Asian History

Milton Osborne began his observations of Phnom Penh as a junior Australian diplomat from 1959 to 1961. Norodom Sihanouk presided over a town influenced by a powerful French cultural presence, a buoyant Chinese commercial sector, Vietnamese clerks, Cambodian civil servants, teachers and bonzes, and free-spending Americans. Osborne returned in April 1966 as a Cornell graduate student, then each year until 1971, the year after Sihanouk was deposed and four years before the terrible entry of Pol Pot’s forces. For a short time during Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, he worked as a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Thai border, and in 1981 returned to a run-down city full of squatters. In subsequent years, Osborne saw a dispirited and exhausted city regain its self-confidence and some of its joie de vivre, in spite of a government (like others in Asia), rampant with corruption and intolerant of challenges to its power.

As the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum’s confident intensity is underpinned by a dazzling range of scholarship – politics history, psychoanalysis, economics, development studies, constitutional law, archaeology, comparative religion, comparative ethnology, pedagogy, gender studies, ethics – all focused in this book on intellectually annihilating a particular minority, the Hindu religious right in India and its supporters in the United States. Nussbaum’s personal background explains her fervour. Her mother’s family descend from the Mayflower, her father was a conservative Southern lawyer, and the family lived the secure life of Philadelphia’s main line. Martha rejected these satisfactions: ‘I was ill at ease with my elite WASP heritage.’ She became involved in the civil rights movement, and converted to Judaism when she married a Jewish linguist whom she met in a class on Greek prose composition. ‘I had an intense desire to join the underdogs and to fight for justice in solidarity with them.’