Peter Frankopan

‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil Amrith at the start of his melancholic new book, ‘I struggled to connect the scene before me.’ While the river that flows through Bangkok looked idyllic, ‘crowded with noisy pleasure boats festooned with lights’, Amrith was struck by the realisation that half of the city ‘could be underwater by the end of this century’. This thought was the latest stage in a process that he says has taken him time to work out: ‘I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place.

‘A fact that confounds me now when I think back on it,’ writes the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh at the start of this expansive and thoughtful book, ‘is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness.’ There were many reasons for this, he says. The war between India and China in 1962 might have played a part, along with the complex relationship between the two countries since then; but also the way that ‘an inner barrier’ has been ‘implanted in the minds’ of many around the world – one that blocks out China but allows in the ‘language, clothing, sport, material objects and art of the West’. Smoke and Ashes is a lovely blend of historical writing, travelogue and personal reflection stemming from what the author calls his ‘epiphany’.

It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits over wine or ‘the heavy smell of boiled cabbage, state beer and a soapy whiff of overripe watermelons’. For others, it is an exotic world of ‘small nations’ east of Germany, where one has to wait for the end of the sentence to learn the operative verb: a place of ‘baffling’ languages ‘written with an abundance of consonants, odd diacritical marks and, in places, even a different alphabet’. Take a step back, and Central Europe takes centre stage.

‘Asia is one’, wrote Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese art historian, at the start of his The Ideals of the East in 1901. Nile Green disagrees in this sparky and impressive book. There is no reason why ‘Buddhism, Confucianism or Shinto should be more intelligible to a “fellow Asian” from the Middle East or India than to a European’. For one thing, ‘Asia’ is home to a vast number of language groups, including ‘Sino-Tibetan and Turkic, Indo-European and Semitic, Dravidian and Japonic, Austroasiatic, and others’, as well as ‘to a far wider variety of writing systems than Europe, Africa and the Americas combined’. So how and why, then, did the clumsy label come into being and stick? The blame, argues Green, lies with Europeans.

It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking book about the confrontation between the empires of Rome and Persia that began at the start of the 7th century and lasted the best part of three decades; it was not even a war with ambitious goals. The ‘last great war of antiquity’ started when the Shah of Persia, Khusro II, decided that the assassination of an unpopular emperor in a palace coup in Constantinople gave him the excuse and the window he needed to try to put right a punitive settlement that had been imposed on Persia a decade earlier.

The Caucasus, a popular saying goes, is a ‘mountain of tongues’. Describing this region requires a strong constitution, determination and brilliance because, as Christoph Baumer writes in this magnificent book, ‘in many ways, the Caucasus region is a puzzle’. That is something of an understatement. For one thing, the mountains usually referred to as the Caucasus are in fact part of two geologically distinct ranges: the Greater Caucasus that is around 100 kilometres wide and ten times the length, spans the land between the Black and Caspian Seas and acts as a climatic valve, blocking off like a plug cold Arctic air from passing south; and the Lesser Caucasus, that is considerably lower, easier to pass and about half the length of the range to the north.

Kazakhstan, say signs by the side of the road in this vast Central Asian country, is ‘a land of unity and accord’. Few outside pay a great deal of attention to a state that is almost as large as Europe, and home to eye-popping natural resources, chiefly — but not only — oil. One who does is Joanna Lillis, who used to work in Russia and then for the BBC Monitoring Service in neighbouring Uzbekistan, and knows the region as well as anyone. Her book, Dark Shadows, is astute, refreshing and revelatory; it is also surprisingly tender, showing not only her affection but her care in trying to make sense of a country that needs to be understood warts and all.

China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world’. It was an obvious exemplar for a man who was trying to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In the late 18th century, when Smith published his seminal work, Britain had not only already begun to build an empire; it was about to learn from the experience of losing parts of it too, as the colonies in North America detached and went their own way. Despite the shock of the US Declaration of Independence — in the very same year that The Wealth of Nations was published — it was Asia that was much more important, lucrative and interesting than the Americas to the British.