This edited volume demonstrates how historians and anthropologists are simultaneously uncanny soothsayers and lousy predictors of the future. Of course, Biao Xiang and Qiang Ma, who write about the recent flourishing of Islam in southeastern China, could not have predicted that Xinjiang Muslim “reeducation” camps and Uyghur genocide would become one of the most pressing concerns of our time. Nor could Angela Ki Che Leung, whose chapter explores south China and Vietnamese medical knowledge and competing approaches to treating epidemics and miasmas, have predicted that a global pandemic and competing containment strategies would consume the world right after publication. Similarly, David Ludden, whose chapter explores what he calls “Cowry Country,” or an “open space of mobility outside the reach of state authorities” (pp. 75–77), could not have predicted the precipitous rise and perhaps equally precipitous fall of state-evading cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The topics that appear in the pages of Asia Inside and Out are so timely, and in some ways so timeless, but by 2022, many of the interventions, while still highly instructive, seem somewhat out of place. However, there is much of timeless value in this book that scholars will appreciate.

The final installment in a three-part series whose earlier volumes explored notions of time and conceptions of place, respectively, this ambitious collection brings people, and the objects they carried with them, to the forefront of a narrative of Asia inside and out. Though ostensibly starring itinerant people, many of the chapters focus more on the objects or ideas that journeyed with the peripatetic humans. Narges Erami, for example, writes about the recent circulation of Persian rugs in Southeast Asia and the adaptability of both merchants and consumers of those rugs. Mounia Chekbah-Abudaya writes about much older traveling pilgrimage manuscripts and Qur'ans and the stories they tell us about a highly literate and interconnected Islamic world. Emma J. Teng, who follows a different type of manuscript, argues that a famous Chinese cookbook by doctor and homemaker Buwei Yang Chao represented “a work of cultural critique, unsparing in its condemnation of American wastefulness and overconsumption” (p. 289). In other chapters, David Ludden follows cowries and May Bo Ching follows Cantonese sounds through performances in different cities over the past three hundred years.

Chapters range from literature reviews, such as William W. Kelly's chapter on sports in Asia, to introductions to archival collections, like Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya's introduction to collections at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. Weaving an inter-imperial narrative that traverses “mobile merchant networks,” as well as both the surface and the “underbelly of empire” (pp. 184, 194), Seema Alavi explores how Omani princes weathered and leveraged various imperial crises to enhance their political fortunes in the mid-nineteenth century. In his equally transnational exposé, James Pickett follows several prominent refugee Begs as they navigated an evolving, and in many ways contracting, “Persian cosmopolis” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tamara Loos, in a similar vein, centers the life of the Siamese “expatriate patriot” Prisdang Chumsai in his overlooked exile in British Lanka. Together, the chapters display an admirable range of approaches and methodologies.

In addition to the many enlightening interventions that individual authors make, one of the most interesting, and unspoken, arguments of the book is its subtle decentering of the traditional political centers of Asia. While China, Japan, and India are covered in passing, the focus of most chapters lies elsewhere, such as Vietnam, Siam, Oman, Bukhara, and Bengal. While scholars of other parts of Asia, such as the Philippines, which the editors curiously describe as falling in and out of the continent (p. 2), might feel a sense of disappointment that their area of expertise is not represented, they will certainly recognize the limitations of space. Ultimately, while exploring diverse understandings of Asia in the past, the editors do not spend enough time grappling with their own role in defining Asia in this volume. The editors admirably aim to “make few claims to wholly changing existing paradigms of studying Asia” (p. 21), but they fail to see how the prestige of their home institutions and the prestige of the press that published the volume grants them outsized influence in ordering that which they desire to turn inside out.

With an introduction that focuses primarily on introducing the chapters, and without a conclusion, this book feels less cohesive than it could. Some individual authors overtly reference and engage with the book's themes and other chapters in the volume, but, on the whole, the project is limited by the very interdisciplinary and transnational ambitions that also make up its strengths.