Tag: Asian Review of Books

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

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Review of Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World (St. Martin’s Press, June 2016; HarperCollins Canada, May 2016).

Nigel Collett
Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

Shanghai GrandOf all human societies of which we have knowledge, Shanghai in the late 1930s perhaps comes closest to the sci-fi dystopias beloved of Hollywood, societies in which the gilded, sophisticated inhabitants of a fabulous city live surrounded but cut off from wasted badlands, served by an abject underclass living as far from the light of day as it does from the consciousness of its masters. For inside the self-policed boundaries of Shanghai’s International Settlement and its French Concession lay both one of the greatest concentrations of wealth on the face of the planet and some of the most sordid scenes of human misery.

The taipans of British, American, French, Japanese and other stock who controlled and owned the wealth of Shanghai lived hedonistic lives of truly decadent luxury. For the wealthy, life was sweet, as Noël Coward, who passed through in 1930 and wrote Private Lives while laid up with influenza in a suite in the Cathay Hotel, remembered. “I entered the social whirl of Shanghai with zest,” he wrote. Continue reading “Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World” →

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History

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The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa

Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

gunpowder ageTonio Andrade, a professor at Emory University, has written a well-researched, balanced, and comparative history of military innovation in Asia and the West in which he challenges the traditional notion—set forth most compellingly by Victor Davis Hanson in Carnage and Culture and Niall Ferguson in Civilization—that Western culture largely explains Western global predominance in the post-medieval world.

Although Andrade frames the book around the invention of gunpowder by the Chinese and its subsequent employment in warfare by both Chinese and Western powers, his principal focus is to explain why in certain historical time periods Chinese and Western military innovation surged or remained static, and more specifically why there developed a “Great Military Divergence” between China and Western powers during the mid-18th century into the 19th century. The key factor, he concludes, is not culture but the Toynbeean phenomenon of “challenge and response”. Continue reading “The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History” →

Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire

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Crowley Conquerors

Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley (Faber & Faber, September 2015; RandomHouse, December 2015)

Reviewed by Jame DiBiasio 

 Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

“Had there been more of the world,” wrote Luís de Camões of the Portuguese explorers, they “would have discovered it.” That’s a line from Roger Crowley’s fantastic new narrative history, The Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire.

Crowley is out to reset the primacy of Columbus and the Spanish discovery of the Americas that resides in contemporary Western society. The age of exploration was a European endeavor but particularly an Iberian one. The Portuguese explorers were the ones who did the bulk of the discovering. Moreover, as Crowley relates, Portuguese swashbuckling penetrated the heart of Asian commerce and achieved a stunning dominance there. The Portuguese, within a matter of years, had created the first Western-dominated world empire since Alexander the Great. Their achievement was Act One in the saga of the rise of the West – and what a bloody, thrilling and unlikely victory it was. Continue reading “Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire” →

The Eagle & the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century

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Eagle-vs.-Dragon-510x269

Juan José Morales

Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

The first Portuguese embassy to China, headed by Tomé Pires, set out from Canton in 1517, reaching the capital Peking in December 1520. Although they carried gifts and letters from King Manuel, the Portuguese did not see the Emperor but were treated as spies, thrown into jail and some executed.

Meanwhile, in November 1519, a Spanish expedition led by Hernán Cortés entered Mexico-Tenochtitlán where they were received with spectacular pomp by the emperor Moctezuma. Months later, in August 1521, the Aztec capital would fall to the Spanish, opening the door to their conquest of much of the American continent.

These first encounters between the Iberians and the two world civilizations of Mexico and China took place therefore around the same time although with completely different outcomes. Serge Gruzinski’s The Eagle and the Dragon, the title referring to the iconic symbols of Mexico and China, is a groundbreaking study that sets to explain the timing and implications of these events. Continue reading “The Eagle & the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century” →