Customer Reviews

When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the "Riches of the "East"

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was really a fun read - like travel literature plus. I never before thought about what Asia was like when Europe was in the Dark Ages. It's based on the actual journals of people who traveled during that time. There are lots of exotic places, like Bukhara and Samarkand, but I never felt lost. There are good maps and there always seemed to be a paragraph of explanation just when I needed it. The book kept coming back to themes, like common court ceremony or the shared fears of pirates. . A lot of the travelers had friends spread across much of Asia. My favorite chapter was on a man named Ibn Battuta. He went all the way from Morocco to China telling stories and bringing news to courts along the way and made it back to Morocco. It's a readable sized book, a little over 200 pages, and at the end I felt as if I'd been right along with these travelers, felt the heat and cold, and learned a lot about their world.

This is a brilliantly innovative and highly readable account of the "world" that stretched from the Middle East to East Asia for a millenium before Europe began to sail the globe. Describing a series of contrasting individuals who travelled great distances across kingdoms and cultures, the author takes us vividly through a fascinating kaleidoscope of landscapes, economies, and spiritual terrains as a truly cosmopolitan economy evolved. This book reminds us that Europe was peripheral to world history for many centuries, far from the great civilizations. Providing a fresh balance to Eurocentric assumptions about global history, it will be equally delightful as a classroom textbook and a weekend companion for general readers.

Reading this book opened my eyes to a prejudice that I never knew I had. I love stories about explorers - Marco Polo, Lewis & Clark, Harrison Forman, etc., but I never thought about the Asian explorers whose trips spread culture throughout the known world. Stewart Gordon passionately recounts their stories and their contributions to civilization in this wonderful collection of narratives of great Asian travelers who represented the forefront of learning. It is a good lesson to learn these days when, after 500 years, the Asian world is again emerging as the center of activity. I recommend this book to anyone looking for new stories of travel and adventure. I was not familiar with any of the figures whose stories are told in the book and now realize that their contributions were every bit as important as the explorers we are taught to revere in the West.

Stewart Gordon's book reminds us that while Europe was huddling under the medieval cloak known as the "Dark Ages," Asia was quite the opposite - vast and vibrant and connected by trade routes over land and sea.

He tells this millennium-long story through a series of vignettes drawn from diaries, biographies, letters, and even a shipwreck. Some are from China looking west, others from Muslim lands looking east, and some from the wilds of central Asia. They are tales of individuals at specific times and places, but Gordon does a nice job of tying them to larger themes - customs, currencies, religions, and the financial and family networks that underlay long-distance trade.

When Asia Was the World is neither a very long nor a very challenging read, but it packs a lot of information. Gordon is a clear writer, though not an inspired one. There is a useful annotated bibliography and each chapter contains a helpful map.

I will give it four stars: good concept, well executed, but not quite compelling.

Stewart Gordon is an artist (wood sculpture, automata) and historian whose previous books have been informed by a vision and concern for cross-cultural relations (Robes and Honor; Marathas, Marauders and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India). When Asia Was the World continues this exploration on two levels, about Asia during the years 500-1500 CE, and about the voyagers who left us records of these times. The subjects may be obscure (to many of us) but Gordon's narratives have a clarity and brilliance appropriate to the colors of the arts and materials they often describe. An excellent book to read before or on a trip - leave it as a gift with your host.

Like most people brought up in the American public school system my knowledge of Asian history consisted of "China invented noodles and gunpowder and then Europe took over and some Chinese guys thought that their kung ku was so good that bullets couldn't hurt them". When I got older I learned that there was a LOT more to it than that but really- it was all pretty vague. Stewart Gordon's book is an excellent remedy to this problem. The scope is broad (500-1500CE!) but the book never feels sketchy. Gordon arranges it around 8 travelers accounts and so he takes us from one end of Asia to the other following real people on their *real* adventures. WOW!

The extensive notes in the back provide lots of pointers to further reading if you're inspired to hunt up any of the original accounts or the hard-core scholarship.

A great book and one I'm recommending to friends.

This book is light but at the same time informative. It will provide anyone with snapshots of how traveling in Asia was in the Middle Ages , by using as a thread the life and adventures of several (relatively) well known travellers (e.g., buddhist monk Xuanzang, philosopher Ibn Sina, globetrotter Ibn Battuta or Mongol conqueror Babur). Then, by describing their whereabouts, Gordon colourfully describes Asiatic courts and commerce in that period. It is more anecdotal than other narratives but far easier to read.

Other books that I would reccommend in this line would be:
1) "Marco Polo's travels"; and
2) "The Adventures of Ibn Battuta" by Ross Dunn.

I am a history teacher at the high school level. I really enjoyed this book both as a tool to better educate myself, and as a source of excerpts to utilize in class with my students. I have used various excerpts with my students to examine the variety and complexity of trade and social connections throughout parts of the Asian world historically. It is very good for this purpose, and I would highly recommned it to anyone with an interest in history, or anyone that is a history teacher.

There's very little question that the teaching of history in our country has been basically Eurocentric for many years, at least when I was in school. I note that now my granddaughters are being given at least some introduction to African and Asian history, which I feel is a start. This book retells several stories that were written as memoirs by a few travellers and rulers in the area of Asia from approximately 600 to 1500. There are tales of religion, trade, warfare, customs and the like, and the author's tone keeps the book from being boring. Reading this, one receives quite an education in Asia and the Middle East, even if the brevity of the work can't do full justice to the topic. As an introduction to that era and those places this is excellent, and hopefully will encourage readers to seek out more fully realized works on the same subjects.

Before Marco Polo and other noted world explorers there was cultural and commercial trade around the world: Asia had its own explorers, traders and travelers who crossed the globe to exchange ideas. Research scholar Stewart Gordon has traveled the world to examine original texts in science, history, philosophy and sociology to create WHEN ASIA WAS THE WORLD, and here provides an Asian focus unique in the world of Western focuses on exploration. His stories of travelers and explorers of Asia provides a compelling, lively account perfect not just for high school and college collections, but for general-interest lending libraries strong in history and culture, especially Asian history.