As indicated by its title, this book retraces the cultural presence of the mythic Alexander the Great in Britain and Southeast Asia during the early modern period. Situated in the larger enterprise of a global history, it is an important contribution to the unfinished program of writing a world literature, and a shared global intellectual history. The analyses in this book rest on the main argument that early modern imperial rivalries between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, which claimed the same classical heritage, helped define a vast Eurasian space of circulation and exchange of cultural and political symbols. In this frame, the book focuses on Alexander, and the comparative—or, rather, connected—study of its transformations in two peripheral sites: Britain and Aceh, in Indonesia, which are mapped out as belonging to the same global cultural networks. Of course, today Britain is firmly at the center of early modern scholarship, while Aceh is ignored by most. One of the great achievements of this study is to introduce readers to a lesser-known literary tradition, while making the important case that it shares a genealogy and many features with its more prestigious and more thoroughly studied counterpart in the West.

The first part of the book, after considering the adoption of the shared heritage of Rome in the early modern empires that helped create a Eurasian transcultural sphere, alternates chapters on the English and Malay uses of the Alexander romance. It thus demonstrates the malleability and translatability of the image of Alexander the conqueror, which becomes an ideal trope by which to analyze cross-cultural encounters and grapple with contemporary politics. Looking at the fifteenth-century Malay Hikayat Isksander Zulkarnain, chapter 2 examines how the Arabic and Persian versions of the romance reached Southeast Asia through merchant networks, and how the story transformed into a conversion narrative, part of a larger process of Islamization. Alexander was also claimed as an ancestor by Malay dynasties, and historical annals used him to negotiate the encounters with the Portuguese.

Chapter 3 moves to the Christian counterpart—Gilbert Hay's Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror—which presents Alexander as a crusader against Muslims, then to later readings of this text, in correlation with British political thinking on empire and in connection with the seventeenth-century expansion of international trade. Chapter 4 turns to Greco-Arab mirrors of princes, which circulated between East and West, where Alexander appears as a philosopher, rather than a conqueror. Parallel genealogies resulted in connected themes in English and Malay literatures, especially when the mirror genre was reactivated to negotiate early modern conflicts and encounters. Chapter 5 prolongs this reflection by reading Hamlet, provocatively, as part of a global Arabic literature network, insisting on the intercultural resonances of the play, especially the graveyard scene, which echoes scenes found in the mirrors.

The shorter, second part focuses on less literal connections. It looks for references to Alexander in the construction of monarchical image in Shakespeare's Henry V and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and in an early seventeenth-century panegyric biography of sultan Iskandar Muda. Such allusions are then examined in relation to long-distance trade and voyages in Milton's Paradise Lost, and in a late seventeenth-century Malay prose romance about the legendary hero Hang Tuah. It is not clear why these analyses of “Alexandrian subtexts” had to be made into a separate part of the book, rather than added to chapters of the first part that expounded similar themes. This choice helps make this book overlong, as do other aspects of the writing: repetition of the same points inside and between chapters, historical information given in specifics that may seem unneeded for understanding the central issues, and a tendency to summarize other scholars’ views beyond what is necessary. This abundance of detail, which showcases the vast research undertaken by Ng, sometimes risks diluting the main arguments in contextual minutiae.

This reservation should not detract from recognizing this book as an often-fascinating contribution to the unfinished task of writing a truly global cultural, literary, and intellectual history of the early modern period, and of mapping out the networks that made possible this Eurasian transcultural sphere, from Britain to Southeast Asia.