When Asia was the World

A quick recommendation to read Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the Riches of the East. Gordon’s an academic but he hasn’t allowed that to stop him writing a very readable book highlighting the role networks played in Asia at various points between AD700 to 1500. Those that talk of Asia’s rise as if it’s a new thing would do well to read Gordon’s book – Asia flourishing while Europe was in the Dark Ages. Nowadays we are not so much witnessing Asia’s rise as its recovery after a short blip.

Gordon highlight a number of great examples drawn from meticulous research of sources it’s amazing to read actually have survived to show the linkage through spiritual (Buddhism and Islam), commercial and intellectual connections. While the transmission routes of Buddhism may be quite well known the chapters dealing with the movement of tropical spices and medicines moving from South East Asia north to the plains of India, west into the Middle East and east into China are fascinating. The story of the Jewish traders on the Malabar coast is also fascinating and all new to me at least.

Each story has some great asides – for instance I’d never really clicked that when the Europeans arrived in Asia their great advantage was that they had better ship board cannon than any Asian nation (developed during all the fighting in the Mediterranean) allowing them to bombard coastal defences. That’s why Europe conquered so many ports in Asia but only really penetrated the hinterlands in the nineteenth century. There’s loads more in that vein making When Asia was the World, like this web site hopefully, a marvellous gallimaufry of information and scholarship.

Anyway – you can read the book or listen to Gordon talking about it at the Asia Society (here) in a talk that the powers that be at the Asia Society decided should also include Reginald Chua for some reason who, unsurprisingly, was able to add little of relevance. Chua is a journalist who was with the Wall Street Journal and just recently took the job of Editor-in-Chief at the South China Morning Post – good luck with that turkey!!