Op de ruines van het imperialisme: de opstand tegen het Westen en het nieuwe Azië

by Pankaj Mishra, Jan Braks (Translator)

Het victoriaanse tijdperk was voor de Britten een triomf van de beschaving. Voor Azië was het de ondergang: de mogols, het Zomerpaleis in Beijing, het Ottomaanse Rijk: alles ging eraan door het westers kolonialisme.
Hier werd een voedingsbodem gelegd voor het anti-imperialisme, maar ook het begin van een rijke, filosofische en intellectuele traditie waarvoor het Westen minder oog had. Het verhaal dat Pankaj Mishra vertelt in Op de ruïnes van het imperialisme beschrijft de opkomst van een nieuw zelfbewustzijn, dat we nu pas, met de enorme opkomst van het Oosten, leren kennen.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics, India, China, World History

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Pankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist.

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mishra's approach here can't be faulted; it would be preposterous to offer the sweeping statements and crisp conclusions of the sixth chaper 'Asia Remade' without carefully laying the foundations in the previous five, painstakingly excavating the neglected work and histories of thinkers like Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Liang Qichao, whose shadows lie tall across the decades in myriad shapes: from Mao Tse-Dong to the Confucian resurgence, from Ayatollah Khomeini to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For me it was a bit of an uphill slog, but all worth it for the exhilarating freewheeling down from the top

Commonplace critique of colonisation tends to assume a passive Asia in subdued thrall, an orientalist picture in itself. Mishra energetically corrects that misconception here, showing how colonial powers were seen by Asian intellectuals and how various strands and flavours of resistence were built up. For most of the book I felt that everyone, Mishra included, was giving too much quarter to coloniser epistemology, which only begin to partially unravel at the hands of Gandhi and Tagore and in the later chapters. It is interesting in itself though that ideas like social Darwinism and scientific materialism caught on and wrought significant changes to Asian state structures and societies. 'Western' ideas were not merely assimilated but furiously and critically debated, adapted, edited, and in the case of the nation state concept, eventually used to overthrow the imperial powers and to remake Asia. The thinkers Mishra follows change their minds in the course of their intellectual careers; first imagining how the key tenets of Western success might work for Islam or the Chinese, and later, on some level recognising the West as a disaster to its own populations as well as others.

Mishra has been astonishingly effective at synthesising and condensing whole libraries of background reading into this focussed, highly structured work. Of thousands of possible strands, he has selected a handful, and woven them into coherence, into something that can be digested and absorbed usefully for reflection and discussion. I was struck by what I felt to be its dispassionate tone; until the concluding chapters, the atrocities of empire were treated almost casually, and strands of opposition are discussed quite matter-of-factly, creating an impression of even-handedness and objectivity. But of course, I have been sheltered from these shameful histories.

What is outside the scope of this history is the ground-level perspective. I suppose many readers will be much more familiar with this view, which is the domain of literature, but the thinkers Mishra follows addressed themselves mainly to elites, at times academic, but mainly political, and only late in their careers realised that cultural change comes from the roots of the grass. Thus, the hinges of Mishra's story are unoiled by vernacular voices, and women make almost no appearance at all. While I found it an edifying read, there was more duty than pleasure in the text for me!

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is no day in which foreigners do not grab a part of Islamic lands. England has occupied Egypt, the Sudan and India; the French have taken posession of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria; the Dutch have become rulers of Java; Russia has captured West Turkistan. Few Islamic countries have remained independent." - Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, 1896

"If there is no moral culture in the schools, no teaching of patriotism, students will no longer know they have their own country. The virtuous man will be an employee of foreigners, the degenerate man a traitor to Chinese. In the state of our armaments we see one road to weakness; in the stagnation of culture a hundred more." - Liang Qichao, 1896

"Europe has lost her moral prestige in Asia. She is no longer regarded as the champion of fair dealing and high principles but as an upholder of Western race supremacy and exploiter outside of her own borders." - Rabindranath Tagore, 1921

************

Pankaj Mishra opens this 2012 book in the Tsushima Straight where a small Japanese fleet sunk much of the Russian Navy in 1905, winning Korea and Manchuria for Emperor Meiji. The colonies around Asia took notice, their politicians and intellectuals astonished and joyful that a great empire was defeated by an eastern nation, one to become imperialist itself. The West took notice too; soon they would taste the bitterness as colonies fell. Mishra focuses on three thinkers of the period, Iranian, Chinese and Indian activists. Other familiar faces are in the mix: Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Sayyid Qutb and Kemal Ataturk, each who had responded to western encroachment in different ways.

In Egypt Napoleon spearheaded a 1798 campaign to replace colonies lost in America and compete with Britain in Asia. With a group of scientists and artists in tow he intended to record the dawn of Enlightenment in the East. The intrusion upset an Islamic order in Africa as the British had in Asia. Initially dismissive of infidel institutions and technology, observers noted changes were needed to meet a challenge by the West. While France lost in Egypt, Britain made strides subjugating India. Napoleon finished in 1815, the European powers turned east towards Asia. Within decades Burma, Singapore, Malay, Java and Vietnam were divided between them. Egypt soon fell to Britain and North Africa to France.

In Iran Ali Shariati was a major guide of the 1979 Islamic Revolution after the western overthrow of democracy in 1953. He had studied Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a late 19th century activist who traveled in Asia and Europe. Al-Afghani was a father of Pan-Islamist and Pan-Arabist thought. While others urged assimilation he sought resistance to racial and religious takeover. He witnessed the Indian Rebellion of 1857, agitating for Afghan revolt in the 1878 Anglo-Afghan war. In Istanbul he fought for reform of education and law, in Cairo he criticized reliance on foreign finance. He went to Russia to enlist support against the British, inspiring 1891 riots in Iran against the Shah's leasing of national resources.

In China Japan's modernization and victory in the 1895 war for Korea loomed over writer and activist Liang Qichao who would later influence Mao Zedong. China was mired in debt due to war indemnities and western ‘loans’. Sun Yat-sen, fomenting uprise against the Qing, was exiled to Japan. Liang and others pressed to reform the Confucian system and renew its ancient values. In the 100 Day Reforms the young Emperor was imprisoned by the Empress Dowager. Liang fled to Japan, assisting the birth of Pan-Asianism as the US seized the Philippines in 1898. The Boxer Rebellion in 1900 attacked foreigners, the Qing chastised. Liang mulled over revolution as social darwinism threatened extinction.

In America Liang traveled coast to coast, meeting JP Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson demanded closed doors of trade to be battered down. The US took the Panama Canal as British had in Suez. Blacks and Asians denied rights Japanese autocracy was tempting to the east. With the Qing deposed, western ally Japan annexed German colonies after WWI. China expected their return in the 1919 Peace Talks but requests were denied. Liang's protests to end extraterritorial law, unequal treaties and war indemnities went unrealized. Ho Chi Minh petitioned in vain for Vietnamese self rule as did Gandhi for India. The Ottoman carcass was picked clean in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Maghreb, Caucasus and Balkans.

