The Devil's Assassin

The Devil's Assassin
© 2015 Paul Fraser Collard
336 pages

 

Jack was filled with the madness. He could feel it searing through his veins. It resonated deep in his soul, every fibre of his being tingling with the insanity of galloping against an enemy horde. The regiment raced forward, their voices roaring out as the men unleashed the cheer saved for this moment. The last yards flashed past and the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry charged into action.

Following the events of The Maharajah’s General,,  in which Jack Lark’s false identity was exposed but the parties involved silenced by  war, Lark is now a freewheeling rogue, keeping his distance from those who’d recognize him and pretending to be an officer on leave, free to enjoy the pleasures of cities like Bombay.   Though away from the fighting, Jack can’t escape his deceit,  and when he’s cornered and kidnapped by a man working for a secretive British intelligence officer known as the Devil,    his career takes an interesting turn. 

It’s the eve of battle in Central Asia. The once free city of Herat has been suddenly occupied by the Shah of Persia,  in violation  of a treaty and destabilizing the balance of power  between the Empire,   Persia, and Russia in the region.   The army is being organized to go forth and show the flag,  hoping the Shah will withdraw, but what few know is that there’s a leak: someone is keeping the Persians informed  of English troop movements, and the level of fine detail means they’re in the camp itself.    Rooting out rival spies is just the work for the Devil, who drafts Jack and threatens to expose him as a fraud if he doesn’t cooperate.   Despite his acquired talent for deceit, Jack is more at home on the battlefield than he is fishing for information in cloak and dagger affairs.  

The Devil’s Assassin is both a spy novel and a war novel, and largely successful on both ends.  The running battle between the British Expeditionary Force and the Persians takes up most of the middle, as the forces engage and break off. It’s purely a cavalry affair, too, spurred on by the British need to rout the Persians before they build up their strength in the area.  Although the Devil  recruited Lark on his talent for disguise and pretense,   a gift for subterfuge doesn’t necessarily make a good counterintelligence agent – as the Devil learns when Lark runs off on the first rumor he hears and nearly beats a man to death, so disrupting the investigation to no good effect that he and the Devil are both told to leave finding the spy or the spy ring up to naval intelligence.     I’d pinned the spy fairly early on, or thought I did: there’s a little twist where the great reveal proves to still be leaving part of the story in the shadow, so while I was far closer to the target than Lark,   I wasn’t quite there.     

Looking ahead I see Lark has found himself in the midst of the Great Mutiny, the American Civil War, and...the....Wild....West?   Obviously I’ll continue to follow!  

The Emperor Far Away

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
© 2014 David Eimer
336 pages

The Emperor Far Away takes readers on a journey along China’s outer rim, beginning in the western steppes where the ‘Chinese’ are a minority,  and following it south to the Tibetan plateau, the jungles of the Golden Triangle, up to the Korean border,  and ending in the far north,  where the snow only melts for three months of the year.   Eimer’s  travels would be fascinating in themselves, given the variety of landscapes and people encountered, but also shed light on the Chinese state’s interactions with its neighbors and internal ‘others’.

The people’s republic of China, like the supposedly vanished empire whose borders it revived,  counts a multitude of peoples as its subjects.  The Chinese state recognizes at least 56 ‘minorities’ within its borders.  The Uighur people of Xinjiang, a larger group,  are more Turkic than ‘Asian’, and hold fast to their own traditions -- particularly Islam. This annoys the Party to no end,  and not only because it disdains religion.  The unity of the Chinese state and its people -- unity controlled by the party -- is a fundamental doctrine of the government.  Separatism is heresy, and since religion’s importance in creating cultural identities is rivaled only by language it remains anathema. Despite this, even its own people drift into religion:  in the section on Tibet, we meet Chinese tourists who are searching for something in the Buddhist temples,  and those near the Korean border are embracing exuberant evangelical sects like Pentecostalism.

