Support Kritika | Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Join the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
Interviews with authors of books reviewed in the Asian Review of Books.
Borneo—split between two countries, home to some of the world’s oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life—is back in the news. The …
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not…
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) o…
In September 2016, Islam Karimov–the first president of a post-Soviet Uzbekistan–died, at age 78. His death ended an oppressive dictatorship that had …
Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As Presi…
Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses…
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this regi…
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 politi…
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…
Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history act…
In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the…
Caste has been a huge topic of conversation in modern India. Yet debates and activism around caste discrimination have spread beyond South Asia. Caste…
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 …
The Great Wave is perhaps the most famous piece of Japanese artwork: a roaring blue wave and three boats on the ocean. And far in the background is Mt…
The Assassins and the Templars. Two groups that are now part of popular legend–and not just because of Assassin’s Creed, the massive video game franch…
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to …
In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the …
Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history–and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs…
Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home…
War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, wa…