In the Mideast riots obtained a degree of self-rule. From the Russian Soviet Lenin revealed secret deals the Big Four had made. Disillusioned Vietnamese and Indonesians defected to socialism, Ataturk expelled Allied forces in Istanbul. Protests pushed Japan from Shandong and the Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. Broken promises to India launched Gandhi as leader. Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel Prize poet, renounced his knighthood. Born to a family of Bengali businessmen who worked with the British he was exposed to western ideas. He argued for a spiritual return to Indian ideals, but opposed Gandhi's xenophobia and westernizers who emulated Japan and Turkey in sweeping away the past.

The syncretic approaches of al-Afghani, Liang and Tagore were superseded by younger leaders urgent need to fight militarists within and imperialists without. Disenchanted reformers were pushed aside by hardline nationalists and communists. The League of Nations was portrayed as a plot against Japan's liberation of Asia and defeat of communism in China. Oil embargoes could only be met by seizing the mainland and islands. Such was the justification as the Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and Burma colonies fell in 1941. Japan's 'Greater East Asian Prosperity Plan' mocked 'Asia for Asians' and gave way to murder and plunder in the region.

The thinkers in this study fell into three main groups: those who advocated for a return to traditional values, some who sought a synthesis with modern progress and others who called for wholesale westernization. The three examples Mishra chooses to highlight were synthesizers who wished to retain aspects of their culture and strengthen them with industrialization. It was a valid goal but the distinctions that made the world diverse disappeared into undifferentiated modernity. As a history it raises interesting questions. Can countries retain cultural characteristics as they connect in a globalized world? At some point we may be left only with politics and religion to keep us apart, for better or worse.

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history of anti-colonial intellectual life in the East during the greatest days of Imperialism. Mishra's new book is one much needed by Western readers. It's a necessary corrective. It's loaded with information about intellectuals in the Muslim world, China and India most of whom I have never heard of before. Each of these men--Jamal al din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao, Rabindranath Tagore and others--possessed insights into the true nature of Western nations' motivations in Asia. They saw the dependence by Eastern states on the West and knew nothing good would come of it. They saw that their own states were weak and predisposed to this manipulation because of aspects in their own cultures, say, favoring authoritarianism or the blandishments of religion. Theirs were not democracies. The populace did not take a personal interest in government, which was opaque and insular. The Enlightenment had caused western states to swing away from despotism toward participative democracy. There was no such parallel movement in the East. There doesn't appear to have been much scrabbling about in dusty archives by Mishra. He does not appear to have a working knowledge of either Arabic or Chinese, and, it seems, has relied exclusively on English-language sources.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Complex book to review, but when it all comes down - disappointing. Technically, the prose is not really as good as you might expect from an accomplished novellist and based on Mishra's excellent polemic essays - for example his exchange with Niall Ferguson.

The argument itself is not without merit but utterly, utterly blinkered. In his anti-colonialism, Mishra is very quick to analyse very selectively and ends up in contradiction. So on the one hand, we hear on the merits of Ottoman empire being an empire, to the extent where he almost blames 'those pesky Christians' in the Ottoman periphery for wanting to secede. If that is just a bit selective, then his qualification of the Armenian Genocide as being caused by "Armenians harassing Ottomans" is offensive.

Equally, his treatment of Communism is baffling - is it the anti-colonial power of Lenin, or is it just another aspect of the Western modernity? Finally, some of the statement are just out of touch - for instance the accusation that the war in Chechnia was conducted by the West, via its agent the Russian. Curiously, he left Bosnia out of that passage entirely - probably as it does not fit his narrative that the USA-led forces intervened directly on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims.

But even that is not really the issue. The core of my disappointment is the apparent intellectual poverty of the thinkers he puts on a piedestal. They reek of provincialism and utter lack of originality. They may be interesting because of the influences they had. But the content itself is uninventive and unilluminating, if not downright trite.

Mishra is far too intelligent not to realize the consequence of the thinking he outlines in his book. Indeed, in last two pages he outlines a very likely scenario that will play out. I fear that he is right. I just wish that someone of Mishra's intellect would not glorify the path to disaster merely on the basis that it will be disaster in which white colonialist will suffer too.

[Muhammad Ahmad · Rating 5 out of 5]

[My review of Pankaj's book was first published in Guernica magazine]

As tsar Alexander III sat down for an evening's entertainment at the St. Petersburg opera house in late 1887, he little knew that the performance would soon be upstaged by one much more dramatic. Shortly after the curtains rose, a slender, goateed man with azure eyes, dressed in a robe and turban, got up from a box nearby and proclaimed loudly: “I intend to say the evening prayer—Allah-u-Akbar!” The audience sat bemused and soldiers waited impatiently as the man proceeded, unperturbed, with his evening prayers. His sole companion, the Russian-born intellectual Abdurreshid Ibrahim, squirmed in fear of his life.

Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani was determined to recruit Russian support in his campaign against the British. Having failed to secure an audience with the tsar, he had decided to use his daring as a calling card. The tsar’s curiosity was finally piqued and Afghani had his hearing.

This could be a scene out of Tolstoy or Lermontov; but so extraordinary a figure was Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani (1838-97), the peripatetic Muslim thinker and revolutionary, that inserting him into fiction would strain credulity. So, renowned essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra has opted for historical essay and intellectual biography to profile the lives of Afghani and other equally remarkable figures in his new book From the Ruins of Empire: The intellectuals who remade Asia.

The book is a refreshing break from lachrymose histories of the East’s victimhood and laments about its past glories. It concerns a group of intellectuals who responded to the threat of western dominance with vigour and imagination. Together they engendered the intellectual currents that have shaped the last century of the region’s history.

Wild Man of Genius

The Iranian-born Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani’s long sojourn across Asia, Europe, and North Africa was animated by a search for dignity, self-strengthening, and self-determination. He was responding to the challenge of western modernity and European colonial domination. As Afghani saw it, an ossified Islam with a literalist interpretation of scripture was hindering Muslim progress. He was determined to reconcile Islam with rationality, and to develop a strategy that would leverage popular discontent to dislodge Western colons from Asia. The political vehicles he experimented with included Islamic reformism, ethnic nationalism, pan-Islamism, and, later, political violence (an idea he quickly abandoned after a disciple assassinated the Shah of Iran in 1896).

