What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so politicized? In the new book Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present (India Allen Lane, 2025), Namit Arora and Romila Thapar discuss some of the challenges facing historians in India today, what it means to be an academic historian, and how ideas around gender, caste and religion may be getting distorted in India’s public history.
History
Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments delves into the often-overlooked monuments of Delhi through the lens of jinns, Sufi saints and the horror tales associated with them, revealing both the brutality and humanity embedded in the collective history of the monuments and those who are tethered to them. Historian Eric Chopra contends that “to make sense of its antiquity is an overwhelming process for it’s a city that has witnessed 100,000 years of presence” and that in the light of the city’s long exposure to invasion and migration it “must be haunted”.
Robert Strange McNamara was arguably one of the worst public servants in post-World War II American history. Decades after the Vietnam War ended, McNamara, who served as US Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, admitted that as early as 1965 he believed that the United States could not win that war yet he orchestrated and publicly supported the Americanization of the war, sending more than 500,000 American servicemen to fight in what he believed was a hopeless cause. All the while, he kept telling the American people that the US was winning, even as he quietly recommended bombing pauses, troop ceilings, and negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic world. Abdülmecid II—who had been elected to the position by the Republic of Turkey just two years before—decamped for Europe.
Edmund Burke remarked in 1790 that “… which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation… The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.” The course of the French Revolution soon proved him right. Two Paths to Prosperity reaffirms Burke’s insight on an even grander stage. Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr bring contemporary social science to bear on the key junctures in European and Chinese history. Along the way, they explore the most fundamental causes of growth, freedom, and innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and still matter today.
“The goal of this book”, writes Rian Thum in his introduction, “is to reach an understanding of Islamic Chinese history that makes the Muslims of China unsurprising, even ordinary.” The layman who has visited, say, Xi’an, might be surprised that this should be deemed necessary.
On 9 August 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, which had itself only become an independent country two years earlier. But Malaysia insisted that Malaysian troops be permitted to remain in Singapore. Singapore’s future Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew later said that Malaysia’s insistence “stiffened our resolve” to “build up the Singapore Armed Forces”. The person primarily responsible for doing that is the subject of Ramachandran Menon’s new book Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army.
For New Year’s Day, we re-broadcast a podcast with Kerry Brown, now Chairman of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power.
Xi Zhongxun’s career spanned the entirety of China’s modern history. Born just two years after the 1911revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty, Xi was an early member of the Chinese Communist Party, took part in the Second World War, became an early leader of the PRC, was purged, survived the Cultural Revolution, was rehabilitated, and helped jumpstart China’s opening up as a leader in Guangdong Province.
In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process of ethnogenesis. For the conquering Arab armies settled in the cities of Egypt, not in the countryside, where Islam remained a minority religion for centuries. Yet today, many Egyptians consider themselves scions of ancient Arab tribes, just as they see their horses as pure blood Arabs. How and when did this Arab identity take hold in Egypt?
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