Samir Amin has written a shelf full of books, many of which are compilations of articles he wrote. I have a shelf of them, including these compilations. Since these are compilations and not purpose written books one finds less new, and most are of Samir Amin reiterating his core messages, occasionally to new topics of […]
Tags: #Empire of Chaos #Geopolitics #Imperialism #Samir Amin
A widely read, and apparently common undergraduate reading text, on Singapore is Alvin Tan’s “Singapore: A Very Short History, From Temasek to Tomorrow”, which was first published in 2000 and updated in a 2022 edition. I picked this up in Singapore looking to understand more about the political economy, and this did not deliver much […]
Tags: #Development #History #Policy #Politics #Singapore #Strategy
Starting from a seminar in 1992, acknowledging the 450th birth anniversary of Akbar, the 1997 book “Akbar and his India” (OUP) potentially presents a unique volume on Akbar. This book may be valuable for some, but a narrow few. This edited book presents a collection of largely disconnected contributions, but does not offer an introduction, […]
Tags: #Absolute Peace #Akbar #History #India #Mughal #Peace #Tolerance
This 1997 book was written by a professor based in Bulgaria. It seeks to answer the question of why the Ottoman rule rose and fell in the Arabian Gulf. “The Ottoman Gulf – The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar”, published by Columbia University Press, is a unique contribution in that its sources are […]
Readers who have followed this blog over the years will be familiar with Samir Amin (see other posts on his books for more). First of all, shout out the publisher Pambazuka Press & Fahamu, an African non-profit publisher, led by Firoze Manji (who I had the honor to spent time with when I was at […]
I opened Joshua Mitchell’s “Tocqueville in Arabia: The Anxieties of the Democratic Age” (original 2013 by UChicago Press, reprint in 2023 with Encounter Books) skeptical. The author spent 3 years in Qatar in the mid-2000s and runs the risk of pretending to a be country expert (as many fly-in fly-out scholars have done). Fortunately, I […]