Described by English poet Wilfrid Blunt as a “wild man of genius,” Afghani’s strategies were in fact more visionary than wild. He preached syncretic nationalism in India, drawing on both Islamic and Hindu traditions. He advised the Afghan amir into confronting the Raj. He fomented Egypt’s first anti-British uprising. He inaugurated Iran’s consequential alliance between the clergy, intellectuals, and merchants. And he attempted to use the Ottoman Sultanate as the focus of a pan-Islamic challenge to Western imperialism. He was fêted by—and simultaneously antagonised—kings, khedives, amirs, sultans, shahs, and tsars. In the meantime, he conducted debates with Ernest Renan, confronted British colonial officials, participated in the Great Game, romanced a German lover, established journals and secret societies, and mentored revolutionaries across the region. His disciples ranged from the nationalist Saad Zaghlul to the Islamist Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. During his stay in Paris in the early 1880s, he also wrote for a French Communist paper, anticipating the anti-imperialist Red-Green alliances of the coming centuries. (Rashid Rida would later emulate him in penning articles for Ho Chi Minh’s journal in Vietnam.)

Afghani’s influence has lived on through figures as diverse as Muhammad Iqbal, Ali Shariati, Abul Ala Maududi, and even Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who uses an Islamic idiom in the service of a reformist agenda. Egypt’s three dominant political trajectories of the past century—reformist nationalism, Islamist populism, and revolutionary violence—can all be traced to Afghani’s influence. His disciples played central roles in establishing both the Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. His ideas were later adopted and stripped of their rationalist content by Sayyid Qutb to turn them into a pretext for political violence. His acolytes also included the Egyptian Jewish playwright and journalist James Sanua, and the fin de siècle women’s rights activist Qasim Amin.

Waking Giants

China’s ascent to super-power status was anything but smooth; perhaps no one figure was more more significant in jumpstarting the somnolent empire’s progress than Liang Qichao (1873-1929), the second major intellectual profiled by Mishra. Like his mentor Kang Youwei, he was a monarchist steeped in Confucian tradition before embarking on an independent trajectory after being banished from a Manchu court in thrall to Western powers. His initial response to the West’s challenge was to use Occidental ideas to invigorate traditional thinking. He went so far as to embrace Social Darwinist views about the hierarchy of races.

But Liang’s admiration for the West proved ephemeral, dissipating after a fundraising tour of the United States. Where Alexis de Tocqueville had been impressed by the vibrancy of American democracy, Liang was horrified by its gross inequalities, oligarchic rule, and severe mistreatment of minorities. He consequently took a jaundiced view of democracy itself, despite having himself pioneered mass-politics in China. With his mentor Kang, he had organized examinees for imperial posts to petition the emperor to annul a humiliating treaty with Japan. Kang had also established publishing houses, libraries, and schools in order to create a Chinese “people.”

But creating a people had consequences. By early 20th century, Chinese nationalism had acquired a racialist Han character with an explicitly anti-Manchu orientation. Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist revolution in 1911 made Liang leery of disruptive change. Liang was dismayed to see the modernism that he had helped foster degrade into slavish aping of the West. The excesses of nationalists and Communists impressed upon him the enduring merits of Confucianism, with its universal precepts of spiritual freedom and social harmony.

In 1917, after arguing for China’s entry into the First World War as a means to garner international clout, Liang, like his countrymen, was shocked by its treatment at the Paris Peace Conference. The Great Powers conceded nothing. Like European Modernists, Liang was also shaken by the wasteland left by the war. If the disabused realism of his post-war writing seemed at times an echo of Thucydides, at other times it anticipated structural realists like John Mearsheimer. “In the world there is only power,” he wrote. “That the strong always rule the weak is in truth the first great universal rule of nature. Hence, if we wish to attain liberty, there is no other road: we can only seek first to be strong.”

China endured a nationalist revolution, a civil war, a Communist revolution, and much else before assuming its present status. In this most stable and prosperous phase, however, it seems remarkably like the strong, autocratic, modernizing state that Liang envisioned, and that unreconstructed imperialists had always feared. At a Hong Kong reception in 1889, Rudyard Kipling had wondered, “What will happen when China really wakes up?” What for Kipling was a nightmare was for his contemporary Liang an abiding dream. Modern China is a realization of both.

Thus Spake Tagore

Liang Qichao’s hard-nosed realism was no barrier to the strong bond he formed with the uncompromisingly idealistic Rabindranath Tagore. Welcoming him on a lecture tour of China in 1924, Liang greeted the Bengali sage by saying, “our old brother [India], ‘affectionate and missing’ for more than a thousand years, is now coming to call on his little brother [China].” But by that time opinion had shifted sharply in China. A newer generation of modernists wanted to sever all connection with the past. Tagore’s warnings against uncritical emulation of the West met with a sceptical audience.

There was nothing inevitable about Tagore’s disillusionment with the West. He was the scion of a liberal Anglophile family whose patriarchs had participated in the British opium trade. British Orientalists introduced him to the indigenous literary traditions that forged his philosophy. Unlike his friend Gandhi, Tagore admired the West. But the betrayal of the Paris Peace Conference and the grand imperial carve-up of Asia exhausted Tagore’s sympathies. In 1919 he wrote Romain Rolland: “there is hardly a corner in the vast continent of Asia where men have come to feel any real love for Europe.”

But Tagore’s disenchantment did not mean a retreat into defensive nativism. He was as likely to countenance imperialist cant issued from Japanese pan-Asianism as Western mission civilisatrice. He was never a hostage to his audience. At a 1930 dinner party in New York he accused his audience including Franklin Roosevelt, Sinclair Lewis, and Hans Morgenthau, of “exploit[ing] those who are helpless and humiliate[ing] those who are unfortunate with this gift.” He was equally disobliging when hosted by the Japanese Prime Minister in Tokyo: “The New Japan,” he told the gathered dignitaries, “is only an imitation of the West.”

Though anti-imperialist, Tagore was leery of radical nationalism. Once Japanese nationalists set it on an expansionist trajectory he vowed never to return, though he had earlier considered Japan as a model of indigenous modernization. Radical forces superseded him in India too which was finally fractured by the national egoism he had warned against. Tagore’s voice survived only in the national anthems of truncated India and Bangladesh. (His influence has also lived on through the experimental school he established in 1901; alumni include Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray.)

Return of the Natives

The scope and ambition of From the Ruins of Empire would have overwhelmed a lesser writer. Mishra delivers with panache. He tackles the complex histories and politics of the formerly colonized realms with rigour and sensitivity. His sharply drawn characters are woven into a narrative that is riveting and insightful. But it is Mishra’s unerring political instincts, unencumbered by ideology, that make this book such a compelling read. Few writers possess the facility with which Mishra moves from acute journalistic observation to confident historical analysis.

In the colonized lands Mishra writes of, there were few who suffered illusions about European power. But some did put stock in the promise of America. When, in anticipation of the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson issued high-minded proclamations about national self-determination, everyone from Saad Zaghlul and Liang Qichao to Ho Chi Minh flocked to Paris to petition for the rights of their respective nations. All were disappointed. The humiliation that representatives from Asia and Africa suffered stung everyone. Little had they known Wilson was responding mainly to the Bolshevik threat; his promises of self-determination were aimed at an exclusively European audience. The idealists were disabused and the nationalists emboldened. Independence would not be granted; it would have to be seized.

Intuitive in retrospect, this idea was slow to gain wider purchase. The colonizers had easily crushed earlier insurrections, which lacked a unifying idea to lend coherence. But the seminal interventions of Afghani, Liang, and Tagore turned the vague ressentiment of the colonized into clearly articulated national projects. Colonialism finally ran up against mass politics and was defeated. None of this would have happened without the supra-national conversations inaugurated by these remarkable individuals.

The West has since built itself a reassuring mythology in which, moved by the moral example of individuals like Gandhi, it graciously bestowed independence upon its former possessions. But the one factor more than any other that precipitated the Empire’s exit from Asia wasn’t Gandhian satyagraha, but Japan’s spectacular early victories over the colonial powers. Beginning on 8 December 1941, it took Japan just ninety days to take British, U.S., Dutch, and French possessions across East Asia, advancing all the way to the borders of British India. “There are few examples in history,” writes Mishra, “of such dramatic humiliation of established powers.” If, according to viceroy of India Lord Curzon, the Japanese victory over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima had been a “thunderclap” which reverberated “through the whispering galleries of the East,” then Pearl Harbor was the storm that raised these voices to a roar. Japan was defeated in the end, but the nationalist fires it had kindled—mostly to advance its own imperial interests—could no longer be extinguished. The war sapped Western will and made decolonization inevitable.

Western power is still in decline, but Western perceptions of power remain oddly sanguine. From American presidential candidates’ strident statements against China during the 2012 election campaign to the superfluous French measures to exclude Turkey from the EU, it seems Atlantic powers fail to grasp that America and Europe need China and Turkey just as much as they are needed by them. During Israel’s November 2012 attack on Gaza, Egyptian and Turkish diplomatic initiatives made America all but irrelevant to the peace-making.

Straitjacketed by the imperatives of domestic politics, the West has been unable—or unwilling—to change course. Barack Obama had his Wilsonian moment in 2009, when he addressed the Muslim world from Cairo and moved many with his lofty rhetoric. But with his record of capitulations, his abject surrender to the Israeli right, and his international regime of extrajudicial killings, hope proved ephemeral. It disabused Arabs of the expectation that a foreign power could midwife change. Dignity demanded action. Rights had to be seized and agency reclaimed.

If an earlier generation had confronted and overthrown the autocratic managers of empire, a new generation is now uprooting the authoritarianism of the postcolonial regimes that had been hitherto justified as a nation-building imperative. The colonial legacy is finally being rolled back. But the sequence of events is not conforming to any known script. It is toppling dictatorships both pro- and anti-Western. The bogeyman of Islamism has served an ecumenical purpose, invoked by left and right alike. But if there is a common thread uniting the myriad forces of the Arab uprisings, it is not the promise of an Islamic resurgence. It is a search for dignity, social justice, and self-determination. The revolutions have been creative and resolute, improvising means but never ceding agency. They have even instrumentalized Western power at times but conceded nothing in return.

It is too early to predict how the Arab Spring will fully play out. But one thing is clear: external bogeymen will no longer stifle citizens’ demands for internal reform. The quality of these reforms will inevitably rest on the character of the ideas that inspire them. Here, however, Mishra is pessimistic. He notes that ideas with the capacity to inspire have been few and far between. Asia may be rebounding, he writes, but its success conceals “an immense intellectual failure.” He laments “no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.” This, however, is both a peril and an opportunity for the activists of the 21st century’s first great insurrection.

In the St. Petersburg opera house, Afghani failed to induce the tsar to confront the British. Still, through words and deeds, he continued fomenting uprisings from Egypt to Persia to Afghanistan. His companion, Abdurreshid Ibrahim, later participated in the Libyan uprising against Italian rule. He also joined Egyptian and Indian exiles in Tokyo to forge an alliance with the Japanese in a pan-Asianist front against Western imperialism. Their successes were ephemeral, but the ideas endured. In the end there was the word–and it is resonating still.

[Omar Ali · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pankaj Mishra's book is an unusually vapid and sophomoric work, carefully packaged to massage the prejudices of his liberal audience, but otherwise completely unoriginal and pedestrian. If you want to see how tendentious fakery is done by a professional, borrow it from a library. Dont buy it, you will only encourage him.
My rolling comments while reading the book are at http://www.brownpundits.com/2017/12/1...

A couple of excerpts from that overly long rant:

Spoiler Alert. since the “review” is really a very long rolling rant, written as I read the book, some people may just want to know this one fact: this books is NOT about the intellectuals who remade Asia. That book would have to start with people like Aizawa in Japan, the first Asian nation to be “remade”, but that is one nation and one set of thinkers you will not find in this book. Why? because this book is not about Asia, its history or its renaissance, it is about post-liberal virtue signaling. ..

On page 18 he says:
"the word Islam, describing the range of Muslim beliefs and practices, was not used before the 19th century. "

WTF?

This is then negated on the very next page by Mishra himself. The only explanation for this little nugget is that Pankaj knows his audience and will miss no opportunity to slide in some politically correct red meat for his audience. There is a vague sense “out there” in liberal academia that Islam is unfairly maligned as monolithic and even that the label itself may be “Islamophobic”. Pankaj wants to let people know that he has no such incorrect beliefs. It is a noble impulse and it recurs. A lot.

Pankaj’s summary of colonial history is boilerplate and unimaginative. He really has nothing new to reveal here. But he does seem to think (and, somewhat surprisingly, most of his reviewers seem to agree) that he is revealing new information and (to quote Hamid Dabbashi)”jolting our historical imagination and placing it on the right though deeply repressed axis. ”
This is very surprising. Are we to believe that Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia, did not know this very basic outline of colonial history and had “deeply repressed it”? Anyone with any interest in history would know all this in much greater detail already. The only thing “new” here (and even that is not new any more) is a certain background hum of “postcolonial snark” (a certain feeling of superiority based on supposed/implied willingness to defy “colonial stereotypes” and Western imperialism and its promoters). ..

I think the key is to realize that Pankaj is crafting a shared (shared with his intended audience) anti-colonial pose/fantasy (mainly anti-British, he seems completely untroubled by the Russian empire in Asia, which is also very telling) and is following Afghani around from one half-baked idea to the next. Meanwhile, the actual 19th century world carried on, little affected by Afghani then and little affected by him now (though he has been adopted as a mascot by diverse Islamist groups, he is not a major source of their ideology or practice). Afghani’s tomb in Kabul meanwhile has been repaired with American “war on terror” funds. Oh the humanity!

