It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian…
Kashmir has always been the point of connection between South Asia, Central Asia and Xinjiang. Winding their way through the mighty Himalaya, Pamir and Karakoram Mountain ranges, traders, travelers and officials created a series of close historic economic, cultural and political ties that have bound the region together.
The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea.
One of the objectives of the historians of the formerly colonized world is to rewrite history from the perspective of the colonized. Yet, such historians have arguably created a historiographic tradition that is lopsided. These are at best works that expose the unfair and oppressive means through which the European powers came to power and…
India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale in his new book Crosswinds offers a fascinating account of India’s diplomacy in four specific events during 1949 through 1959: the formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Indochina War, and the two Taiwan Strait crises. India’s diplomatic role was encouraged by…
Although the Ottoman Empire nominally extended along the North African coast as far as the borders of Morocco, much of it, especially the Westernmost reaches, were largely autonomous much of the time. By the turn of the 19th century, control by Istanbul of the so-called Barbary States was nominal; the dey of the Regency of…
Anthropologist Tom Barfield’s field work in the steppes of northern Afghanistan in the 1980s inspired a lifelong curiosity for the ancient empires that once arose in this frontier region. In an earlier work, The Perilous Frontier (Wiley Blackwell, 1992), he examined the relationship between the steppe pastoralists and sedentary states, concluding that the emergence of…
Twentieth-century Japan was an ideocracy. It was organized around an ideology called State Shintō which asserted, among other things, that the emperor was divine and the Japanese unique. It begat all manner of theories about the Japanese (Nihonjinron): it was claimed that the Japanese race is a unique isolate thanks to living in an island…
Nepal’s tumultuous political history is the focus of Lok Raj Baral’s latest book, Nepal: From Monarchy to Republic, which charts the country’s journey from its political unification in 1769 to its present status as a federal democratic republic. The veteran author and political scientist charts the seismic shifts that have fundamentally changed Nepal’s politics, society…
Despite his extraordinary success as a conqueror, the turn of the 15th-century Turco-Mongol leader Tamerlane (or more appropriately Timur or Temür—the English derives from the Persian Temür-i lang, or “Timur the lame”) is usually considered something of an also-ran to the original Mongol empire’s founder Genghis (Chinggis) Khan. But ’twas not always thus: several centuries…
Over the course of two centuries (between 133 BCE and 89 CE), China’s Han empire fought a series of conflicts with a confederation of nomadic steppe peoples known as Xiongnu. As Scott Forbes Crawford notes in his fast-moving, readable narrative history The Han-Xiongnu War, the Han and Xiongnu were east Asian “superpowers” whose struggle for…
Ayurveda enjoys a growing global appeal, and is often touted as ‘true’ and ‘time-tested’ by contemporary political actors, governments, social groups, practitioners and NGOs in India. With “indigenous” healing systems enjoying increasing state support today, an examination of the socio-political aspects of medicine, in particular Ayurveda, and its role in nation-building is critically important.
Angie Chau’s discussion of five Chinese literary and visual artists who sojourned in Paris between (for the most part) the First and Second World War explores, in an academic way, the notion of “transposition”, a usage she has coined to describe how artists navigated the two environments—Chinese and French—they encountered and operated in. Non-academic readers…
It is not uncommon for auto rickshaws and trucks in India to proudly proclaim “Mera Bharat Mahaan” (My India is Great) in decorative signage. While the statement (among other didactic notes about traffic safety) has kept bored or exhausted fellow commuters engaged, Yorim Spoelder points out in his new book Visions of Greater India: Transimperial…
Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich…