To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover a lot of ground. There is therefore a wide variety in the depth of knowledge we bring to the range of subjects we cover. For some, we are genuinely experts and can talk at length with authority; for others we are operating on a much thinner basic level of expertise. It’s not to say that what we say in lectures or classes is necessarily wrong, but rather that we are well aware that there can be less real understanding than we would like of the nuances underlying a single slide and its 3 bullet points. Over time, we can hope to expand the range of our in-depth knowledge and fill in the areas about which we can talk with authority. For me, reading Gregory Smits’s and Takara Kurayoshi’s books on the Ryukyu islands has been such a process.
History
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.
Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes as an organization that “revolutionized the way in which intelligence operations were conducted in complex cultural environments, and pioneered methods that would influence approaches to intelligence work …for decades, … even up to the present day.”
Today, Afghanistan—if it ever reaches global headlines—is portrayed as an unstable land, known more for the wars great powers fight (and often lose) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right.
History is often told as the story of distinct societies, focusing on the ambitions of kings and the outward march of empires. Yet there is an arguably richer tradition that views the connections between societies as the true engines of human development. Just as Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World) reframed antiquity around the Silk Road, and David Chaffetz (Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires) recently argued that the horse was the definitive connection-technology of the terrestrial world, Barry Cunliffe’s Driven by the Monsoons applies this lens to the sea over the longue durée. Accomplishing for the Indian Ocean what Fernand Braudel did for the Mediterranean, the emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford argues that the ocean was not merely a backdrop but the fundamental heartbeat of the ancient world, a rhythm dictated by the slow, unchanging geography of the earth and the seasonal back-and-forth of the monsoon winds.
Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about how the institution functioned; who became enslaved, how did the slave trade work; how were its victims treated? Craig Perry seeks answers to those questions by delving deeply into the Cairo Geniza, a trash repository which by serendipity preserves for us tens of thousands of private, legal and commercial documents from the 11th-12th centuries. With these, he comes to a number of surprising conclusions about the workings of medieval slavery in the lands of Islam.
The “Chicken’s Neck”, or Siliguri Corridor, was created in the aftermath of Partition. Just 22 kilometres wide at its narrowest point and roughly 60 kilometres long, it connects India’s northeast to the rest of the country. Bordering Bangladesh and Bhutan and with China in close proximity, security theorists have long worried that this strategically vital region, could be severed and India’s northeast rendered landlocked in the event of conflict. In some sectors, Indian and Chinese troops are stationed just 30 metres apart, the closest proximity anywhere along the entire Sino-Indian border. How this strip of border was created, and how it has been shaped by recent politics, is the topic of In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck by Akhilesh Upadhyay.
World War II birthed the anti-colonial Indian National Army (INA), a force composed of former imperial troops and civilian recruits that fought with Japan against the British and helped to accelerate India’s independence from Great Britain. Like most aspects of World War II, these developments were messy, complicated, and filled with tragedy. Gautam Hazarika, a former banker turned World War II historian, tells the story of one of the war’s lesser-known tragedies—the fate of Indian prisoners of war in the aftermath of Japan’s conquest of Malaya and Singapore.
Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
Biographies, at least in English, about Japanese who played key roles in the Second World War are relatively rare. Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin—each the subject of dozens of biographies—have all attracted a great deal of attention. General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s leader for most of the war, has however had only several books dedicated to him. For the leader of an empire that held Manchuria in its grip, overran much of China, occupied French Indochina, and seized throughout Southeast Asia the colonies of the Americans, British, and Dutch before going down in defeat, this relative lack of attention is remarkable.
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