Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power…
Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved…
Opera Hong Kong chose Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail for its annual summer semi-staged production at the Hong Kong City Hall, held 17-18 August 2025. The production, directed by Tang Xinxin and conducted by Michael Koehler, was sung in German with dialogue in English (and a large smattering of Chinese).
Since around the turn of the new millennium, an explosion of science, archaeology and historical research have come together to establish the centrality of the steppe in world history: the place whence hail both Indo-Europeans and the wheel, a region that spawned empire after empire, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols. That “the region lying…
Hong Kong has often been called a “cultural desert”; while this is both uncharitable and less than entirely accurate, few question that Hong Kong punches below its weight culturally and has long failed to make optimal use of its many natural advantages. John Duffus’s recent memoir, Backstage in Hong Kong, provides a blow-by-blow narrative as…
There are any number of serious and worthy reasons to write a book on Alexander the Great, and author and historian Rachel Kousser gives several—including that Alexander’s world was more “globally connected” and “integrated” than our own and how “Alexander’s story does not just give us a different perspective on the past; it also helps…
“Where does one begin unravelling the history of India and its peoples,” asks Alan Machado (Prabhu) in the first paragraph of his new book Discovering India Anew. At the beginning, he says.
There is much about the way international relations is framed—from the so-called rules-based order to the nation-state itself—that has its origins in the Western history, philosophy and experience. It stands to reason that the traditional view might not map very well onto two non-Western countries an order of magnitude larger than almost any other in…
Alexander Grigorenko’s previous book Mebet, set among the Nenets people of the Siberian taiga, was such an unique literary experience that one could be forgiven for opening Ilget, the next book in the trilogy (a rather loose trilogy, it would appear), with some trepidation, anxious that it repeat or at least not surprise in same…
Even academic books need to be aware of the prevailing zeitgeist. Richard D McBride begins his history of first-millennium Korea with a pop-culture reference to K-Drama.
The title (and cover) of Andrew Hillier’s new book The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843-1853 might lead one to think that it is primarily a collection of drawings and paintings; but while the volume is indeed profusely-illustrated, it is rather more a biography of Henrietta Alcock, the wife of Rutherford Alcock, one…
Some things about Filipino author Marga Ortigas are clear after reading her recent novel God’s Ashes. She can write. She has a fertile imagination. She knows a great deal about a wide variety of things from politics to culture and technology. She knows how to craft a complicated, detailed, intricate plot.
In its eclectic choice of subjects, Filipino writer Lio Mangubat’s collection of historical essays Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves betrays its origins as a podcast. It resembles, not least due to Mangubat’s skill at spinning a good yarn, a collection of short stories rather than non-fiction pieces; and what the book lacks in an easily recognizable…
“What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century?” asks Jin Feng in The Transpacific Flow, a short 100-page study of MFA programs in China.
Although it is the Silk Road that captures most of the contemporary attention and discussion, it was in fact spices, not silk, that drove Western Europeans to seek routes to Asia. “Lightweight and durable, spices” writes Roger Crowley in his new history (appropriately entitled Spice), “were the first truly global commodity … they could be…