A Historical Atlas of Tibet by Karl E. Ryavec, and: Sources of Tibetan Tradition ed. by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein and Gray Tuttle, and: The Tibetan History Reader ed. by Gray Tuttle, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, and: Tibet: A History by Sam Van Schaik (review)

Tibet rarely appears in global history courses, and when it does, it is most often in relation to its controversial political relationship with the Chinese government or its unique form of Buddhism. The reasons for this are historically complex, related in part to the rise of the nation-state as a guiding paradigm for Area Studies in the postwar period, and since Tibet was no longer a nation at this time, Tibetan studies as a field sat uneasily with other regions in this paradigm. They are also due to the influence of Orientalist perceptions of Tibet that place it outside of time and critical historical study and focus mostly on Buddhism, especially as Buddhism was the central theme in the vast corpus of literature produced in Tibet. An additional issue has been the lack of textbooks for comparative history courses, as well as the particular inaccessibility of primary sources. The recent appearance of four works that present Tibetan history critically, comparatively, and in context through accessible narratives and translated primary sources and maps is therefore a welcome contribution to the ability to teach Tibet outside of specialist Tibetan Buddhism courses.

Sam van Schaik’s sweeping Tibet: A History provides an engaging overview, beginning from available historical sources in Tibetan and Chinese languages dating to the seventh century and continuing on through to blog sites and biographies in the present. Complementing this approach is The Tibet History Reader, Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer’s edited collection of classic essays in the field of Tibetan studies, which date from 1949 through to 2005 and provide a more in-depth, specialist look at elements of Tibetan history. This volume is especially noteworthy in that it brings together in one place for the first time a number of important articles that have previously been scattered through journals and edited collections. These studies both provide detailed introductions to standard narratives of Tibetan history dating from prehistory to the present and are useful as introductory texts both alone and together. However, both of these books are further enriched by the timely appearance of two sets of primary sources presented in unprecedented accessible formats: Gray Tuttle, Kurtis Schaeffer, and Matthew T. Kapstein’s collection of more than 180 translated primary sources in Sources of Tibetan Tradition, a long overdue addition to Columbia University’s Introduction to Asian Civilizations series, and A Historical Atlas of Tibet, Karl E. Ryavec’s beautifully produced collection of forty-nine maps of the Tibetan plateau and the surrounding “Tibetan cultural region” that spans from Central to East Asia and includes the Himalayas and parts of contemporary western China (p. 3). In their accessibility, detail and presentation of the complex nature of historical Tibetan societies, these texts all represent a coming of age in the field of Tibetan studies, which will open Tibet to critical exploration and understanding by popular as well as academic audiences. The decision of these authors and editors to present Tibetan terms in the consistent phonetic format developed as part of the Tibetan Himalayan Library initiative is also a factor that has contributed to accessibility. Given the wide-ranging nature of all of these texts, in this review, I will consider several of the themes that they have in common and that will facilitate their use in history, cultural studies, and religious studies courses that both focus on Tibet and include...