Beyond cultural parochialism

A major personal peeve of mine is that the past few centuries of Western colonialism have overshadowed so much that moderns are often unequipped to understand the vast tapestry of human historical and geographical diversity. If you are a modern Indian or Chinese or African person you know your own culture and its history…and its relationship to the modern West. This is a shadow of a bygone age which is down in its terminal stage.

Presuming that the audience of this weblog is mostly South Asian, here are some very broad surveys which I think the audience might find interesting:

– The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian

– China: A History

– Africa: A Biography of the Continent

– The Russian Moment in World History

– Strange Parallels…Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830

– History of Japan

– A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC

– When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty

– The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

– A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

– Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788

If anyone can recommend a good survey of Latin American history, I’m game.

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Razib Khan

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Razib Khan

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AnAn

8 years ago

Could you write your perspectives on some of these books?

Most people in almost every country are very parochial. I have always found this very puzzling since I have always thought in very global terms since a young age (maybe because I read so many books). Most people are also not interested in interdisciplinary perspectives (combining deep understanding in multiple different disciplines of study).

girmit

Reply to AnAn

Anan, if you check out Razib’s main blog, he does a lot of book reviews, including a number of the above mentioned.

Reply to girmit

Thanks girmit. Will try to find Razib’s reviews of these books.

Kabir

Thanks for this post, Razib.

Of the books you have mentioned, I have read “The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean” which I found very interesting. I was quite fascinated by Nice, Genoa and all of that.

bharata bharatavanshi

I am unable to understand your argument of possibility of caste like structure in IVC or it pre originating vedic groups. What is the evidence and what confidence do you have that the evidence will continue to hold up in future as well. A separate article on this speculation if you please. It just seems unnecessary speculation to me. speculation that might drive another wild goose chase. Thank you.

albert magnus

It seems like Charles C. Mann’s 1491 (and 1493) might fit on this list.

BP Round-Up / Open Thread – Brown Pundits

25 days ago

[…] Beyond cultural parochialism: Razib tells us what to read, which is a good thing because he reads alot. I don’t know how he does it! […]