The golden triangle is another area of interest. for here there exists narco-states that ignore national boundaries and impose their own authority on their subjects.   These are not necessarily dangerous places, provided one is vouched for. The streets are patrolled by fifteen year olds with Kalushnikovs, and the economy largely consists of growing, processing, and shipping opioids -- including little red pills that are not swallowed, but exposed to flames and the smoke inhaled.  China’s southern border encompasses both ‘model minorities’ and unyielding nomads,  the latter of whom are most common in Tibet, where they have traded camels for motorbikes.  Unlike Xinjiang and Tibet, the people in the golden triangle region are free from the fear that their culture will one day vanish: the Han are not settling en masse here as they are elsewhere.

Further north, near the border with Korea, readers encounter the ‘third’ Korea. The Yanbian prefecture of of China sits along the North Korean border, and nearly half of its population is ethnically Korean. Some are refugees from North Korea, others have drifted there more naturally -- and like American immigrants, many straddle two identities and refer to themselves as Chinese Koreans.   The region is strongly influenced by South Korean culture, and particularly its abundance of churches. Because of the fusion of North Korean refugees and South Korean culture, Eimer believes Yanbian is an image of what a unified Korea might look like. Even further north Chinese culture mixes with Russian, instead, resulting in blonde-haired blue-eyed people with Chinese names. 

If Emperor Far Away is anything, it is varied. Eimer takes us across steppes, up mountains, down rivers, into the jungle, and finally into areas so cold that the snow is only absent in the high summer.   Eimer’s interest in meeting people off the beaten track makes for interesting reading as he uses his Mandarin, a few contacts, and the curiosity of people to make travel arrangements on the fly.  Sometimes this meant breaking down in the middle of nowhere,  bypassing border checkpoints, and hitching rides on cargo ships.  Those interested in China’s  place on the world stage will no doubt be interested in sections like the one on North Korea, where it is revealed the Chinese government treats North Korea like one of its autonomous prefectures:  it doesn’t respect the Kims as leaders of a neighboring nation so much as it regards them as a necessarily evil.  Better to manage the Kims and keep their economy from dying completely than to see the place collapse and all those starving  Kim captives flood China.  The chapter on the Chinese-Russian border is a reminder of how the Chinese are haunted by the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse,   one of the reasons the Party is so ruthless about political dissent.

Emperor Far Away will easily rank as one of my more memorable and helpful reads this year.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
© 2005 Jack Weatherford
325 pages

For all the differences and tensions between the West, Iran, and China, all can agree on one thing: the Mongols were mean. Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes of Central Asia after uniting regional tribes to create an empire which spanned from the Pacific Ocean into western Russia. His armies emptied Central Asia and under a successor would crush even Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. This history of the Mongolian khanate, from the rise of Genghis to its delayed division after his death, attempts to give the Khan the same sort of hearing that other world-conquerors like Alexander and Napoleon receive, weighing the positive aspects of his realm against the negative mass-slaughter, which in the west renders Genghis as an uber-powered barbarian. Among the virtues of the Khan's realm: general religious tolerance, as Genghis supposedly regarded religion as a private and not a public thing, and liked to hold debates between clerics of competing faiths; Eurasian trade, as Mongolian rule allowed east-Asian goods to flow across to Europe; and a state that valued merit and loyalty more than caste. The author's story is helpful and convincing, but having read Lost Enlightenment only a few weeks ago, I started this extra-conscious of how much vanished under the Khan's wake in central Asia. However, I can now grudgingly admit that some of Khan's destruction had a creative aspect to it as well.

Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History
© 1942 Jawaharlal Nehru
1192 pages

In 1930,  a man who would later become the first prime minister of India was thrown in jail for a period of two years. There, removed from his family and regretful that he was forcibly absent from his daughter Indira's life, Jawaharlal Nehru labored to impart what wisdom he could through a series of letters. Beginning in October 1930 and ending in August 1933, the letters -- written in a loving and erudite pen -- cover the whole of the human story, from prehistory 'til the "present day" of 1938.   Composed from memory, notes, love for his daughter, and fervent if beleaguered hope for humanity, Glimpses is an extraordinary collection.

