Podcast with Kerry Brown, author of “China Incorporated: The politics of a world where China is number one”
How do we talk about China? It’s a question every analyst, academic, policymaker, and reporter probably needs to ask themselves.
Podcast with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author of “Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther”
The Book of Esther, one of the historical books in the Torah and the Old Testament, is known as a story of community, discrimination, and human ingenuity. It’s core to the Jewish holiday of Purim, with singing, feasting, and other merriment. And it’s unique as one of the few books in the Bible that doesn’t…
Podcast with Maximillian Mørch, author of “Plains of Discontent: A Political History of Nepal’s Tarai (1743-2019)”
When we think of Nepal, we think of its high Himalayan mountains, or maybe the highlands of Kathmandu. But somewhere between a quarter and a third of the country is nothing like that: marshy, forested, malaria-infested swampland, along the southern border with India.
Podcast with Nishanth Injam, author of “Best Possible Experience”
The characters in Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience, his debut short story collection, are like many in India or in Indian communities in the United States: Working hard and enduring hardships to try to get a better life for themselves. They don’t always succeed—and even those that do lose something along the way.
Podcast with Nicholas Hoover Wilson, author of “Modernity’s Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India”
When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse.
Podcast with Vaudine England, author of “Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong”
The legacy of the businessmen who built Hong Kong are all over the city. Bankers work in Chater House—named after Paul Chater, the Armenian businessman behind much of the city’s land reclamation (among many other things). The Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel sits along Mody Road, named after Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, a Parsi immigrant who helped found…
Podcast with Rudi Matthee, author of “Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop’s Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World”
When meeting an expatriate friend on my first trip to Dubai, the host at the restaurant where we were meeting quickly ushered me up to the second floor. For foreigners, he said—before handing me a wine list. Dubai’s tolerance of alcohol is a more formalized version of Muslim tolerance—and clandestine drinking—of alcohol that dates back…
Podcast with Michael J Seth, author of “Korea at War”
The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.
Podcast with Robert Hillenbrand, author of “The Great Mongol Shahnama”
It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all. 500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out…
Podcast with Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo, authors of “Korea: A New History of South and North”
As a member of the US National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was…
Podcast with Marco Caboara, author of “Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735”
Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different…
Podcast with Fiona Sze-Lorrain, author of “Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories”
Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories jumps from character to character, location to location, time period to time period. Two cooks working for Madame Chiang-Kai Shek. A dancer, exiled to Shanghai’s Wukang Mansion. Three women, gathering in a French cathedral, finding strength in each other decades after the protests in Tiananmen.
Podcast with Sofia Samatar, author of “The White Mosque: A Silk Road Memoir”
In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make themselves available for conscription, and pushed forward by prophecies of the imminent return of Christ, over a hundred families travel in a grueling journey, eventually building a settlement and…
Podcast with Tanvi Srivastava, translator of “The War Diary of Asha-san: From Tokyo to Netaji’s Indian National Army”
On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against…
Podcast with Peter Thilly, author of “The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China”
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…
