In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa, as well as familiarity with descriptions in Portuguese sources as yet not formally published at the time. How this happened, we could only guess; Jorge Flores’s Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, although it deals with a period from a few decades to a century and a half later, helps explain what was going on.
History
India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that pose a challenge: internal borders too are at play. The Indian government for decades has had a complex, often tumultuous relationship with its northeastern states. The inherent complexity of the region means a wider, more expansive approach to political analysis is needed. This is precisely what Avinash Paliwal’s new book seeks to do.
India has inspired William Dalrymple for well-on thirty years, resulting in a number of eminently readable books, including White Mughals—an analysis of east-west inter-cultural conflicts), Return of a King (a portrait of military disaster); and The Anarchy, an exposé of colonial exploitation. In his latest book, The Golden Road, Dalrymple for the first time tackles a big, civilizational theme: what world history owes to the subcontinent.
In the 16th 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.
Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese and half-Basque and relished her role as a socialite more than that of a mother. Virginia’s parents split up while she was still a young girl, after Cristina discovered that Carlos had another wife and family back in China. Cristina kicked him out and had their marriage annulled.
Pakistan’s politics is so complicated that it can be hard to determine either a trajectory or even a throughline. If Tahir Kamran’s enormously-detailed Chequered Past, Uncertain Future is any indication, this is not due to any failure of imagination. Kamran is focused mostly on the country’s often fraught relationship with democracy, but leaves one with much the same impression about foreign and domestic policy and issues of Pakistani identity.
Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor.