Fans pick 100 books like The Eurasian Core and Its Edges

Most Americans misunderstand China, even though one of their greatest statesmen, Henry Kissinger, wrote this brilliant book explaining how the Chinese view the world very differently from the West. One simple example explains it well. The West plays chess, which aims for total victory. The Chinese play weiqi, which aims for protracted campaigns and strategic encirclement.

American strategic thinkers accuse China of military belligerence. Yet, China, unlike the US, hasn’t fought a major war in 45 years. Why not? Kissinger cites Sun Tzu to explain: “Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.” Sadly, the US has embroiled itself in several wars, even after the Cold War ended. The world would be a safer place if Western leaders reread Kissinger’s book.

What motivated the great Asian desire to rebuild and revitalize their societies? The simple answer is centuries of humiliation at the hands of the West. Pankaj Mishra tells remarkable stories of how Asians were both humiliated and educated by the West. Every Western policymaker should read his story about how the British and French forces looted and burned the Summer Palace, destroying more ancient treasures than the Taliban ever did.

Pankaj Mishra describes well the emergence of a key generation of Asian intellectuals inspired by Japan’s naval triumph over Russia in 1905, including Rabindranath Tagore and Liang Qichao. American policymakers who engage in a contest against China without understanding these centuries of humiliation do so at their own peril. 

As the great Asian renaissance gathers momentum in the 21st century, many young Asians will begin to rediscover their own cultures and civilizations, just as the West did in its first cultural renaissance in the 15th century. Few understand classical Indian civilization as well as Amartya Sen does.

Since Asian cultures are associated with despotism and Western cultures with individual liberties, Sen says, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.” Living up to the spirit of the title of his book, Sen demonstrates in this book that he’s an argumentative Indian and Asian. Argumentative Asians will eventually win the argument with the West. 

Not all the struggles of Asians are with Western societies. There are also divisions and rivalries within Asia, including, sadly, between the two Asian giants: India and China. Kanti Bajpai’s book explains the complex, neurotic relationship between the two Asian powers well. Former Indian PM Manmohan Singh once wisely observed, “The world is large enough to accommodate the growth ambitions of both India and China.”

A decade after he said that China and India clashed again in the Himalayas in June 2020, plunging relations to a new low. The Asian century will be seriously crippled if China and India don’t find a long-term modus vivendi. Bajpai’s book will help both sides understand each other better. 

Home is Not Here is a touching autobiographical account of a past Chinese world completely different in time and place from that of Hessler’s explorations. In the first half of the twentieth century millions of Chinese left China and migrated to Southeast Asia, including Wang’s parents. Wang traces their struggles to maintain their Chinese identity as minorities in different cultures. In telling his family’s story he gives a vivid picture of the upheavals and tribulations of both China and Southeast Asia in a troubled era. Wang Gungwu is my favorite historian of China, and author of many books on the grand sweep of Chinese history, but here we see China’s and Asia’s most turbulent era from a personal perspective.

Peter C. Perdue gives an exhaustive account of the Qing Dynasty’s conquest of Xinjiang - which, according to many historians, was the first time a Chinese Dynasty consolidated its rule over the whole of the region. This history has important implications for claims regarding the legitimacy of Chinese rule over Xinjiang.

This is the fundamental, well written work for the relationship between imperial China and the nomadic peoples.

I am impressed how Barefield perceptively analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of successive nomadic confederations from the Xiongnu down to the Mongols.

He argues convincingly, in my opinion, that often the Chinese Empire and the nomadic confederation often depended upon each other economically and militarily as is well seen in the alliance between later Tang emperors and the Uyghur Khans in the eighth and early ninth centuries.

Two prominent aspects of China’s recent economic development are its mushrooming network of high-speed rail and its efforts to encourage infrastructure in its neighbors and beyond through the Belt and Road Initiative. The careful research of this book brings the two together. In exploring the different attitudes toward China among its southern neighbors the authors give a concrete account of how involvement is shaped by the prospects, concerns, and politics of each country. Meanwhile, it is clear that China is achieving a new centrality and connectivity in mainland Asia. What remains to be seen is whether a connected Asia is also a unified one.

This book explains how a powerful sultanate located on an archipel in the South China Sea maintained its independence until the very end of the nineteenth century. Being the centre of a ferocious slave-raiding network, it played a pivotal role in supplying the slave labour for commodity production both for China and the West. Warren’s book links an upsurge of slave raiding in Southeast Asia at the end of the eighteenth century with imperial expansion of the West and the economic resurrection of China. It questions the dominant perception that piracy and slavery in Asia were antithetical to economic growth.

I find Warren’s thesis tremendously valuable to understand processes of globalisation and a source of inspiration for my own research and teaching on slavery in the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth century. It also opened my eyes to the fact that the upsurge of slave-raiding was fed by illicit arms… show more.

During the thirteenth century the Mongols advanced on many frontiers, their forces conquering China, much of the Near East, and even crossing the Indus River. One of their most substantial wars of conquest however was in north-western Eurasia where their armies covered enormous distances, ultimately reaching lands as distant as Poland and Hungary. In time, as the Mongol Empire broke apart, this region became a powerful empire in its own right, often referred to by historians as the “Golden Horde,” or in this case “The Horde”. In this book Marie Favereau provides a compelling history of this empire covering its origins, its development and its later history. This account is all the more significant because the Horde has actually received far less attention from scholars than the Mongols’ other territories.