among other awards. He is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University. His previous books are Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: 2008) and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press: 2002). A former reporter for The Economist, Bass writes often for The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Including its review of Judgment at Tokyo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the Japanese invade and commit the now infamous atrocities in the Chinese city. As the writer Peter Harmsen notes, Bernhard’s background isn’t particularly compelling: He’s bounced from job to job, and is known for butting heads with his colleagues and superiors. But as Harmsen explains in his book Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing (Casemate: 2024), the Danish man ends up doing something extraordinary: Setting up a refugee camp and using every ounce of political capital and sheer bullheadedness to protect tens of thousands of Chinese trying to escape the fighting. In this interview, Peter and I talk about Bernhard, his less-than-illustrious path to China, and what his deeds in Nanjing tell us about the nature of heroism. Peter Harmsen is the author of Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate: 2015) and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City (Casemate: 2015), as well as the War in the Far East trilogy. He studied history at National Taiwan University and has been a foreign correspondent in East Asia for more than two decades. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bernhard Sindberg. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange. But getting to the point where India’s stock markets—and its financial system more broadly—could work effectively took a long time. As Rajrishi Singhal tells it in Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of Financial Reforms in India (Viking, 2024), India’s financial system suffered from antiquated procedures, cartels and a confused paper trail that left the door for abuse wide open. In this interview, Rajrishi and I talk about India’s financial sector, its earlier dysfunction, how it was fixed—and scammers like Harshad Mehta, “The Big Bull.” Rajrishi Singhal has been a senior journalist, banker and public policy analyst. He was executive editor at the Economic Times, consulting editor with Mint, research and strategy head at a private sector bank and senior fellow for geoeconomic studies at a Mumbai-based think tank. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere. Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023) Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 2022, the U.S. Mint released the first batch of its American Women Quarters series, celebrating the achievements of U.S. women throughout its history. The first set of five included Maya Angelou, Sally Ride…and Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American to ever appear on U.S. currency. Katie Gee Salisbury takes on Anna May Wong’s life in her book Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong (Dutton, 2024). The biography takes readers through Wong’s life, from her start in Hollywood’s early days, her struggles against prejudiced studio executives unwilling to give her the spotlight, through to her groundbreaking trip to China. In this interview, Katie and I talk about Anna May Wong’s life, her struggles against censorship, and what films you should watch to understand Wong as an actress. A fifth-generation Chinese American from Southern California, Katie has spoken and written about Anna May Wong on MSNBC, in the New York Times and in Vanity Fair. She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. She was a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship finalist and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” Follow on Instagram at @annamaywongbook and on Twitter at @ksalisbury. Other links: —Katie on writing Anna May Wong’s biography, for Lithub —An excerpt of Not Your China Doll, for PBS You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Including its review of Not Your China Doll. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart–and fled. The Japanese, of course, did not invade in 1942. But between the attack on Pearl Harbor and, say, mid-1942 when the Allies held back the Japanese advance, both the Indian colonial establishment and pro-independence activists thought carefully about the possibility of invasion—and how to respond to it, if it happened. Mukund Padmanabhan writes about this panic in his first bookThe Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024). In this interview, Mukund and I talk about the fierce debates in India about how to respond to the threat of a Japanese invasion. Mukund Padmanabhan is the former Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers. He was appointed to the post in 2016, after having been Editor of the business daily, Hindu BusinessLine. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, near Chennai. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Flap of 1942. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour has become a milestone in Chinese economic history. Historians and commentators credit Deng’s visit to Guangzhou Province for reinvigorating China’s market reforms in the years following 1989—leading to the Chinese economic powerhouse we see today. Journalist Jonathan Chatwin follows Deng’s journey in The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Chatwin follows Deng—from its start in Wuhan, through the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, and back up to Shanghai—and explains how a savvy Deng, then out of office, got China’s leaders to embrace market reforms again. Jonathan Chatwin is a non-fiction writer and journalist. His work has appeared in CNN, the South China Morning Post and the BBC. He is the author of Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China (Manchester University Press: 2019) and Anywhere Out of the World: The Work of Bruce Chatwin (Manchester University Press: 2012). Catch our first interview with Jonathan on Long Peace Street here! You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades. Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for decades. These insights are the foundation of his latest book: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China (Random House, 2023) In his book, Kaplan criticizes how the U.S. has approached the region—intervention and regime change (including his own mea culpa for his previous support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only for Washington to look somewhere else when newly-formed regimes inevitably disappoint. In this interview, Robert and I talk about his idea of the “Greater Middle East,” some of the experiences that most stood out to him, and his conclusions on how to think about democracy, order, and anarchy in this part of the world. Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel, including Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House: 2022), The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian (Random House: 2021), The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House: 2012), Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House: 2014), Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House: 2010), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Random House: 2000), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (St. Martins Press: 1993). He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade (Cornell East Asia Series: 2024). Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo, for duty; Dosetsu, for loyalty. There’s betrayal, drama…and a lot of secret, intertwined family relationships. Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2017), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction. Today, Glynne and I talk about Part 2, how the novel connected to readers at the time—and how Hakkenden ends up being a lot like our Marvel Cinematic Universe. Catch our first interview with Glynne on Part 1 here! You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It’s very easy to study the history of the British Empire from the perspective of, well, the British–and to extend the early 20th century version of the empire as a world-spanning entity backwards through history. David Veevers, in his new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023) studies the English, and later British, empires from a different perspective: Not the British, but the Irish, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and Indians they met, traded–and often fought–with. And he shows that, for much of its history, the British Empire’s position was far more precarious than its later dominance implies. In this interview, David and I talk about how the English Empire got its start, and how other groups pushed back. Dr David Veevers is an award-winning historian and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bangor, and was formerly a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also the author of the acclaimed academic book, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600 - 1750 (Cambridge University Press: 2020) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Defiance. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Just a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa heard about this community, she decided to travel to Guangzhou and China to learn more. She met traders, drug dealers, surgeons, visa overstayers, former professional athletes, and many more trying to live, work and stay in China. Her travels are the subject of her new book Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China (Canongate, 2023). In this interview, we talk about her experiences in Guangzhou, the prejudice Africans immigrants faced in China—and the prejudices they brought with them—and what this migration says about “south-south” relations Noo Saro-Wiwa is a travel author and journalist. Born in Nigeria and raised in England, she writes for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, and has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Soft Skull: 2012), was published to critical acclaim in 2012 and was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year in 2012. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Black Ghosts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and Busnachs and the doggedness they had in pursuing their debts. Julie Kalman writes about these two families–and their inter-familial business dealing and squabbles–in The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023). In this interview, Julie and I talk about the Bacris and the Busnachs, the strange relationships between Algiers, Britain, France and the U.S., and what “sanctions” and “debt diplomacy” looked like in the early nineteeth century. Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of history at Monash University. She has published widely on the history of French Jewry in the nineteenth century, and in the post-war period. She is also the author of Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press: 2017), and Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press: 2010). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Kings of Algiers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, Black athlete was a symbol of a more complicated, more multiethnic Japan—and of the global nature of high-level sports. Osaka is now about to start her comeback, after taking some time off following the birth of her child. She’s not just an athlete: She’s a media entrepreneur, venture investor, and mental health advocate—with that latter label coming with difficult conversations about the wellbeing of high-performance athletes, and their obligations to the media. Just in time for her comeback tour, tennis writer Ben Rothenberg is here with a new biography of the tennis star: Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice (Dutton, 2024). Ben Rothenberg is a sportswriter from Washington, D.C. who has covered Naomi Osaka around the world since she emerged onto the WTA Tour in 2014, both in print for The New York Times—for which he covered tennis from 2011-2022—and on his podcast, No Challenges Remaining. His longform writing has been published in outlets including Slate and Racquet. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Naomi Osaka. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Empires are one of the most common forms of political structure in history—yet no empire is alike. We have our “standard” view of empire: perhaps the Romans, or the China of the Qin and Han Dynasties—vast polities that cover numerous different people, knit together by strong institutions from a political center. But where do, say, the empires of the steppe, like the Xiongnu or the Mongols, fit into our understanding of empire? Or the Portuguese empire, which got its start as an array of ports and forts in South and Southeast Asia? Or the Manchus, who waltzed into a collapsing Ming China and rapidly re-established its governing structures–with themselves at the head? These are just a handful of what Thomas Barfield calls exogenous, or “shadow” empires, which grow on the frontiers of larger, wealth-growing polities, in his most recent book Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History (Princeton University Press, 2023). Shadow empires cannot exist without their hosts, extracting wealth from them—and yet, the most successful of them grow to become wealth creators in their own right, becoming what Barfield terms “endogenous empires.” In this interview, Thomas and I talk about empires—both the commonly-accepted kind and their shadow variants—and how we can differentiate between the many different kinds of empire throughout history. Thomas Barfield is professor of anthropology at Boston University. His books include Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton University Press: 2010) and The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1992). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shadow Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written in for over three decades. There are reports of armed clashes in Kyoto. It’s said that the emperor has ordered the expulsion of the foreigners, and it’s also said that a large band of vagabond soldiers has gathered in Senju in Edo. It’s said that in Edo people are wearing their [winter] kimono linings, and in Nikko it has been snowing. I don’t know if it’s true. But really, every day we hear nothing but disturbing rumors. The Meiji Restoration, which ousts the shogun and restores the emperor’s power, happens four years later. Koume’s diary is the central document in Simon Partner’s latest book Koume’s World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia University Press, 2023) In this interview, Simon and I talk about Kawai Koume, her diary, and everything she witnessed in the decades covered by her journal. Simon Partner is professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of three previous books that chronicle modern Japanese history through the lives of ordinary people such as farmers, shopkeepers, and housewives, including most recently The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan (Columbia University Press: 2018). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Koume’s World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

