Penang and its networks of knowledge is an important study belonging to a broader swell of new scholarship aiming to restore Penang to prominence as a subject of historical analysis. The island-state is — as co-editor Peter Zabielskis identifies — a site of ‘engaging narratives of exposition and explanation, complete with complex tensions and conflicts, [and] a richness of material and linguistic cultures’ (p. 11). Bringing together an interdisciplinary crew of researchers, this excellent study of the Pearl of the Orient is anchored in the discourse surrounding networks that has become de rigueur in analyses of (post)colonial port-cities. The volume spans Penang's foundations as a colonial city in 1786 to its contemporary challenges as a site of multiple heritages. Each chapter demonstrates how Penang serves as microcosm for colonial, imperial, and global entanglements while still retaining its own unique identity. In their journey to recover Penang's relationship with its region, the authors draw from a dazzling array of underused sources including private correspondences, missionary records, Islamic manuscripts, travelogues, art, newspapers, ethnographic interviews, and even the city itself.

In her opening chapter, Barbara Watson Andaya explores Penang's origins through the letters of fourteen-year-old country trader John Adolphus Pope. She demonstrates how Pope's correspondence with his friend George represent a unique perspective into British efforts at gathering information — about people and places as well as flora and fauna — as part of a broader ‘orientalist exercise’ of knowledge production about Asia (p. 41). Anthony Reid's follow-up provides an intriguing analysis of the Collège Générale of the French Catholic Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, which trained hundreds of indigenous missionaries from as far afield as China, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Korea, Laos, Japan, India, Borneo, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Complementing Reid's work, Jean DeBernardi investigates evangelical Christians in the Brethren movement in chapter 3, demonstrating how they successfully recruited Asian and European followers through vernacular street preaching in Malay, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, and English as well as leveraging emerging technologies of transportation and communication to proselytise across the Indian Ocean.

Maintaining the focus on religious networks of knowledge, Annabel Teh Gallop provides a fascinating study in chapter 4 of two illuminated Islamic manuscripts from Penang — a copy of the Taj al-Salatin held at the British Library and the Merican Family Qu'ran kept in the Penang State Museum — with a unique aesthetic style that diverges from other Southeast Asian illuminated manuscripts. Outlining how both the Taj al-Salatin and Qu'ran incorporate visual features reminiscent of Ottoman and Persian manuscripts — decorative flourishes, distinct colour palettes, and Farsi inscriptions — Gallop provides a new way of viewing Penang's entanglements with the broader Islamic world through the intersection of art and religion. In chapter 5, Christina Skott explores the development of British tropes of Penang as picturesque and sublime and the influence of romanticism in the creation of the stereotype of the lazy Malay. As Skott demonstrates, these ideas were inextricably linked to a discourse of ‘civilisation’, with the physical landscape viewed in terms of its economic potential and Malays seen as requiring tutelage from the British to be restored to greatness.

In the following chapter, Geoff Wade provides an overview of the Prince of Wales Island Gazette — Southeast Asia's first newspaper — using vignettes from its pages to make the case that the newspaper serves as a rich, untapped seam of knowledge about Penang's first half-century. Through an analysis of some of its advertisements, government notices, noteworthy news items, business bulletins, and social and entertainment pages, Wade demonstrates how the Gazette can serve as a barometer for the circulation of goods, ideas, and people in Penang. Carrying on with the theme of under-utilised sources, Anoma Pieris ‘reads’ the city itself to recover Penang's overlooked urban history in chapter 7. Weaving together an analysis of Penang's origins as a penal colony with an innovative examination of the Penang Riots of 1867, Pieris highlights how inter-ethnic alliances of Malays, Chinese, and Indians challenged spatial divisions drawn up by the colonial administration on the basis of ethnicity and imbued Penang's urban spaces with ‘new social and cultural meanings’ (p. 218).

Chapters 8 and 9 return to the press, exploring how newspapers helped forge and reinforce transcendent and cosmopolitan identities. In the former, Khoo Salma Nasution examines how a pan-Islamic political consciousness emerged among Indian Muslims through their exposure to Penang's vibrant print culture. As Nasution argues, beyond being consumers of the press, Indian Muslims — alongside Peranakan Jawi — played a vital role in the development of Tamil and Malay vernacular newspapers, which had a global impact through its encouragement of Islamic solidarity within the ummah (community). Su Lin Lewis’ study of the Straits Echo during the interwar period presents an enthralling account of how the global phenomenon of the ‘Modern Girl’ expressed itself in Penang. Lewis makes the case that as a port-city with a multi-ethnic and polyglot population, Penang was particularly well-placed to develop and perpetuate a sense of cosmopolitan modernity as represented by the Modern Girl. As Lewis convincingly argues, the Modern Girl serves as an outgrowth of ‘the entanglement of many old cultural roots and new, creative visions of the future’ that has long characterised Penang (p. 287).

Striking a more contemporary note, the final two chapters by Judith Nagata and Peter Zabielskis are part of an evolving discourse about the inherent tensions between modernisation and heritage. Nagata and Zabielskis provide detailed ethnographic studies of the history of waqf (Muslim land endowed for charitable use), their physical and social legacies, how their residents are contending with the encroachment of capitalist development, and how the waqf themselves can act as an alternative to the homogenising force of high-rise urbanisation. Taken together, the eleven chapters of Penang and its networks of knowledge represent much-needed interventions into the history of an oft-neglected node for regional, imperial, and global networks of knowledge. More than that, however, they also contain valuable insights into how historical examples of diverse forms of engagement within and across boundaries of ethnicity, gender, class, and religion can teach us how to navigate a world increasingly fractured by such divisions.