My point is this: when Pankaj says

“It is impossible to imagine, for instance, that the recent protests and
revolutions in the Arab world would have been possible without the intellectual and political foundations laid by Al-Afghani’s assimilation of Western ideas and his rethinking of Muslim tradition”

He is relying on his audience being ignorant of the actual intellectual and political foundations of the various Islamist movements fighting in the Arab world today. The “assimilation of Western ideas and rethinking of Muslim tradition” are less a feature of contemporary Arab Islamism and more a thing that Pankaj would like them to have. (that the structure or methods of these movements are in many ways modern, hence to a large extent Western in origin, is not the same thing as consciously assimilating Western ideas and rethinking Muslim tradition).

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding. I've recently discovered this author, Pankaj Mishra. Maybe I spend too much time under my rock, but I think he should be much more widely known for his broad knowledge of history and deep understanding of the interaction between western and eastern philosophy and religion and the perspective he brings to it of someone who grew up struggling with both worlds.

If George W. Bush wants to know, as I believe he said, why "they hate us," he need only read this book. The relentless greed and vicious racism, the wars and exploitation, the broken promises and double dealing that the western colonizers practiced throughout Asia from the beginning of their dealings there were observed and absorbed by the boys and young men who grew up to be Gandhi, Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and through the generations to Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.

"The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." If you want to know how we got where we are now, it's a direct line.

Mishra ranges through Japan, China, Korea, Viet Nam, India, Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire from the late 1800s to the present discussing the lives and writings of the men who began to grapple with how Asia was to become "modern" and still somehow remain Asia.

"The fundamental challenge for the first generation of modern Asian intellectuals: how to reconcile themselves and others to the dwindling of their civilization through internal decay and Westernization while regaining parity and dignity in the eyes of the white rulers of the world."

Mishra knows so much history and can make so many cogent connections among time, space, and people; the writer he reminds me most of is the late Tony Judt, great explicator of modern European history. They would have made wonderful collaborators.

Mishra's latest book, just out, is Age of Anger, which brings this up to the present day. My husband's reading it now, and I'm fixing to as well as soon as he lets loose of it.

[Randal Samstag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mishra’s book is the antidote to conventional stories of how the “third world” could “develop” if it only would pursue a Western model of social organization, be it capitalist or socialist. As a reviewer said here, this is the answer to George W Bush’s question, “Why do they hate us?” If you had never heard the name, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, as I had not, you really need to read Mishra’s book. If you thought Why Nations Fail was a great book, you need to read Mishra’s book to find out why it is not. If you ever thought that America (or Europe) ever was great, you need to read Mishra’s book. Really, you need to read Mishra’s book.

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in years, calling Mishra the modern inheritor to Edward Said's legacy is no exaggeration.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pankaj Mishra is a journalist and novelist with an articulate prose style. His work has progressed from stories about travel in his native india to a novel (The Romantics), but his new book about key figures in Asia's transition from colonial conquests to modern nations is one of the most informative books i've encountered in a long time. i read it out of an interest in Asian history, but frankly, i think i learned more about the dynamics of contemporary global politics from the process. Why is today's Middle East so viciously hostile to "the West" (that is, Europe and the USA)? Why do China and india lead the world in certain areas, yet struggle with poverty? So many aspects of our current political reality have their origins in the European (i.e. British and French) colonialism and imperialism of the 19th century. Mishra himself admits at the end of the book that when he started out he was surprised by "how much he didn't know." That is how i felt by the time i was 20 pages into this book. A really informative, carefully constructed study - if i could, i'd make it required reading for all the members of Congress and the Pentagon: maybe it would give them a clue about why, when we took over iraq, we were not welcomed as "liberators," and why our struggle in Afghanistan will always be in vain.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents an intellectual history of global decolonization. The book is structured around a series of intellectual biographies of early Asian critical writers on how to best respond to the forcible intrusion and disruption brought about by the entry of European nations into Asian politics and culture. The temporal focus is on the 19th and 20th centuries. The biographies that are the focus of the book are generally ordered around the religious context of the three areas: the Middle East, South Asia, and China/Japan/Korea. The author is very thoughtful and appears to have read everything ever written on colonialism and post-colonialism. The stories in the biographies are well done and show how each author started out with some positions and then had to adjust his positions on the basis of relations with other writers. All of the writers start with one of a few positions, including learning from European colonializers. Then they watch as their ideas get put into practice among the crowds and then further adjust their thinking based on experience.

The time frame in the book is important. Nearly all of the profiled intellectual rebels started with positions that were either sympathetic or unsympathetic. These then evolved, usually towards more strident positions more. That nearly all of these individuals grew up in the last quarter of the 19th century suggested that their rationale for responding to imperialism followed on revolutionary activity in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th. This suggests that the individuals profiled in the book were intermediaries between European revolutions against conventional marvels. As Asian people encountered imperialism in the 20th century between two world wars, especially given the disappointments from the Versailles Peace Conference after WWI, the encounters with the West became more violent and the supposed values of attempting to adapt to the imperial western nations became less clear to observers. Many of the authors reviewed moved to more radical positions as their experience with Western powers became less beneficial and as western ideals seemed increasingly hypocritical, such that there is a brand of liberalism and capitalism for the powers and another brand altogether for the interactions of these nations with Asian states.

None of the western powers come out of this analysis with much to their credit but much more that calls into question the benefits of capitalism and the legitimacy of western ethics and values.

The structure of the book and its major arguments are complex. Lots of authors are mentioned and a credible effort is made at drawing the biographical streams together to craft and argument. How ideas of markets, values, authority, power, and religion develop in different cultural settings over time is a story very well told but one that takes much patience to digest.

For a book that focuses as it does on principles and values, the line of argument is surprisingly pragmatic and functional. All of the individuals profiled in the book are asking the question of how to respond most effectively to the intrusions of imperialist powers. Initially, the older empires tolerated the intruders and for a while it was a mutually advantageous relationship.

Once the Europeans wanted more, however, the old empires were unable to resist effectively. This is because they were working on the traditional metropole-countryside arrangements that some have called "Asiatic Despotism" in which most of the population were living their own lives in small villages and were left on their own by the metropolis as long as they paid their taxes. Once the Europeans wanted to extract more from these primitive states, they found they lacked the means to resist, due to low levels of organization, inadequate resources, lack of a modern army, etc. Some empires tried to reform and reorganize in order to resist. Ottoman Turkey tried it and ultimately failed while Japan had much more success in mimicking the modern nation-state. This is where nationalism comes in to the argument and provides a basis for reform and reorganization.

The nationalist and modernizing response ultimately had problems, since individual Asian with only a few exceptions, were not strong enough to oppose Europe individually. This led to various transnational movements, especially the growth of a reborn Islam that had the potential to unify Muslim across a wide range of circumstances. Islam also provides means for dividing peoples as well.

