Sikhs in India and the Sikh diaspora in North America are occasionally in the news around controversies regarding the demand for a separate state. For those interested in the deeper history of power and politics of the idea of the Sikh republic, Sarbpreet Singh’s Cauldron, Sword and Victory: The Rise of the Sikhs (which is volume two of The Story of the Sikhs series) will be of immense use. While the first volume engaged with the formulation of the tenets of the faith by the ten Gurus from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, this second one deals with the 18th-century translation of the religious identity into a political one.
Podcast with Roger Crowley, author of “Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World”
The spice islands: specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic.
No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse. The journey begins in prehistory, with a small, shy animal that humans hunted for food. Hunters domesticated the horse in order to ensure a supply of meat and, later, mare’s milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. This was a watershed event for both species, transforming the horse from an animal fleeing at a gallop from the mere smell of humans into the most valuable of their livestock. The horse’s need to roam far and wide for pasture prompted the horse herders to spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Then herders learned to ride horses in order to keep up with their far-flung herds; this changed the course of history.
The “barren rock” in question is Hong Kong and the tales aspire to give a portrait of the territory through the eyes of some long-term residents. When visiting abroad, people from Hong Kong are often asked, “How have things changed since the Chinese took over?” These tales don’t address that question directly, but they span the period of the Chinese takeover in 1997 and very successfully evoke the life of one section of the population before and after. For anyone who has lived there and left they will appeal as evocative reminiscences.
Despite being full of lively characters, the most vibrant personality in Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo might be the city itself. Tokyo here is a fascinating hybrid gleaned from the novel’s ten individual perspectives, and the introduction of each new set of eyes reveals, piece by piece, a city that is as multifaceted as it is massive.
“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment.
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 between east and west … was the axis on which the globe spun” (as Peter Frankopan put it in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World a decade ago) no longer seems a contentious statement.
Today, the word “fengshui” (literally “wind and water”) usually conjures up images of living rooms and interior design. It has also become a global concept, popping up everywhere, from Netflix reality shows like Selling Sunset to blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians. This attention to fengshui, seen as essential for ensuring good vibes and positive energy, reflects a common perception. Yet in its original setting, fengshui had—and arguably still has—a more profound historical and social importance.
It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about what it portends. Just over a week later, Amarendra is dead—of plague. India had not had a case of plague in a dozen years: Was Amarendra’s death natural, or premeditated—perhaps orchestrated by Benoy, his half-brother and competitor for the family riches?
How did a small island nation off the coast of Europe come to play such an oversized role in the making of modern China? That question must have occurred to both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chairman Xi Jin Ping, perhaps with a touch of irony, when they reviewed the honor guard in London in 2015, under a canopy of Union Jacks and red banners. Kerry Brown, who has written numerous books about both Chinese history and its current leadership, provides his answer through an engaging and wide ranging retelling of the two countries’ entwinement.
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