Few families have had as much success shaping history as the Abbasids. Descended from one of the Prophet Muhammad’s four uncles, they used their reputation for probity and piety to take over and rule the Arab Empire for 37 reigns. Deftly managing family feuds, they enjoyed a century of unimaginable splendor, followed by four centuries…
Shiv Kunal Verma, an acclaimed historian and filmmaker, has written an encyclopedic history of the 1965 India-Pakistan War, which began when Pakistan attacked Indian forces in the Rann of Kutch in April 1965, stalled as a result of a temporary ceasefire brokered by the British, and restarted in August when Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar by…
December 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on 12 December: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon.
The ubiquity of Portuguese surnames in Hong Kong, including as they do quite a few people who don’t look particularly European, can come as something of a surprise. Some of these, as Catherine S Chan points out in her new book Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting, date literally from…
It’s become almost fashionable to write about lost Jewish communities around the world. Recent books have been published about Indian Jews and Jews in Harbin, along with those in the Philippines, to name a few. Now Zayn Gregory has come out with The Last Jews of Penang, illustrated by Arif Rafhan. It’s a short book…
Kashmir, or more accurately, Jammu & Kashmir (JK), is host to a long running conflict dating back to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Ever since the majority Muslim JK, ruled by a Hindu leader Hari Singh, acceded to India, instead of Pakistan or declaring Independence, a conflict has raged in over the…
Under the Song Dynasty, China experienced rapid commercial growth and monetization of the economy. In the same period, the austere ethical turn that led to neo-Confucianism was becoming increasingly prevalent in the imperial bureaucracy and literati culture. Tracing the influences of these trends in Chinese intellectual history, All Mine! explores the varied ways in which…
In the history of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Chinese temples play a pivotal role in serving the spiritual and social needs of the immigrant community. Wak Hai Cheng Bio, the oldest Teochew temple in Singapore, is a rare surviving example of traditional Teochew architecture in Southeast…
“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many colonial cities throughout Asia–while also making sure that their own communities back…
The story could be from Disney: in 1653, 14-year-old Venetian Nicolò Manucci, suffering from youthful wanderlust, stows away on a ship. Befriended (and hired) by an English nobleman (Henry Bard, Viscount of Bellomont) en route to Persia to solicit assistance from the Shah for exiled Charles II, he travels through the Ottoman Empire to Esfahan….
The historian Rui Ramos, who teaches at Lisbon’s New University, said, “All history is revisionist. History is an academic domain where one must emphasize originality, offering unique and diverse interpretations.” This challenge underpins Marc David Baer’s new work, The Ottomans, which joins a long list of recently-published works on this subject.
The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.
Scalpers worked overtime for New Yorkers eager to see Beijing Opera star Mei Lanfang perform during his one and only American tour in 1930. His “exquisite loveliness in pantomime and costume” must have seemed ineffably exotic to New Yorkers, unfamiliar with the codes of Chinese opera, or the art of female impersonators 旦（dan）like Mei. An…
There was a time when to get to Moscow from Hong Kong, one had to transit through Bangkok onto an Ilyushin which came down, due to its relative short range, in both New Delhi and Tashkent before finally arriving at Sheremetyevo.
To appreciate Lucy Atkinson as the most intrepid of all Victorian women explorers one only has to read her discreet allusion to giving birth after 150 kms of horseback riding across a waterless steppe: “I was in expectation of a little stranger, whom I thought might arrive about the end of December or the beginning…