Of course, their author was an extraordinary man.  I first encountered him some six years ago, when I watched the film Gandhi and found him such  a sympathetic figure that I read his biography and became utterly transfixed by him. Most striking was a story his biographer, Shashi Tharoor shared -- that Nehru was so unnerved by his support in office that he wrote an anonymous letter warning people to be more skeptical -- "Nehru has all the makings of a dictator...we want no Caesars" .  Having read Glimpses, having spent upwards of a month with Nehru, reading these intimate letters to his daughter,  I can more readily believe that he wrote such a thing.   Here was a man whose deep appreciation for human history allowed him to create from memory and notes, an epic history of the world without recourse to a library -- who would, in the progress of the letters, continually connect them to one another in one fabric of historical reflections.  He was as conversant with the weaknesses and pains of the human experience as the potential and glory. 

Glimpses reminded me much of H.G.Wells' Outline of History, and this is no accident; Nehru quotes it a few times, using it as one of his sources. While Wells and Nehru share a common worldview, however -- scientifically centered and politically progressive, the two combining in a ready belief that science was on the precipice of conquering politics and economics with state socialism --  Nehru writes more broadly of the world.  Not surprisingly, India and  Southeast Asia are at the book's heart. Even when writing on other topics, like Ireland's perennial fight with England,  allusions to India are common.. These connections are partially the result of him writing as teacher to his daughter, but as he admits the letters serve him as well, allowing him to reflect and inwardly digest the lessons of history. As an actor in India's ongoing drama for independence, no doubt there are lessons he hopes to apply in practice. He also draws out these lessons in contradiction, contrasting "priest-ridden" India with  China, which he views as more rationalistic even in antiquity.  (Again with Wells, Nehru is not a fan of organized religion,  largely viewing it as nothing more than elaborate conspiracy to keep people from thinking about being poor. He does not blame it for every ill of the world, however, referring to it often being used as the mere cover for more mundane conflicts.)

What does Glimpses offer the modern reader?  For starters, Nehru's history regularly visits India, southeast Asia, and the middle east in a way that westerners at least probably do not encounter. I have never read about India colonialism, for instance, and have only encountered Persian history post-Sassanids when I  sought it out deliberately.  There is the virtue of novelty, then, but Nehru makes this all the more valuable by relentlessly chronicling areas' histories in connection with one another; they're not disjointed. Even when Nehru is forced to make sudden jumps, he offers recaps and reviews to remind his daughter, of what we discussed previously. (Considering that there are nearly two hundred letters, this is especially helpful.)     There is also Nehru's teaching style to consider. This is not an academic history, but the counsel of a parent to a child, and it is therefore tender. When he devotes four chapters to the trade crisis and Great Depression, one suspects he is writing more for his own benefit, but Nehru frequently stops chronicling to reflect. It is here when he is musing on the lessons these recollections to have teach us that Nehru sounds most loving, most wise.  He is a pleasure to listen to, to spend time with, and this is an invaluable attribute for an author.  Even if a reader disagrees with a man, it is possible to listen to him, take him seriously, and earnestly reason together with him -- if he is a sympathetic author. If he is a boor bellowing in confrontation,  there is neither wisdom nor argument to find, only courage in one's prejudices. 

Nehru is no boor -- and neither is he a bore.  While Nehru was a political figure, his history does not limit itself to politics; he frequently dwells on literature, architecture, and poetry, frequently including verses for his daughter's consideration.  (He also includes tables of trade and population statistics, because fifteen year olds eat that stuff up.) Obviously, I prefer Gandhi's strident village anarchism to any sort of state-centered scheme, but Nehru isn't an extremist. He writes of science that humility goes hand in hand with knowledge, as every discovery only creates further questions. He exhibits that humility most of the time, frequently chronicling the unintended consequences of government actions and the chronic moral frailties of man. If Nehru has a blind spot, it  is authoritarian socialism, and particularly his enamored take on Stalin. While the author is happy to accept Roosevelt's tinkering with the American economy as a kind of socialism, he declares that Hitler's tinkering with the German economy had nothing at all to do with socialism despite its "National Socialism" name.  Both were using the state to 'buffer' the economy on behalf of :"Society", so -- what's the difference?  

