Asian Review of Books

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) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right. In his new book, Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest (Reaktion Books, 2025), archaeologist Warwick Ball argues that this land was a center where the worlds of Iran, India, Central Asia, and even the Mediterranean met and mingled. Ball takes readers from the Bronze Age Oxus and Helmand civilizations through Greek Bactria, the Kushan Empire, the spread of Buddhism, and the rise of powerful Islamic dynasties. Warwick Ball is an archaeologist and author who spent over twenty years carrying out excavations, architectural studies and monumental restoration throughout the Middle East. He is the author of many books on the history and archaeology of the region including The Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.” Things don’t look quite so certain now. China’s internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators, and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing. Yi-Ling Liu charts the story of the Chinese internet in her book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet (Knopf, 2026), with profiles of creators like Ma Baoli, the founder of one of China’s, and the world’s, largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip hop pioneer Kafe Hu. Yi-Ling’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, and The New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Wall Dancers . Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025), makes a different argument: That the region’s medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights, and the spreading Muslim faith. Professor Yossef Rapoport of Queen Mary University London is a historian of the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 CE. Among his publications are books on marriage and divorce in late medieval Cairo and Damascus, on the fourteenth-century religious reformer Ibn Taymiyya, and on medieval Islamic maps. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Becoming Arab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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. What followed was a bold plan by Indian Muslims and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world’s richest men at the time, to potentially revive the caliphate, as told in Imran Mulla’s book The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince (Hurst, 2025) Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Indian Caliphate. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 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 (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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, tookpart in the Second World War, became an early leader of the PRC, was purged, survived the CulturalRevolution, was rehabilitated, and helped jumpstart China’s opening up as a leader in GuangdongProvince. He also happened to be the father of Xi Jinping, China’s current president. Joseph Torigian has written an extensive biography of Xi Zhongxun, titled The Party's Interests Come First:The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford UP, 2025). And he joins us today to talkthrough Xi’s long and very eventful life. Joseph is Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University and a ResearchFellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including itsreview of The Party’s Interests Come First. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He canbe found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 franchise starring the former as its heroes, and the latter as its villains. Steve Tibble takes on both these groups in his new book Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025). Steve takes us to the time of Crusades: a more crowded and dangerous Eastern Mediterranean, where varied groups–not just the Crusaders–jostled for power and influence. And he joins today to share how these two groups rose and, eventually, fell. Steve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Crusader Armies: 1099–1187 (Yale University Press: 2016), The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land (Yale University Press: 2020), Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (Yale University Press: 2023), and Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press: 2024). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Assassins and Templars. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to who domesticated horses first–but Ludovic’s team came up with their answer: They emerged on the western Eurasian steppe around 4200 years ago. But that revelation was only the beginning of Ludovic’s work, as he dug into the genetic origins of different kinds of horses, like the Arabian horse, as well as charted how the horse’s genetic diversity changed over time. His research is collected in his new book Horses: A 4,000-Year Genetic Journey Across the World (Princeton UP, 2025) Ludovic Orlando is a CNRS Silver Medal–winning research director and founding director of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse at the University of Toulouse in France. His work has appeared in leading publications such as Nature, Science, and Cell. He is a recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Horses. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review