The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941-1945. Gin, Ooi Keat. London: Routledge, 2011. ISBN: 9780415456630 (hbk); 9780203850541 (ebk). Because few historian-scholars and students hitherto have given much Schrift to the role of the Japanese Empire in Southeast Asia, the Occupation of both British Borneo – Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo – and Dutch Borneo in 1941 to…

Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. Ralph A. Austen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 0195337883 The desert comes alive in Ralph A. Austen’s Trans-Saharan Africa in World History, as over a thousand years of vibrant trade and commerce in trans-Saharan Africa are carefully chronicled and explained. The premise of Austen’s book asserts that from the…

Documentary: The Warriors of Qiugang, Director: Ruby Yang, Writer: Thomas Lennon. 2010, 39 minutes. See also, http://www.warriorsofqiugang.com/en/1AboutFilm.html The Warriors of Qiugang, a stark and powerful 39-minute documentary, offers an excellent introduction to some of China’s gravest issues, one that would be extremely helpful to students of modern China.  With no voiceover and little editorial mediation, this…

Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement. Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. ISBN: 0896802809 This slim volume tells the story of Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement-New Country (a.k.a. Pachakutik), the political arm of a social movement coalition formed in 1995 between the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities…

Small Town China: Rural Labor and Social Inclusion. Beatriz Carrillo. New York: Routledge, 2011. 212 pp. ISBN: 9780415600231 China is a society in the midst of transformation. One of the most visible and studied aspects of this transformation is the large scale migration of workers from the rural sections of China into the major urban centers…

Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic. By Melina Pappademos. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780807834909 Melina Pappademos’s work is intended as a corrective to the influential body of literature that explores the intersection of race, nationalism, and political mobilization in twentieth century Cuba. Seminal books by Aline Helg, Alejandro…

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World.  By Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520257504 When I lived in Mexico City in 1999-2000, one of my greatest joys was drinking agua de Jamaica (hibiscus tea) as part of my late afternoon lunch.  Given…

The Islamic World-system: a Study in Polity-market Interaction. Masudul Alam Choudhury. London: Routledge Curzon, 2004.  ISBN: 9780415613156 Masdul Alam Choudhury is a professor of economics at Sultan Qaboos University, in Oman, where a number of scholars are working on economic models that operate through a Shuratic process, in harmony with the basic principles of Islam.  The…

The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. David W. Anthony. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780691058870 A traditional, but perhaps unfair, saying is that when archaeologists find a new shard or other object they rush to the nearest history book to find out what it…

The Silk Road in World History. Xinru Liu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780195338102 This book more than more exemplifies the themes underlying Oxford University Press’ New Oxford World History series: presenting comprehensive histories of the local , the regional and the national while emphasizing their links with the global, using an inclusive narrative that…

After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection 6th edition. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. ISBN: 9780073385489 Those familiar with Davidson and Lytle’s long-time classic, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, will find that the latest, 2010 edition has significant improvements and new, user-friendly features that make an upgrade…

Technology: a World History. Daniel R. Headrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780195338218 Review of Daniel Headrick’s Technology: a World History (Oxford University Press, 2010) offers students of history a comparative and global approach to thinking about the role of technology in the development of human communities.  This is a slim book – 179 pages that…

Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities.  Edited by Jonathan H.X. Lee.  Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2010.  484 pages including text and annotated videography; accompanied with a Study Guide, 136 pages. ISBN: 9780757584176 Cambodian Americans are dark, dirty, poor, pitiful, hopeless, and helpless victims of the Khmer Rouge regime.  How often have these claims…

Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001. Ussama Makdisi. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. ISBN: 9781586488567 Ussama Makdisi’s Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.—Arab Relations: 1820-2001 provides critical insights into how the United States and the “Arab World” have encountered each other over the last two centuries, offering historicized answers to the question, “Why…

The Environment in World History. Stephen Mosley. New York: Routledge, 2010. 126pp., $29.95. ISBN: 9780415409568 In redesigning a course on modern world history at my university, I took on the rather quixotic idea to structure the class along thematic lines. I framed the course within the frameworks of globalization and its impact on commerce, sexuality, environment,…

Societies, Networks, and Transitions: A Global History. 2nd ed., by Craig A. Lockard. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 1120 pages. ISBN-10: 143908520X  ISBN-13: 9781439085202 The first thing that strikes a reader about the new edition of Craig Lockard’s world history textbook are the maps, both in a short introductory geography section on map-reading and in the text itself. …

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, by J.H. Elliott. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. 546 pp. ISBN: 0300114311 The act of comparison has a long history, as a useful tool for understanding and also as a rationale for intolerance. In his newest book, Empires of the Atlantic World,…

Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. By Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. 511 pp. + maps and illustrations. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780691152363 Although we live in a world of some two hundred nation-states – each of which flaunts its own sovereignty, claims to represent a…

The Horse in Human History. Pita Kelekna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521516594 Pita Kelekna provides a masterful statement regarding current archeological, anthropological, and historical understanding of the increasing complexity of early equestrian cultures and of the worldwide rise of importance of the horse economically, socially, and politically. In a consistently lucid and fluid narrative,…