In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and Ukraine, the wide sweep of the Eurasian steppe, the far shores of the Caspian Sea, the incense and rituals of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the high walls and towers of the city of Constantinople. Yet for many Viking raiders, traders and settlers, it was the road to the East that beckoned.

These Viking adventurers founded the Norse–Slavic dynasties of the Rus, which are entangled in the bitterly contested origin myths of Russia and Ukraine. The Rus were the first community in the region to convert to Christianity – in its Eastern Orthodox form – and so they are at the heart of the concept of ‘Holy Russia’. Russian rulers have frequently referenced these Norse origins when trying to enhance their power and secure control over the Ukrainian lands, most recently demonstrated by Vladimir Putin as his justification for seizing Crimea and invading Ukraine.

In Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine (BiteBack Publishing, 2025), historian Martyn Whittock explores the important but often misunderstood and manipulated role played by the Vikings in the origins of Russian power, the deadly consequences of which we are still living with today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely band of maverick soldiers, diplomats and spies to the chaotic region around the Caspian Sea. Their mission: to block the advance of the Turks, to hold back the rising Bolsheviks and prevent a Turkish-inspired jihad overwhelming India, and to secure the vital supply of oil from Baku.
It was an almost impossible task, but Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Nick Higham tells the gripping stories of the remarkable and enterprising characters at the centre of it all, who would be tested to the limit. There was Lionel Dunsterville, the inspiration for Kipling's Stalky and commander of the expedition; Ranald MacDonell, a Scottish aristocrat and diplomat who smuggled millions of roubles for the war effort; Edward Noel, a seemingly indestructible soldier who was held hostage for sixty-five days in horrific conditions; Toby Rawlinson, the younger brother of one of Britain's most senior generals and a brilliant inventor; and Reginald Teague-Jones, a spy who printed his own currency and would eventually emerge as an author at the age of ninety-nine.
Drawing on personal diaries, memoirs and once-secret government archives, Mavericks brings to life a cast of eccentric heroes who survived against all odds to tell their extraordinary tales. This is a propulsive story of boldness and intrigue, set in a forgotten corner of the Great War where the rules were made to be broken.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This podcast episode by Alevtina Solovyeva traces Central Asia as the enduring crossroads “between empires,” where caravan routes outlast the borders drawn over them. It opens with the Silk Roads: trade as the region’s original superpower – moving goods, ideas, and identities. The narrative then tracks how Qing–Russian rivalry and the 19th century “Great Game” layered governors, railways, and taxes onto steppe and peoples, then the Soviet period engineered republics, industries, and pipelines while China watched, split, and later recalibrated. Independence for the five Central Asian states after 1991 reset the board: Russia remained the familiar security habit; China re-entered with capital and corridors, culminating in the Belt and Road. Multi-vector tendencies took hold as Turkey, Iran, Japan, Korea, the U.S., and the EU pressed in. The 2022, start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, accelerated internal and external processes concerning Central Asia as a strategic area, as well as a Russia-China partner-rivalry across energy, transport, finance, and soft power. Four platforms – SCO, EAEU, BRICS, and BRI – showcase both cooperation and competition, with BRI as the physical layer that forces choices on routes, rules, and control. Looking to 2025-2030, three stress tests loom: the terms of Power of Siberia-2, corridor races (CKU vs. Kazakh/Middle Corridor routes), and “security creep.” Central Asia has become a focal arena for international actors amid deep shifts in power balances and rules. It is a fast-moving environment with open-ended trajectories, multiple internal and external agents and situational theatres where interests intersect.

Dr. Alevtina Solovyeva is the Head of the Centre for Oriental Studies and Mongolian Research Laboratory at the University of Tartu. She specializes in Asian studies, Chinese and Mongolian studies, folklore studies, historical and social anthropology, and social sciences.

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Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the book demonstrates how systematic warfare, driven by imperial ambitions, shaped Urartian and Assyrian territories, creating symbolically and materially powerful landscapes.

Dr. Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple.

Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today.

Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports, failure to invest and failure to consume enough have condemned not only the Russian Federation, but Eurasia more broadly, to stagnation and conflict. Only time will tell if Russia and its neighbours can escape the zero-sum politics of austerity in a world of rapidly evolving geopolitical, energy and climate crises.

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In Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021), Adeeb Khalid presents a comprehensive narrative of modern Central Asian history based on original research and an exhaustive synthesis of recent scholarship. 

Khalid explores how the modern forces of empire, revolution, and communism (and its collapse) have shaped both the "Russian" and "Chinese" parts of Central Asia from the 18th century to the present. Countering portrayals of Central Asia as a remote and inaccesible land on the peripheries of modern history, the author demonstrates how the region's connectivity and its participation in global exchanges of goods and ideas shaped its developments in the modern period. Students, specialists, and non-specialists will be delighted by Khalid's ability to capture the complexity of modern Central Asian history and deliver it in a readily accessible format.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University

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In 1932, along with a group of African American activists and writers including novelist Dorothy West, Langston Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union. Veering off from the “official” trip, Hughes met Arthur Koestler before venturing on to an extended journey through the newly formed republics of Central Asia. While Hughes’ readers may be familiar with his A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, this chapbook makes available previously unpublished material drawn from Hughes’ notebooks, photographs, and collaborative translation projects with Uzbek poets. Just as his own work is being translated into Uzbek, Hughes—ever the participant—collaborates with his peer poets in the region to produce texts published in this collection for the first time. 

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile trade that’s made its mark on Central Asia, the subject of Chris Aslan’s latest book Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia (Icon Books, 2024), recently published in paperback.

Drawing on over a decade’s worth of experience in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Aslan notes that there’s really three “roads”: In addition to the famed Silk Road, there’s also the Wool Road, tied to nomads across Central Asia, and the Cotton Road, a modern-day source of economic growth–and environmental damage.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Unravelling the Silk Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the Soviet Union once showcased cotton production to visiting delegations—particularly from Muslim-majority countries—as evidence of its development model. Now, as global powers, including Russia, China, and the EU, vie for influence in the region, cotton has again become a strategic commodity—used to forge political ties, secure resources, and drive infrastructure projects. Hofman highlights local communities’ active role in shaping these developments, emphasizing that rural landscapes are not simply backdrops for a “New Great Game,” but sites where broader geopolitical forces and grassroots agency intersect. Through her long-term fieldwork, she illustrates how Tajik farmers navigate and negotiate these overlapping external interests, and in doing so, reframe Central Asia’s future amidst geopolitical tensions.

Dr. Hofman specializes in agrarian and social change in Central Asia, where she has worked since 2012. She completed post-doctoral research at Oxford's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as part of an ERC-funded project "China, law and development." In 2019, she obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands with a dissertation focused on the political economy of agrarian transformation in Tajikistan: "Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan." Her research interests span political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. In recent years, she has focused on rural labour, gender, and commodity politics. Dr. Hofman is completing a monograph based on her dissertation and post-doctoral research projects. Her research agenda for the coming years centers on the rural everyday of geopolitics, focusing on China's growing assertiveness in the global agrifood regime, shifting geographies of production, and rural labour.

Dr Irna Hofman | School of Geography and the Environment | University of Oxford

@irnahofman

Resources:

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