The big difference between Nehru's writing on Stalinism and his writing in the hundreds of pages before is that with Stalin, he is writing on the present, without benefit of hindsight.  I imagine that if Nehru were to live in our own time, he would present a view of Stalinism -- and Maoism, and Pol Potism, and Juche, and the other variations which have killed and enslaved many millions in the 20th century --  that is more critical,  his being able to see the consequences from afar.  I do not believe his love for the common man would be diminished in the least, nor would his hope. This was a man who concluded his letters in the 1930s, when Japan and Germany stood astride the world, when the democracies were ailing and impotent, when India still languished under foreign domination -- and yet he urged his daughter to not take a dismal view of the world:

For history teaches us of growth and progress and of the possibility of an infinite advance for man; and life is rich and varied, and though it has many swamps and marshes and muddy places, it has also the great sea, and the mountains, and snow, and glaciers,  and wonderful starlight nights (especially in gaol!), and the love of family and friends and the comradeship of workers in common cause, and music, and books, and the empire of ideas. So that each of us may well say: -- 'Lord, though I lived on earth, the child of earth, Yet was I fathered by the starry sky''.

Glimpses was a book, for me, six years in the waiting, and worth the waiting.  I hope to spend more time with Nehru in his Discovery of India. 

Lost Enlightenment

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps -- and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area --  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the 'silk road', though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and 'renaissance men'  -- though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions --  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters --  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes -- most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished -- for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and there's no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn't merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.


* "Central Asians" seems as clumsily artificial as "Yugoslavians" , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it's easier than "Iranian-Turkic peoples".

When Asia was the World

When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the 'Riches of the East
© 2009 Stewart Gordon
256 pages

When Asia was the World revisits, through the lives of traveling monks, traders, and warriors,  the extraordinary vistas and cultures of greater Asia from 500 to 1500 A.D.   It is not a conventional history of Asia before the ascendancy of Europe,  but allows the reader to play the part of historical tourist, tagging along with various men traveling circuitous routes from Iran to China. Some are traders, bringing to life a robust economy that nearly covered a hemisphere,  Others are pilgrims -- Buddhist monks, traveling from China to India and back, visiting every monastery they can and soaking in wisdom -- Muslims, too, made treks to learn from courts afar. These men circulated not only spiritual insight, but secular knowledge, connecting courts across the continent.  Others are Mongolian raiders,who don't bask in civilization so much as incinerate it.  This is ideal reading for someone who has a vague interest in Asia, or in global history in general, but who doesn't want to deal with an actual history book. Here, the history is absorbed through men of zeal and ambition, willing to transverse epic mountains, forbidding deserts, lush forests, and pirate-filled sea planes to see what's beyond the horizon.

Related:
The Spice Route, John Keay
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, David Bernstein

The Persians

The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran
© 2009 Homa Katouzian
452 pages

Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. It'll take a while, because there's been a lot of them.The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran is a sweeping  political history of Persia, and of the modern Islamic Republic of Iran. The author quotes a Persian proverb which asks -- six months from now, who alive? Who dead?  --  and argues that Persian history is established proof of the thin line between arbitrary authority and chaos. While technically  a survey, its density and focus on a list of rulers rather than the general trends within Persian history makes it a formidable challenge to the beginning student.

The Persians is largely modern, reaching the 20th century in less than two hundred pages.  What follows beforehand is essentially a long list of men killing men.  It’s nearly biblical – just replace “begat” with “who was killed by”, and you’ll get an idea. Oh, there’s some variety; sometimes the potentates settle for blinding one another instead of killing, which does get passé, and some Turkic and Mongolian fellows are offed, too.   Although Persia looms in the background of western history, invading Greece and lopping off Roman consuls’ heads, even marching on Jerusalem,   those episodes of strength seem to be the exception rather than the rule.   The tediously recorded butchery may actually be intentional, for the author’s main contention is that arbitrary tyrants have been the norm of Persian history, and that not until the 20th century has any work been put into creating a state beyond the will of one man, in forming a civil society that checks the ambitions of a solitary tyrant.


