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Home / Periods / Asian History

Period

Asian History

c. 221 BCE–present

Asian History provides a geographic route into historical fiction and history set across East, South, Southeast and West Asia. It is intended for long-running national, imperial and regional histories such as Imperial China, feudal Japan, Mughal and British India, colonial Southeast Asia and modern Asian political change.

The category is no longer intended to make Asia and the Islamic world a single historical period. Clearly ancient settings such as Ancient China and Ancient India are placed within Prehistory & Ancient World, while the Early Muslim Conquests, the Islamic Golden Age and the Khmer Empire sit within the Medieval Period. Other tightly dated Asian contexts can sit under the relevant global chronological root.

This leaves Asian History as a useful geographic gateway without forcing every Asian or Islamic setting into one oversized branch. Books should continue to use the most specific available child context rather than the broad parent whenever a precise setting exists.

Series

Series about Asian History (2 series)

The Asian Saga in Order

by James Clavell 7 books 4.6(58,777)

The Asian Saga is a sequence of large-scale novels about European and Asian encounters across nearly four centuries. Its chronological reading order moves from civil war in Japan in 1600 through the creation of British Hong Kong, the opening of treaty-port Japan, a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Cold War…

The Islam Quintet in Order

by Tariq Ali 5 books 4.2(514)

The Islam Quintet is Tariq Ali’s cycle of five historical novels examining encounters between Islamic societies and the Christian West across more than five centuries. Moving from the fall of Muslim Granada and the Crusades to Norman Sicily, the late Ottoman Empire and the modern transnational world, the…

Books

30 Best Novels About Asia and the Islamic world

Non-Fiction

30 Best Non-Fiction Books About Asia and the Islamic world

Histories, biographies and reference works are listed separately from the historical novels above.