Welcome to my reading review! Asia is a pivotal continent – home to some of the world’s largest nations and some of its most dynamic. Recently I picked up two books on the region, Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon and Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was The World, and my take on them is below.
Please note I am not an expert in the topics covered by these books; rather, my perspective is that of an interested lay reader.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, by Robert D. Kaplan (2010) – This book is about the history and contemporary geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, as seen through the lens of the author’s travels. If you’ve done any reading on these topics, none of the concepts the book discusses will be radically new: these range from the “string of pearls†(Chinese naval facilities around India, in the likes of Burma, Sri Lanka and Pakistan); to China’s reliance upon oil shipments through the Straits of Malacca; to the nature of Islam in Indonesia; to the historical trade and cultural links between the countries in the region. However, the book could well add some interesting colour. If, however, you haven’t read about these topics and you were looking for a decent introduction, you could probably do a lot worse than starting with Monsoon.
You can buy Monsoon from Amazon here.
When Asia Was The World: Travelling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the Eastâ€, by Stewart Gordon (2008) – This book is a collection of ten vignettes, mostly about individuals (the “merchants, scholars, warriors and monks†of the title): Jews and Muslims, Chinese and Portuguese and more, from the founder of the Mughal Empire to the traveller ibn Battuta, across almost 1,000 years. One vignette discusses what the contents of a shipwreck in the Java Sea tell us about the trade networks of the time, and the final vignette discusses the region as a whole. I found some of the people chronicled to be much more interesting than others, but on the whole, I liked the book as a source of insight as to how the world worked, who went where and why, how kings treated honoured guests and how ordinary people made their living in those days. This one is going on my reference shelf.