Brinda Charry found inspiration, she writes in her author’s note, for her debut novel The East Indian, from a little known piece of US history. Dating from almost the first days of the English settlement in the early 1600s, servants and laborers from India arrived in colonial Virginia and Maryland via London, having been England in the first place as servants to officials of the East India Company. Charry explored this piece of history and set her story around the first-known Indian immigrant, a young Tamil man who went by the name of Tony. The result is a fascinating story in itself—Tony’s adventures, sometimes against his will and sometimes by choice—complemented by vivid writing. 

Opium is an awkward commodity. For the West, it’s a reminder of some of the shadier and best forgotten parts of its history. For China (and a few other countries), it’s a symbol of national humiliation, left to the past–unless it needs to shame a foreign country. But the opium trade survived for decades, through to the end of the Second World War. How did that trade actually work? How was it possible to trade a good that was, at best, tolerated in the strange gap between legal and illegal. This trade is what Peter Thilly covers in his book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China.

Common sense has it that corruption is a quid pro quo practiced by individuals who disregard their institutional duties and responsibilities in favor of personal gain. However, this is a relatively recent definition or association that came to be enshrined in establishments bureaucratic in nature (as opposed to monarchical or feudal systems that existed previously) from the mid-18th century to mid-19th century when allegations against and among East India Company’s officials reached the British Parliament.

Contemporary China is a socio-political assessment of China since 1949, at the advent of the People’s Republic of China. The author, Gilles Guiheux, is a historian and sociologist at Université Paris Cité. Those familiar with 20th- and 21st-century Chinese history will find little new or surprising in Guiheux’s account, though unlike some other works on the Communist period he emphasizes continuity as well as change. The Communist regime, he writes, had a “multiplicity of inheritances”, and its “programme of action” since 1949 has much in common with other early 20th-century reform movements and even the interwar Republican period, though it also borrowed from Stalin’s Soviet Union. China’s societal evolution during the Communist period, he suggests, was not unique but instead like other countries in Asia and elsewhere experienced “industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization”.