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The book traces two centuries old history of plantations in Sri Lanka from its inception in the early 19th century to the present. In doing so the book highlights the complex interrelationship between power and class, gender and ethnic hierarchies. The authors are well known social scientists and have already made a mark as perceptive writers on Sri Lankan history and politics. Based on their rich experience, coupled with extensive use of archival and secondary sources and enriched by personal interviews with key players the book is an invaluable contribution to Sri Lankan history and politics.

Tabish Khair’s The New Xenophobia is a bold effort to examine an increasingly pressing universal phenomenon, which the world has been ignoring as being part of the past. The importance of this work is that it seeks to place what it terms as ‘New’ in the perspective of what was the old xenophobia within the author’s broad concept that ‘Power refers to any imposition, the physical or not, of one consciousness upon another’ approvingly quoting Emmanuel Levinas, the French Lithuanian 20th century philosopher, on the nature of violence beyond the physical.

India’, according to Bharat Karnad, ‘is a latter day Hanuman, potentially powerful, but dwarfed by doubts, unsure of its strengths, [and] weighed down by a sense of its own weakness.’ The Monkey God in the Ramayana was able to at least shakeoff his misgivings and triumph when it mattered. For Karnad, there is little evidence that India can do the same. It is a nation, as his scathing critique suggests, which ‘has been down for so long in history’ that bursts of recognition from the outside are treated unevenly as a mark of achievement.

Billed as a ‘new history of the world’, this ambitious attempt at chronicling a version of world history from the perspective of the Eurasian Trade Routes is a great text. Peter Frankopan prefaces the book by condemning the excessively Eurocentric approach to traditional history writing as an explanation for this work. Outlining his dissatisfaction with the way history was taught, he talks about how as a child he had a world map in his bedroom.

Ronojoy Sen’s work suggests that the history of sports in India is much more than mere pastime and play. A study of the chequered history of sport would for Sen reveal much about the nature of Indian society, its values, ethics, aspirations, fissures, and very importantly the dynamics of power play. As Sen’s book succinctly portrays, the saga of sports in India has been inextricably bound with issues of class, identity mobility and patronage.

Bahram Modi, the Parsi merchant in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, turns to his associate in the last few pages of the novel and remarks poignantly, ‘When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible?’ The urge to be remembered has been a recurring motive in history, though a privilege limited to very few.