Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or the jigsaw puzzle that is Mughal history, one is likely to come away from this well-written and colorful book quite the wiser.
Author: Peter Gordon
How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and language in the world. To Hell with Poets is good not just in the context of Kazakh or even Central Asian writing available in English, but good, period.
Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island with Ève, a novelist who had one cult hit years before and who has retreated into isolation; they rarely if ever see each other.
If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model.
From the temples of Angkor Wat and Borobudur to images of Ganesh and references to the Ramayana, anyone who visits Southeast Asia cannot fail to be struck by the influence of centuries-old Indian culture, an influence that seems more profound and deeply rooted than that of China. Yet in today’s Southeast Asia, the situation is largely reversed; India is very much a political and commercial also-ran.
While not exactly lost to history, Mughal Princess Gulbadan (with an extensive Wikipedia page and a biography by the prolific Rumer Godden), is not nearly as well-known as her father Babur, (half) brother Humayun and nephew Akbar nor even Nur Jahan, the subject of self-styled feminist historian Ruby Lal’s previous book. But Gulbadan, uniquely among Mughal women of that period, has a book to her name: the “Ahval-i Humayun Badshah or ‘Conditions in the Age of Humayun Badshah’, popularly called the Humayun-nama.”
Those of a geographical, or perhaps geopolitical, frame of mind might find it fitting that Elisa Shua Dusapin’s, after novellas set in Korea (Winter in Sokcho) and Japan (The Pachinko Parlour), has placed her third in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East. Other writers (Paul Yoon comes to mind) have also set their work in this trio of places with interlocking histories.
One cannot help wonder whether the number of “China books” is a lagging or leading indicator of the country’s importance in world affairs. While some of these books communicate more about the author than China, Jeremy Garlick’s Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption is more realpolitik than politics, more about what works and what doesn’t than who’s right or wrong.
First looks at China, or some aspect of it, at least those that have impinged on the broader consciousness, have often been travelogues. Think Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze or Tim Clissold’s Mr China. Over the years, these books have covered expats, farmers, millennials, businessmen, but despite China’s ever deeper involvement with Africa—one of the more important contemporary geopolitical developments—there has been little, at least in extended book form, written on Africans living and working in China. Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts may be the first, certainly one of the first, at least as something other than an academic study.
Although the Ottoman Empire nominally extended along the North African coast as far as the borders of Morocco, much of it, especially the Westernmost reaches, were largely autonomous much of the time. By the turn of the 19th century, control by Istanbul of the so-called Barbary States was nominal; the dey of the Regency of Algiers would deal directly with foreign states.
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