A Short History Of Asia – Colin Mason

Asia is home to half the world’s population and is already shaping up to be the crucible of change in the 21st century. Colin Mason’s book A Short History Of Asia offers a concise overview of how Asia became what it is today

It is folly to talk of Asia as if it was a unified entity. It is home to more than half the world’s population and comprises some 53 countries.

However, the continent today does suffer from a “certain commonality of problems”, according to Colin Mason author of A Short History of Asia. Underdevelopment, poverty, disease, cronyism, corruption and shoddy governments, are all too common daily realities for many of the region’s inhabitants.

While Mason reaches the above conclusions, they are not the core focus of the book. In this newly revised second edition of A Short History of Asia – the first was published in 2000 and sold in excess of 15,000 copies – the veteran Australian journalist takes readers on a journey through this diverse continent’s past. From prehistoric times, you travel through the dawn of civilizations, the rise and fall of the great empires, European interference and colonization, and up to the present day.

Mason draws on his decades of experience in the region. In the 1950s while working for ABC he became Australia’s first roving Southeast Asia correspondent. He later went on to run a radio station in Khon Kaen, Thailand in 1963, and advised the Thai government on how to develop its television industry.

A Short History Of Asia – Colin Mason



See all books by Colin Mason at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Comprising 30 chapters the books is divided into three chronological sections, “Before Imperialism”, “The ‘White Man’s Burden’”, and “The Modern Nations”. Unsurprisingly, a fair chunk of the content is dedicated to China, India and Japan, the continent’s three historical powerhouses. Nevertheless, the book is fleshed out with chapters focusing on Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The book presses the importance that Asia has played in the cultural, political and economic development of the world.
For example, the ancient civilization of Harappa, in what is now India, was spawned some 7,000 years ago. It boasted, amongst other things, planned urban centers, with grid-planned, straight streets, which divided its great cities into 12 blocks. Meanwhile, much of Europe at the time was making do with makeshift wattle and daub huts.

When England’s King Henry 8th was getting married in the 15th century, treating guests to a sumptuous meal of gruel on stale bread, Peking’s Forbidden City was being inaugurated, and its massive treasure armada embarked on a significant journey of discovery. This was just the latest development in a country whose scientific, medical and technological discoveries were 1,000 years more advanced than Europe’s.

Facts like these were part of Mason’s inspiration for writing the book. “I was very annoyed with the early histories that I read. They were all concerned with what the Europeans or the colonizers were doing in Asia. It was very difficult to get any material on the era before colonization,” he says, speaking by phone from Sidney. “I wanted to redress the balance.”

And redress the balance he does. While the West may have lagged behind Asia for centuries, its expanding empire’s cottoned on fast to the great riches to be made from the continent’s vast resources. Colonizers extracted hordes of gems, precious metals, spices, rubber, and such like, while using homegrown commodities like opium to weaken the dominated nations. Nowhere is this so extreme as in Britain’s use of opium to bring China to its knees in the 19th century.

Great empires crumbled under European occupation, and Mason lays the blame for many of Asia’s current troubles squarely at the feet its former colonial masters.

“They’re [the problems] all historical in my opinion and they all stem from the colonial period. Underdevelopment in many countries, poverty, disease, lack of efficient government, all of these things come from the fact that while the infrastructure was being developed enormously in the European countries, in the colonies it was being neglected,” he says.

In order to ensure their empires prospered European colonizers kept local populations downtrodden and uneducated. Entire countries like Indonesia were transformed into what Mason calls “plantation economies”.

Thailand itself has long been one of Southeast Asia’s most stable nations, and the expedience of its former rulers led to the kingdom’s essentially being a buffer zone between the British Raj and French Indochina. Nevertheless, the British exerted significant influence over what was then Siam, and while the country was never colonized, it still harbors the effects of the European interference.

Decades of military rule and civilian autocratic government is a direct result of the region’s colonial past, argues Mason, who believes that Thailand’s rising middle class has a strong part to play in the kingdom’s democratization.

He says that the government here needs to spend a lot more time listening to its people, and its often stark refusal to do so will only hamstring the nation’s economic and political development.

“I’m not very fond of controlled democracy, and it seems to me that’s what you’ve got and that’s not good enough for Thai people.
“You can’t be a little bit democratic anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant. You have to give democracy a lot of rope, maybe you’ll make mistakes but eventually it will work out.”

Overall, A Short History of Asia is an excellent read, while it does suffer from the odd slow patch, Mason manages to distil the continent’s centuries of cultural, economic and political developments, in a concise and accessible format.

By drilling down into the complex ebb and flow of past events and interactions the author sheds light on how many of the realties of life here today are the way they are. As such the book well deserves its place as a must read for anyone wanting to gain decent insight into this vast and amazing continent.

A Short History Of Asia – Colin Mason



See all books by Colin Mason at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

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