The exceptions are illuminating too. The British Raj split into multiple parts due to conflicts with Britain especially over Islam. The builders of the new Indian state built on the idea of the nation that grew out of British rule. China was a mix of all of these trends, but Mishra argues that the hardships under Mao forged a Chinese identity that allowed for a successful adaptation fo modernity and the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy after Deng's reforms in 1978

There are lots of interesting takeaways from the book. Among them are:

1) Many Asian intellectuals never really liked the intrusion of the West. That was clear in the 19th century and earlier. Antagonism towards the US and Europe from Asians is not a recent development but a long term trend.

2) The colonial powers worked hard to generate antagonism and conflicts. The colonial peoples were poorly treated. The poor reputation of the West was well earned.

3) Dealing with modernity in a global economy is hard, just considering the difficulties of crafting a workable economic development. Add ideology and politics to the technical difficulties of modernization and it is understandable the decolonialism has gone hand in hand the growth of militant anti-western positions.

4) Tracing the influence of ideas (including the ideas of the individuals profiled in the book) is hard. Not only do events change and provide new stimuli, but individuals can change their minds and think about matters differently - people change their minds and even grow sometimes. This makes the story more of a challenge to follow but the book provides a good sense of how the critical issues are being considered.

5) This story is filled with tensions and intellectual conflicts. Even with so many balls in the air, the author succeeds in communicating that decisions about economic development and adaptation are sometimes best viewed more broadly and historically than before.

6) The book is especially valuable for linking contemporary politicians to their intellectual ancestors. This result by itself makes the work worth reading.

[Sherif Gerges · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book. Essentially not too different in thesis from Age of Anger, Mishra delivers an entertaining and erudite if not fatalist assessment of the West.

The central thesis of the book, Mishra argues, is that today’s populist nationalism and Islamist movements are both emotional and ideological reactions to the unresolved legacies of European imperialism. He contends that liberal modernity—championed by figures like John Stuart Mill—was historically entangled with colonial domination. Movements led by Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Islamists like Sayyid Qutb or Osama bin Laden emerge from a shared history of humiliation, inequality, and alienation. Mishra’s thesis is that the contemporary world remains shaped by the psychic and political wreckage of empire, with both Western and non-Western extremisms reflecting a profound crisis of modern identity.

At times, the book reads more like a philosophical essay than a history text. Mishra draws freely from literature, political theory, and psychoanalysis, often dwelling more on ideas than events. This can be dense for some readers, but those willing to engage deeply will be rewarded with insights that linger.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Mishra, the modern world is primarily the post-colonial world, and the greatest minds in shaping that world have been leading thinkers in the great Asian anti-colonial movements. Looking at the whole of Asia from Egypt to Japan, Mishra focuses not so much on the political leaders of those movements, but more on the thinkers who articulated the primary visions of a new Asia. For the Muslim world, Mishra's leading thinker is Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, with his calls for a rational but united Islamic society that defends its independence and follows its own moral vision. For China it is Liang Qichao, whose thoughtful critique of Western imperialism involved the vision of a modern, powerful China that upholds its own spiritual heritage. For India, he focuses on Rabindranath Tagore, as a thinker who inspired India before Gandhi.

Most of the book follows the twists and turns of these momentous lives, whose ideas foreshadowed the world we know today. Then Mishra basically presses the fast-forward button and zooms through the tragic and transformative developments to date. Of course Westerners regarded these rebels against the great colonial empires as backward-facing terrorists against progress. Of course their visions of Asia gained popular endorsement in the decades to come. But Mishra also shows how Asians have been torn between accepting the colonial West's terms of social Darwinist competition for supremacy (as in the cases of imperial Japan or Islamist jihadism) or forging some different basis for cultural autonomy. In following the cultural evolution of Asia, Mishra describes the challenges of reinventing Asian civilizations. The colonial competition for survival of the fittest among nations has increasingly become a culture of competition for advantage between individuals. In response to that new Western "reality," Asia is still struggling to shape societies that are based more on improved human relations than on sharpened competition.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little history is a dangerous thing. One of the reasons I have never liked reading history is that I discovered written history often has pieces that are missing that can change one’s understanding of an event or time. One has to dig down into the details and the truth may never reveal itself. But thank goodness for Pankaj Mishra, who gives us history like nothing Americans are likely to encounter in school: history from the point of view of majority non-white nations around the time of the first global upheaval, at the turn of the last century and the First World War.

Mishra focuses on Asia as it was defined at the time, anything east of Turkey and west of Japan, and uses the words of individuals to define a zeitgeist that inspired and motivated upheavals taking place in the world at the time. Though Europe’s most influential thinkers deemed most of the non-white non-European societies unfit for self-rule, the men that drove revolutionary change in those very societies were motivated by notions of equality and human dignity spoken and written of in Western Europe, and later, by Woodrow Wilson.

One of those men was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, revered now as the intellectual god-father of the Islamic Revolution. Educated in Tehran in the mid-ninetieth century, al-Afghani passed himself off as a member of different sects and nationalities in order to most effectively educate and reform with an eye to anti-imperialist strategy.

The English people believe me a Russian
The Muslims think me a Zoroastrian
The Sunnis think me a Shiite
And the Shiite think me an enemy of Ali
Some of the friends of the four companions have believe me a Wahhabi
Some of the virtuous Imamites have imagined me a Babi…

And yet al-Afghani was able to keep his focus on power to the subjugated people of Asia and exhort them to greater resistance to the imperialist power being brought to bear upon them by the West. Al-Afghani turns up wherever societal turmoil was in progress (Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran) and by his writings and speeches was able to urge a “protective modernization” upon fellow Muslims: “self-strengthening without blind imitation of the West, and who insisted that the Koran itself sanctioned many of the values—individual freedom and dignity, justice, the use of reason, even patriotism—touted by Turkish high officials as ‘Western.’” “Fanaticism and political tyranny” were the basic evils of unreformed Muslim society, he argued, the means by which the West had come to dominate the East.

Eventually al-Afghani came to believe that modernization alone as not sufficient, as it was making countries in the East subservient client states of the West. Pan-Islamism and nationalism was then considered to be the only way to beat back the encroaching West. He has a long history, traveling to Paris, Moscow and back, eventually, to Persia, agitating until his death in 1897. His grave, long unmarked, was moved to Kabul in 1944, and was visited by the American ambassador in 2002, who paid for restoration of the site. One group of al-Afghani’s followers became proponents of Salafism, the puritanical movement which is the basis for ISIS, surely a perversion of what al-Afghani believed.