There’s a popular folk hero in Puebla, Mexico—Catarina de San Juan, who Mexicans hailed as a devoted religious figure after her death in 1688. She’s credited with creating the China Poblana dress, a connection of dubious historical veracity made several centuries after her death. But Catarina is one of Mexico’s most famous “chinos”—despite the fact that she was likely from India, not China. In fact, any Asian that disembarked in Mexico, whether from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, or even further away, was called “chino.” It was not a particularly beneficial classification: “Chinos,” under Spanish law, could be enslaved; “Indios,” or indigenous populations, could not. That’s just one part of Diego Luis’s historical investigation into the first Asians in the Americas in a book titled, appropriately, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press: 2024). Diego Javier Luis is Assistant Professor of History at Tufts University. Today, Diego and I talk about Asians in the Spanish Empire, both in the Philippines and in Mexico, and some of the interesting ways that these first Asians tried to push back against their oppressors. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The First Asians in the Americas. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian Empire’s practice of exiling political prisoners to Siberia. What Kennan saw on his journey shook him to his very core, forcing him to question his respect for the Russian Empire. And as writer Gregory Wallance explains in his book Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kennan’s advocacy upon his return turned U.S. views from Russia away from being a faraway friend to something far more skeptical. Gregory Wallance is a lawyer and writer in New York City. He is the author of Papa's Game (Ballantine Books: 1982) which received a nonfiction nomination for an Edgar Allan Poe Award; America's Soul In the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, And The Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Book Group: 2012), The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring (Potomac Books: 2018), and the historical novel Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane's Recollection of Dred Scott And the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War (Greenleaf Book Group: 2015). He is currently an opinion contributor for The Hill. Today, Gregory and I talk about Kennan, his many trips to Siberia, and the effect his journalism had on American views of Russia. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Into Siberia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea. As Joshua Ehrlich notes in his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press: 2023), the Company hit upon a novel justification for its work: It was committed to the pursuit of knowledge, and that was why it needed to merge commercial and political power. In this interview, Josh and I talk about the East India Company, how it tried to make “knowledge” part of its responsibility, and how the “politics of knowledge” are still relevant today. Joshua Ehrlich is an award-winning historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago. Ehrlich’s many articles have appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

For almost seven centuries, two powers dominated the region we now call the Middle East: Rome and Persia. From the west: The Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, later the Byzantine Empire. From the East: The Parthian Empire, later replaced by the Sasanian Empire. The two ancient superpowers spent centuries fighting for influence, paying each other off, encouraging proxy fights in their neighbors, and seizing opportunities while the other was distracted with internal strife. The relationship culminates in an almost-three-decade long war that so exhausts the two powers that they both end up getting overrun by the Arabs years later. Adrian Goldsworthy gives a detailed account of this long history in his recent book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry (Basic Books: 2023), starting from the (alleged) first contact in 92 BC through to the collapse of Persia in the seventh century. The two of us are going to try our best to talk about this long history in our interview today. Adrian Goldsworthy is an award-winning historian of the classical world. He is the author of numerous books about ancient Rome, including Hadrian’s Wall (Basic Books: 2018), Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale University Press: 2008), How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (Yale University Press: 2010), Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World (Yale University Press: 2016), and Augustus: First Emperor of Rome (Yale University Press: 2014). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Rome and Persia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The opening story of Eternal Summer of My Homeland (Epigram Book, 2023) the debut story collection from Singaporean author Agnes Chew, is about grief. Hui Shan loses her mother right before the birth of her first child–and gradually cuts her father out of her life after he refuses to do the traditional things one does to commemorate the death of a family member. Until she learns what her father has actually been doing: Growing a garden, illegally, on Singaporean government land. Agnes’s stories are all about Singapore and its multiculturalism, tradition, and modernity. And, as she explains in today’s interview, the collection is in fact Agnes's attempt to reconnect with the city, after moving away to Germany. Agnes Chew is also the author of The Desire for Elsewhere (Math Paper Press: 2016), a collection of travel essays. Her work has appeared in Granta, Necessary Fiction, and Wildness Journal, among others. She holds a Master’s degree in international development from the London School of Economics; her prizewinning dissertation, which examines inequality and societal wellbeing in Singapore, was featured in the Singapore Policy Journal. Agnes can be followed on Instagram at @_agneschew. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Eternal Summer of My Homeland. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he’s also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich were reduced to scrounging for beans or wheat, the poor for chaff or rotting garbage. Being able to buy a few pecks of chaff or bark was ecstasy.” The Ming Dynasty collapsed two years later. Timothy Brook, in his latest book The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton University Press: 2023), points to environmental disaster as the spark that helped cause the Ming Dynasty’s fall, relying on a history of surging prices to show how the over-275 year dynasty eventually fell to the Qing. In this interview, Timothy and I talk about inflation in Ming China, how it connects to climate change, and how short-term environmental shocks can cause a market to break down. Timothy Brook is professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Great State: China and the World (Harper: 2020), Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury Press: 2013), and Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury Publishing: 2009). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Price of Collapse. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead. The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support for the puppet state of Manchukuo—and it’s the subject of Scott Seligman’s latest book, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (U Nebraska Press, 2023) In this interview, Scott and I talk about Harbin, the major players in Semyon’s abduction and murder, and how the investigation and trial became an international sensation. Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac: 2020), The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac: 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press: 2013) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Murder in Manchuria. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review