Even once the text moves to the 20th century and becomes more fulsomely detailed and varied, it’s still a little odd in what it dwells on. The author mentions, for instance ,that the 1953 coup has been studied in detail, and so...he bypasses it. If you didn't know that coup was executed by Britain and America to shore up their client-king’s absolute authority over the the Iranian people, too bad. If you're in the dark, you're staying there, because one minute Mossadegh is in power and the next he's in prison. Trends within Iran which bear significant fruit, like the  development of the Shiite clergy,  are barely present, or are  like the poetry buried under the mounds of executed kings.

That's not to say there isn't material of interest in here. I didn't realize that Alexander the Great is actually claimed by the Persians as one of their own, a half-Persian lord who appears in the Shahnameh, a massive work of legendary history.  The Great War and World War 2 take on a different light from Iranian eyes: because Britain and Russia spent the late 19th and early 20th century playing tug-of-war with an increasingly frayed Iran,  Iranians admired and sympathized with the Germans in both conflicts. The closer the author draws toward the present day, the more communicative he is about Iranian culture in general:  in the final hundred pages there is a good section on the evolving role of women in Iranian society, which -- while not as good during the Shah's forced modernization -- is not as bad as it was in the early 1980s.  

While there's no shortage of useful information to be mined here, beginners should probably look for something less mountainous and less dry.

Related:

• The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam,  Peter Crawford
• Iran and the United States, Hossein Mousavian

In God's Path

In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
© 2015 Robert Hoyland
303 pages

A Roman author referred to the Roman and Persian empires as the two eyes of the world -- but they didn't see the Arabs coming. In the span of a hundred years, a people from the desert wastes between Egypt and Mesopotamia had traveled from Spain to the Indus, bringing together a diversity of nations under one banner and laying waste to empires. History texts usually present a map of expansion as the sudden creation and explosive growth of Islam, but Hoyland argues that's premature.  Instead, he examines the Arab conquests as...the Arab conquests, in which Islam is first the means of an alliance between Arab tribes that allows them to sack two ailing realms, and then is the means of forging their own empire that transcended tribal bounds.  Instead of merely attributing the Arab spring into empire as one motivated by religious zeal, Hoyland examines the Arabs as actors on the historic stage, and dwells on their political skill.

The result is a history that overturns elementary assumptions.  For instance, conquest and conversion were two completely different processes: even a province absolutely integral to the nascent Islamic civilization, Persia, was not majority-Muslim until the 14th century.  (Islamic provincial governors were by no means eager to force conversion:  non-Muslims were taxed by the government.) By preserving the structure of the societies they were conquering -- relying on Christian and Persian scribes, civil officers, etc to retain their roles --  and offering completely secular benefits for joining the Arabs on their globetrotting campaigns, what began as a local city-state quickened into a global phenomenon.  Eventually, the religion of the Arabs, who had become the ruling class, would become the religion of a multitude, evolving along the way. Towards the end Hoyland dips into religious history,  reflecting on how the century of war, mixed defeats and triumphs, and the assimilation of various cultures shaped it. For instance,  he views the bar against images as a way for the Arabs to distinguish themselves against the decadent empires they had supplanted, but especially against the Romans, whose Constantinople twice defeats sieges here.   While there were some brief spots in the strictly historical narrative that rivaled Numbers for being a list of names and places without story to them, Hoyland's insightful commentary more than makes for it, This is a history that illustrates not only the beginning of the Islamic world, but shows some of the shared machinery of empires in general. For a book on conquests, there's comparatively little about the actual execution of battles; for that, a source like Crawford's War of the Three Gods might prove a complement.



Related:

• War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford
• Destiny, Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary