PositiveThe Asian Review of BooksAround the silent sovereign revolves a constellation of colorful personalities. They are impulsive, talkative, intriguers, rebels. Bellaigue brings them to life by using the archives of the Serenissima, Venice, whose diplomats were as eager to impress their readers as modern journalists publishing clickbait, reporting gory executions and gorgeous receptions ... Bellaigue’s storytelling is an antidote to histories that follow too doggedly a central theme. His history does not move forward like a river rushing out of the Alps, but meanders and eddies across a flat plain. Sometimes his waters are muddy indeed, as when he explains the obscure intrigues of Hungarian politics. The current that moves the reader forward is a meditation on power, trust, envy. Suleyman frequently consults the 11th-century statesman Nizam ul-Mulk on how princes should behave to keep their thrones, an art in which he is ultimately successful. Aspiring alpha males and females would do well to keep the Nizam’s or Bellaigue’s books on their bedside tables.
Anthony Sattin
MixedAsian Review of BooksA kind of rhapsody on how this aspect of human nature has contributed as much, if not more, to civilization, than the tillers of the soil ... Sattin’s argument for the importance of the nomad in history is on strongest grounds when he discusses the Mongol Empire and its successors ... His description of Tamerlane’s career as nomad turned world conqueror is erudite and evocative. The concept of nomadism is then stretched, like a gossamer over a number of other historical actors, less convincingly, including the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals. Here he exaggerates in suggesting that these dynasties were in any meaningful way nomadic ... With his erudition and winning style, Sattin is not deterred by anachronisms and over-generous generalizations. He will be walking off into the mountains with shepherds or itinerant peddlers and swapping his stories for theirs. This book deserves to be read as an ode to mobility, and not a book of history or anthropology.
Marc David Baer
MixedAsian Review of BooksBaer’s enthusiasm for the empire as a cosmopolitan, European-oriented and tolerant state will surprise some readers. He is right to argue that the Ottomans were more tolerant than the Europeans, who expelled the Muslims from Spain and instituted the Inquisition to persecute the forcibly converted Jews. I would argue this is not a unique feature of Ottoman genius, but a tradition of Muslim statecraft ... We can agree that the Ottomans’ practiced tolerance, but see it as no more than realpolitik ... It’s unfortunate that a work based on painstaking and original research should contain mistakes that could have been easily caught by a friendly re-reader ... This reviewer found that the author’s focus on the use and abuse of people’s private parts is overused as a means of juicing up the narrative. We learn, for example, that antinomian dervishes practiced intimate body piercing. Did I need to know? On the other hand, there is a frank discussion of Ottoman sexuality that will enlighten many readers, without demonstrating, as Baer claims, a greater commonality with Europe. That is, in the end, my biggest caveat about Baer’s thesis. By humanizing the Ottomans, he makes them not more European, but simply more universal.
Virginia Postrel
PositiveAsian Review of BooksEach of the book’s chapters is strung on the warp fabric production. Chapter One treats fibers, like cotton, silk and wool; chapter two, thread, chapter three, cloth; wrapping up with the market and the consumer. Sometimes the author loses the thread, so to speak, as when she details the emergence of bills of discount and the origins of Lehman Brothers as underpinning the market for fabrics. Since fabrics were the biggest commercial items of trade and industry for centuries, it is not surprising to see the association with modern credit and money, but it doesn’t tell us anything new. Postrel is best at teasing out the whimsy of an archaeologist who decides to make her own Tyrian purple dye from the murex mollusk or the mathematician who reads Euclid’s Mathematica as a guide to weaving ... Each of the book’s chapters is strung on the warp fabric production. Chapter One treats fibers, like cotton, silk and wool; chapter two, thread, chapter three, cloth; wrapping up with the market and the consumer. Sometimes the author loses the thread, so to speak, as when she details the emergence of bills of discount and the origins of Lehman Brothers as underpinning the market for fabrics. Since fabrics were the biggest commercial items of trade and industry for centuries, it is not surprising to see the association with modern credit and money, but it doesn’t tell us anything new. Postrel is best at teasing out the whimsy of an archaeologist who decides to make her own Tyrian purple dye from the murex mollusk or the mathematician who reads Euclid’s Mathematica as a guide to weaving.
Amy Stanley
RaveAsian Review of Books\'Historians\', wrote Simon Schama, \'are painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,\' but Amy Stanley succeeds as well as anyone could hope in her masterfully told and painstakingly researched evocation of an ordinary Japanese woman’s life in Edo on the eve of the opening of Japan ... This is very much the portrait of a woman. Stanley deals with the disappointments and tragedies of Tsuneno’s life with a delicate touch that channels the understanding of a daughter, a sister, a mother ... Having laid out the psychological and familial framework for her story, Stanley then weaves through the narrative threads from the rich trove of memoirs, annals and artefacts that the boisterous Edo period left behind. From this we hear the sounds of the samurai tramping through the city, smell the eels grilling in tiny food stands, see the colour of posters for Kabuki performances ... Stranger in the Shogun’s City is the most evocative book this review has read about Japan since The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris.