I spend so much time on al-Afghani because I don’t think I have ever heard of him before, or if I have, I never knew anything about what he was thinking. Mishra just begins with al-Afghani, however, and delves into China’s (and Vietnam’s) pre-revolutionaries, Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and Tan Sitong. Tan died, tragically for China’s interests one might argue, by allowing himself to be captured and executed in his twenties by forces loyal to the dowager empress. He was one who was clever enough to have negotiated the moral shoals of republicanism by combining it with the Confucian notion of social ethics.

Liang Qichao was the one of Tan's contemporaries to travel in the United States, writing “70 percent of the entire national wealth of America is in the hands of 200,000 rich people…How strange, how bizarre!” Liang was later part of a delegation to the peace conference held in Paris following the First World War. Interests of the non-white majority countries were ignored, despite the notions of freedom from oppression and human dignity embodied in Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and lodged in the hearts of many nationalists.

The final figure upon whom Mishra focuses is Rabindranath Tagore, who was likewise awakened to new ideas through contact with the West, but who also saw the spiritual vacuity in the West’s worldview. When he visited China in the 1920’s he was disparaged by crowds shouting “We don’t want philosophy, we want materialism!” Such a thing could be said to be heard today in Beijing. Let’s hope the Chinese don’t come to regret their single-minded choice, or are turned back once they see the desert ahead.

It is hard to avoid Mishra’s conclusion that racism was the reason Eastern countries were exploited and ignored by the West at the turn of the twentieth century. It is also true that the West had made advances in science, logic, and humanistic theories that struck thinkers in Asia as entirely worthwhile and modern. The Asians, however, could see something perverted in the West’s materialistic rapacity and sought to preserve some of their rich spiritual heritage while modernizing their political systems. If the West had only appreciated and taken on board what the East had to offer, rather than using muscle to subdue the insistence on autonomy from imperialism, probably none of us would be in the position in which we find ourselves today.

Mishra’s work of history is enormously important and entirely welcome, covering as he does vast parts of the non-white Asiatic world during a time of turmoil. He does not avoid the blank spots, omissions, and imputations common to writers of history: in the one sentence assigned to Armenia he writes, “However, harassed by Armenian nationalists in the east of Anatolia, the Turks ruthlessly deported hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915, an act that later invited accusations of genocide.” Nonetheless, this work and its bibliography is a giant step towards redressing our ignorance of the histories, needs, and desires of peoples in their search for rights.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a very similar reaction to this book as I did 'Liberalism: A Counter-History' so I am going to do something similar and break it down into the good and the bad. I will also begin by stating something similar to what I did when reviewing that book: no matter the balance of forces in my review, I do heavily recommend everyone read this book.

The Good:

Well, as I mentioned, everyone should read it. Even if, like me, you have more than a passing acquaintance with many of these thinkers, seeing a bunch of them thrown together for era context is a great thing.

The writing is really good and engaging.

Goes into detail about the evolution of thought in some individuals themselves, rather than just their final product. A really excellent context-based synthesis of Asian philosophy as it responded to the rise and domination of Europe.

The author has a good grasp of what actually made movements like that of Japan, Turkey, and latter day China successful=i.e military power and economic independence. There are no silly ideological talking points here, at least on that issue.

The bad/questionable:

Still seems to be some internalized Huntingtonism here. The belief of the west vs the rest was silly chauvanism in the past, but the belief that somehow this nebulous nonentity known as 'the east' is fundamentally different or even a cohesive thing is a weak point. China's rise is if anything a victory for the Westphalian system, and the most effective means of achieving independent power blocs by the authors own admission is building a state which can join such an order, rather than rejecting it. 'The East' is really like the non-liberal west akin to Bismarck or Metternich, a rejection of universal order for local concerns and autonomous balancing. This is why development and growing power has been effective in East Asia, where statecraft is old and barely interrupted, but not so much in the Muslim world, where dreams of religious and idealistic orders are just as prevalent as in northern and western Europe. If anything, the Muslim world is the world of unfortunate westerners rather than part of any 'east.'

I felt the author really glossed over the Turkish experience because it was 'too western' and restricted to an elite. Most of these movements were elites, and I hardly see Kemalism as more western than say early communism in Asia was.

Some minor quibbles should be mentioned too, like how a few dates are slightly off and how the Russo-Japanese War was hardly the first time since 'the middle ages' (a reference to the Golden Horde I imagine) an Asian or African power beat Europeans in a conventional war. Morocco decisively repulsed a renaissance Portuguese invasion, the Ottoman on and off creamed everybody until the 18th century, Sri Lanka gave some sailors a bloody surprise in the age of exploration, and Ming Dynasty loyalists under Coxinga drove the Dutch out of Taiwan entirely. Not to mention that the first Anglo-Asanti War ended in a stalemate which slightly looked better on the Asanti as late as the early 19th century, and that 17th century Japan and 18th century Madagascar would successfully drive missionaries out without repercussions (in that era at least).

But still, despite quibbles, I would add this and 'Liberalism: A Counter History' to my required reading list for any up and coming euphoric liberals/humanists who need a healthy dose of reality.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good concept, rocky execution. Too bad the first 300 pages aren't as coherent as the epilogue.

It reads as if Mishra did his research on old fashioned note cards, then shuffled them like Nabokov only without achieving any artistic or intellectual design, or as if he dropped the box as it was delivered to the printer and just stuffed the cards back in the box willy nilly. As a result, the reader is dropped into a pinball machine, ricocheting from one writer, country or year to another one without warning or transition. Time after time he writes two or three sentences about one person by last name, dropping him into the text as if the reader knows him well, then finally introduces him by his full name and mini-biography fifty pages later. The structure of the book purports to focus on Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Tagore, but it rockets all over. He starts a section and gets half-way through a thought about one of them and then dashes off twenty years and six degrees of separation to talk about someone else. It is just a terrible struggle to read.

When reviews of other histories talk about the author's ability to order his material, they are talking about the author's ability to avoid this kind of mess.

Still, Mishra does present a great deal of material. Too much for the size of the book, but he gives a sense of the breadth of thinking on the topics of imperialism and nationalism in Asia from about 1800 on. His epilogue is very good at finally giving an orderly structure to what he has presented. His three or four core thinkers went through an evolution of political philosophy as they aged, lived through wars and negotiations, and traveled abroad. While many Asian intellectuals wanted to Westernize as a way to gain the power and prestige to evict the Westerners, these men eventually, generally saw the Western nation state and industrial culture as inherently corrupt, and sought strength through a return to traditional Asian cultural values.

The epilogue, however, makes the claim that successful as many Asian countries now are, they don't have a true political philosophy that can provide a long-term, successful unifying principles for their peoples.

Also interesting is the point that the Japanese occupation of many Asian countries during WWII, as brutal and devastating as it was, enabled many of them to evict returning European powers after 1945 because revolutionary groups had gained some organization and creditability during those crucial years.

