Su Fang Ng's Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia takes an interesting approach to the reception of Alexander the Great's Nachleben (afterlife). Few historical figures can claim such far-reaching influence as the Macedonian conqueror. From biblical legends to World War II generals, from Islamic kingship to modern European politics, Alexander looms large over all our histories. Ng considers how tales of Alexander passed through economic and political networks, joining up different regions, permitting linkages through a common, imagined “heritage.” Britain and Southeast Asia come under scrutiny—areas that had the least, if any, actual contact with Alexander's conquest. Ng demonstrates how “classical presences in both regions shaped ideas of empire, of trade, and of contact with foreigners,” establishing “supra-local connections,” with a literary dimension derived from historical and fictionalized accounts (2–3). These tales, Ng argues, produced “parallel discourses” of an imagined, “universal” empire that shaped attitudes of Western leaders and Asian sultans. She examines the early age of exploration when Alexander's legacy became especially associated with trade, when European travelers in Asia regarded themselves as his successors in the East. Utilizing the work of Pierre Briant, Ng illustrates how Enlightenment era authors like Montesquieu emphasized Alexander's commercial legacy, opening up the East to trade, forming part of the justification and mode of discourse of Western imperialism. His legacy also provided common ground for communication whereby Alexander's reimagined presence “functioned as a transcultural icon through which various cultures mediated their relationship to the foreign” (4). Ng cites Malay manuscripts in British libraries containing retellings of Alexander's exploits. A lively seventeenth-century trade in documents illustrates how literary journeys paralleled trade routes, intertwining with commerce, connecting the far-flung regions of Southeast Asia and Western Europe through a shared legacy. Works like the Malay Alexander romance, partaking of the wider romance tradition, were recommended by eighteenth-century grammarians to aid Westerners in learning the language, while the Eastern romance tradition influenced how those cultures communicated with the West. Alexander's literary empire thus provided some perceived common ground between disparate cultures, allowing wider cultural contact and trade.

The Roman Empire's successors carried the Alexander paradigm further afield. Already integrated into Persian and other Eastern traditions, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and Egypt propagated the Alexander brand among their subjects. Fifteenth-century Portuguese trade infringed upon Africa, and the Ottomans responded by reasserting their dominance in this region and the Indian Ocean. Drawing the scholarship of Briant and Vincent Barletta, Ng illustrates how the Alexander romance accompanied them. In its transmission to the Malay culture, a central focus of this treatise, the romance metamorphosed into a “conversion narrative” (81). An Islamic Alexander thereby invaded Southeast Asia, changing hearts and minds. From affairs in the East to Britain, the Scottish Buik of King Alexander, derived from a recension of the Alexander romance, profoundly influenced the Stuarts. This had implications at home and abroad, with the Scots using it as a means of self-definition vs. the English as well as eventually exerting an impact on the whole British Empire when the Stuarts succeeded the Tudors. Ng quotes David Armitage, who argued that the “vernacular language of British imperial ideology—of ‘Great Britain,’ ‘empire’ and ‘colony’—was forged in the context of Anglo-Scottish relations in the 1540s,” which developed through the Stuart reception of Alexander (121). British and European trade in the seventeenth century with the Islamic world would be defined through their shared reception of his legacy.

Chapters are devoted to Shakespeare's, Marlowe's, and Milton's incorporation of Alexander tropes, how these both reflected and influenced European perceptions of Islam. Ng traces the medieval roots of such ideas that play out in Hamlet's reflections on governance, replete with Alexandrian allusions. This interpretation connected with the Malay receptions yielding a shared, common deployment of the Alexander theme in order to figure “intercultural relations arising from trade” (209). As commerce increased between Europe and the East Indies in the early modern era, the image of Alexander underwent further transformations, from sovereign and conqueror to “a new literary type, the mercantile protagonist” (210). A notable omission, however, in her discussion of literary influences is John Lyly. His play Campaspe is probably based on an apocryphal tale of Alexander, his mistress Campaspe, and court painter Apelles, from Pliny. Lyly deployed it, performed before court and queen, to influence Elizabeth I's policies against Spain. This would have fit well into the discussion of imperialism, though Lyly is not well known today, and his absence from Ng's book is perhaps pardonable.

She discusses how the seventeenth-century Acehnese culture on Sumatra had many imitatores Alexandri. Their sultans adopted qualities associated with the Macedonian as they had received him through literary traditions permeating Southeast Asia. She cites an apt example of a 1615 letter from Sultan Iskander Muda to King James I refusing British trade in Sumatra. Sultan Iskander is a Malay imitator whose very name derives out of the Islamic Alexander (Iskander) tradition. His letter follows the literary phraseology of Alexander letters from the Hikayat Iskander Zulkarnain, a Malay epic relating the fictional exploits of King Iskandar Zulkarnain, mentioned in the Quran (18:82–100), and generally considered an Islamic reception of Alexander. Iskandar Zulkarnain was claimed as a direct forebear of the Minangkabau kingdoms of Sumatra, much as the Scottish royal dynasties also claimed similar links with Alexander, with several Scottish kings bearing that famous name. It is as if the receptions of Alexander were communing with one another through their fictional afterlives across vast distances and diverse cultures.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch trade established enclaves throughout Southeast Asia, and trade activities continued to be linked with receptions of Alexander. The apocryphal story (from Augustine) of Alexander and the pirate figured into the thematic Zeitgeist of that age. Milton's views on trade and the decadence of Eastern despotism, connected with Alexander's conquest, are discussed in the final chapters of the book. Receptions of Alexander were deployed for multiple ends, both advancing colonial ambitions, trade, and exploration and figuring into moral discourses. Milton emphasized Augustine's point that robbers who become emperors were still, in essence, no better than robbers. Ng concludes that Alexander, claimed by East and West for different reasons, united these worlds through his literary empire. The Alexander of early modernity is a mélange, “a creature of many faces” (341). This “integration” of cultures that it promoted was not an entirely peaceful one, as students of colonialism well know; and, though Alexander was in some sense universal, he was also particular to each society that adopted him (ibid.).

On the whole, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia is a superb piece of scholarship, a welcome addition to reception studies of Alexander the Great. It delves into areas that such works have previously noted but never before penetrated to such depths. Ng's research is extensive, taking full advantage of available material produced by a wealth of scholars. She is well acquainted with that scholarship, adroitly utilizing it. The book will serve as a useful tool for students and professional researchers interested in the legacy of Alexander along with colonialism, empire, and the history of trade between East and West. Ng has demonstrated how significantly Alexander the Great's reception came to dominate and influence principal movers of early modern history.