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“Asia: A Concise History” covers four millennia in just over 400 pages, which comes out to about ten pages per century. Concise indeed! No one could accuse Arthur Cotterell of misleading labeling.

In this impressive book, Cotterell has, in particular, managed to highlight the relationships and connections between Asia’s different regions, cultures, religions and historical developments.

Asia is hard to pin down in its entirety — and many would deny that “Asia” even exists as a coherent concept — but while the various parts of Asia can be very different, they nevertheless had great influence over each other. Cotterell captures not just the broad sweep of Asian history but also — the book’s great strength — its interlocking strands.

One can always quibble about what has been included and what omitted, but Cotterell integrates a staggering amount of material, not so much compressed as tightened and edited into an eminently readable volume.

Cotterell has a finely tuned feel for what is relevant and interesting: there were dozens of “oh, really?” moments when I felt compelled to turn to Wikipedia to read more. (Reading this book without an Internet-enabled device handy might be a frustrating experience.)

One of these passages concerned Menander, a second-century BC Greek king of Bactria (a successor state to Alexander’s short-lived empire) whose territories covered large swaths of Northern India, as far east as Bihar. Menander converted to Buddhism. I should have perhaps known about this already, but Buddhist Greeks and two-millennia-old Greek-language inscriptions on ceremonial columns in central India just seem improbable.

Another few paragraphs discussed the Kalmyks, a nomadic Mongol people who emigrated from Dzungaria in what is now Xinjiang to the Volga, settling there in the mid-seventeenth century. Something over a century later, in 1771, due to pressure from Russian settlers, their leader, Ubashi Khan, decided to move them all back whence they came, welcomed by Qing Emperor Qian Long. (Some Kalmyks remained behind, and today form the only Buddhist polity in Europe.)

Other fascinating tidbits include links between Sumerian and Greek mythology and the fact that the there was a colony of Indus Valley merchants in ancient Akkad; there are inscriptions as far back as 2200 BC testifying to sea-borne trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilization.

Cotterell has divided Asia into five regions: West Asia (roughly Turkey to Iran), South Asia (the subcontinent), East Asia (roughly China, Japan and Korea), Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

The timeline is divided into three periods: ancient (up through about the sixth century), medieval (which, somewhat unconventionally, runs up to the 19th century) and modern, in which Cotterell takes us up close to today’s headlines. Each combination, with the exception of ancient Southeast Asia, is given its own chapter.

This structure provides an easy-to-follow way of navigating the huge expanses of territory and time. But Cotterell does not stick to either the chronological or geographical limits imposed by the structure. On the contrary, he highlights connections across both time and space to illustrate themes, developments and influences.

Thus Chinese oracle bones show up in a discussion of Sumerian cuneiform and the Chinese Gen. Ban Chao in the section on ancient South Asia. Cotterell repeats this surprisingly effective technique on a smaller scale within each chapter, caring less about strict chronological order than emphasizing connections and developments.

What might sound like a broad-brush approach is in fact built up from myriad smaller brushstrokes. Cotterell is clearly attracted to the actors of history, and hardly a page goes by without an anecdote about or quotation from the historical personages in question.

Considerable attention is paid to the details of the various religious and philosophical traditions, from the Sumerian and Aryan epics to Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism. To top it off, the book is filled with well-selected black-and-white illustrations.

Cotterell’s erudition (only very) occasionally gets the better of him. Aristotle’s description of the Spartans is perhaps out of place in a section on the Qin empire. Some statements, like “The legacy of [Hammurabi’s] harsh law still informs attitudes in West Asia: turning the other cheek is not the usual response to a modern insult,” seem a bit of a stretch.

And there a few statements that are more controversial than Cotterell might have one believe. But given the breadth and scope of his achievement, this is just nitpicking. “Asia: A Concise History” is far more than just a skeleton summary of the past four millennia. On the contrary, it is an engaging and eye-opening synthesis of the world’s largest continent and the one that has the longest recorded history.

Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
Asia: A Concise History By Arthur Cotterell (John Wiley & Sons, August 2011)