What We're Reading This Week

Sean Phillips, University of Oxford

Jeremy Cliffe, “The fateful chancellor,” The New Statesman

A concise intellectual history and appraisal of Germany’s outgoing chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Faisal Devji, “What is the West?” Aeon

A thought-provoking essay on the shifting character and meaning of the West in international discourse.

Gideon Rachman, “Why Aukus is welcome in the Indo-Pacific,” Financial Times, 20 September 2021

A short, punchy piece on the fallout of the recently announced Aukus agreement, including its (broadly positive) reception across the Indo-Pacific region.

Nicholas Sy, University of the Philippines Diliman

Arash Khazeni, “A walk down Mogul Street,” UC Press Blog

A teaser for his recent book The City and the Wilderness but also a collection of photographs, this short piece by Arash Khazeni takes the reader down “Mogul Street” where built heritage “linger like ghosts in the urban debris and landscape” hinting at “a different time of cross-cultural exchanges between the Indo-Persian Mughal world and the Burmese Empire.”

Tamara Loos, Bones around my neck: The life and exile of a prince provocateur, Cornell University Press

This book’s subject, Prince Prisdang, was both a product of his king’s project of absolute monarchy and ostracized by it. Tamara Loos presents Prisdang’s contradictions as internal conflicts in a way that humanizes the “historical abstractions of imperialism, resistance, Buddhist universalism, and the transformation of Siam into a modern state.”  

Digital Tokugawa Lab, Council of East Asian Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center

Led by historian Fabian Drixler this project deep dives into the dynamic political geography of Tokugawa Japan, identifying every “village in space” and “track[ing] its history through the early modern period.”