Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government scholarship—and from there, somehow got roped into the foreign service.
Category Archive: Podcast
Pakistan’s history since independence is… complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as the military launched multiple coups to overthrow the civilian government. The country was split into an unsustainable two halves—with one declaring independence as Bangladesh by the 70s.
Four years ago, on 1 February 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the fledgling democratic government in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, officially known as Myanmar. That sparked a civil war that continues today–with neither the military junta nor the various rebel groups coming closer to victory.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization—and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels. After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today.
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.
Yñiga, 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.
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.
2024 was another bumper year of Asian Review of Books / New Books Network podcasts. Here is a selection of a dozen highlights from short stories and pop-classics in translation to biography, history, society and the arts. Click on the speaker to hear the podcast … or download (and subscribe!) from your favorite podcast app.
When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced US-born fiancée 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.
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.
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