[Sumirti · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

They had failed to notice the intense desire for equality and dignity among peoples whom Europe's most influential thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to John Stuart Mill, had deemed unfit for self-rule — thinkers whose ideas, ironically, would in fact prove highly potent among these 'subject peoples'.

The books I value most are the ones that fill in the gaps in some particular paradigm shifting fashion, something that confronts what is commonly delivered as need-to-know and says, no, you're wrong, or, no you're harmful, or, no, you may have been useful for the sense of stability of a third grader, but not for grown adults who have grown into responsibility for the world around them. Much as I have major qualms with certain aspects of this work, Mishra continues a line of learning that in my reading experience has been preceded by Nehru's The Discovery of India, Farmaian's Daughter of Persia, Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and a number of others, fiction and on, that tell the tales of lands where many members of my communities hail from and to none of which I've been. My appraisal of this work rests less on its individual merits (which are indeed extraordinary) and more on how it functions in a continuum of coming into awareness that I have participated in for some time now. Much of it is simplistic as consequence of its broad scope and comparatively few pages in its monumental effort to essentially spoon feed a century of existence of more than half the globe to a different 20% of it, or whatever percentage white people make up of the world these days, and my rating is modified accordingly. My evaluation is also as much for Mishra's writing as for his plentiful bibliography and recommended reads, at least one of which I was gratified to see as already being on my shelf. Needless to say, I enjoy the sense that I'm on the right track.

'I think that when a woman's education is neglected, then even if all the males of a nation are learned and high-minded, still the nation is able to survive in its acquired stage only for that generation. When they disappear, their children, who have the character and educational deficiencies of their mothers, betray them, and their nation returns to the state of ignorance and distress.

-Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

This is not an introductory book by any means, and by the end, the text is a whirlwind of vaguely recognized and imminently recalled key terms that have floated around the peripherals of minds of folks subjected to the sort of propaganda that I encounter on a day to day basis. This is in part caused by Mishra moving away from his tack of following a few key and/or widely traveled historical figures, so I for one am grateful that he lent his readers that structure for most of this work. It allowed me to learn without being bowled over too much, and while his superficial jumping around grew inadequate at parts (his glossing over the Armenian genocide is why I downgraded the rating), I know have so much more context for Nehru, Mao, Saddam Hussein, Indira Gandhi, Japanese imperialism, Chinese communism, jihads, Islam, Aung San Suu Kyi, and so many others and so much else that I have piecemeal knowledge of and plan to pursue in much greater detail in the future. Needless to say, this has been an invigorating reading experience, and even Mishra's abject hypocrisy in touching on the violent failures of Japan and China without delving in to the means to an end of Turkey's comparative "success" can't completely ruin it for me (although I don't blame anyone for whom it does). It takes what is silently considered publicly permissible to pass over in my corner of the world and draws connections from one world shaking phenomenon to another: perhaps not as consistently or thoroughly as one would like, but still drawing certain conclusions in certain places in an objective enough manner for one to be able to easily apply such conclusions in other lands and eras. This is a book I can see myself consulting in the future for the sake of recommended reading, to the point that I may even keep this book rather than send it on its way like most others. We'll have to see.

Much of China would remain exposed to the vagaries of warlordism until 1927 — a situation made familiar to contemporary readers in pre-Taliban Afghanistan where arms from abroad flooded the country, old elites struck deals with military strongmen, and ordinary people suffered from arbitrary taxes and confiscations of property. Mao Zedong's native province of Hunan was particularly ravaged by rival warlords, and the bitter lessons of chaos and misrule would haunt future generations of Chinese.

'China's only crime' had been 'her weakness and her belief in international justice after the war [(WWI)]. If, driven to desperation she attempts something hopeless, those who have helped her to decide her fate cannot escape a part of the responsibility.'

—Liang Qichao

This goes on the small list of books (there's only one other work on it so far) from 2019 that may end up being an absolute favorite of mine, and that really does not happen too often these days. I have my qualms with it, but I got so much out of it that I'd hate to relegate it to the rest of the four stars, or even the five stars, that I normally pass through. I suppose, like anything worthwhile, it necessitates struggle, and I hope to be able to think back on this when I read works this book touches upon, such as the biography of Tagore that I have on hand, or the Arabic memoir of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt that was recommended to me by this work's bibliographic essay. I've spent so long on one side of the knowledge globe that I recognize when gaps are being filled, and any work that does that has my gratitude, critical as it needs be at times.

These great civilizations were at last run to death by men of the type of our precocious schoolboys of modern times, smart and superficially critical, worshippers of self, shrewd bargainers in the market of profit and power, efficient in their handling of the ephemeral, who...eventually, driven by suicidal forces of passion, set their neighbors' houses on fire and were themselves enveloped by flames.

-Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilization

[Iván · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gran libro sobre Asia y su relación con los antiguos imperios de Occidente. Ejemplos de varios países como India, China, Egipto, Irán y muchos otros. Interesantes los capítulos y las reflexiones sobre Oriente y Occidente por parte de intelectuales asiáticos del siglo XX. Me encanta como escribe Pankaj Mishra.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

The West has seen Asia through the narrow perspective of its own strategic and economic interests, leaving unexamined- and unimagined- the collective experience and subjectivities of the Asian people....This book seeks to open up multiple perspectives on the past and on the present, convinced that the assumptions of Western power- increasingly untenable- are no longer a reliable vantage point and may be dangerously misleading. from the prologue p8

Pankaj Mishra not only expands on these intentions, by so doing he exposes the poverty of our vaunted Western education system by revealing worlds that we at best have read about in footnotes.
His global perspective adds weight to his words when he comes to draw his conclusions.

White men, conscious of their burden, changed the world forever, subjecting it's great diversity to their own singular outlook. and in the process reducing potentially rich encounters with other peoples ...into monologues. P294

PM is brilliant at conveying the many voices so long lost in the disorder. This is not a casual book, and demands careful attention, especially for those of us who are unfamiliar with the material. In contrast to most of his other books, which reflected years of careful editing, this book felt somewhat disjointed and perhaps hastily assembled. This, in my guess, is a reflection of the urgency of the time and the necessity of reeducating ourselves all around the circle.

Those who say religion has nothing to do do with politics do not know what religion means. 270
quote attributed to Ghandi

[Breakingviews · Rating 3 out of 5]

By Edward Hadas

“What is the cause of the poverty, indigence, helplessness and distress of the Muslims, and is there a cure for this important phenomenon and great misfortune?”

The question was asked in 1880 by the Persian intellectual and activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Around that time, thinkers from India, China and other lands which had been literally or metaphorically colonised by the industrial nation-states of Europe were asking similar questions about their own degraded peoples. In “From the Ruins of Empire”, Indian-British writer Pankaj Mishra provides a lively narrative of the discussion about how to respond to “the West”. As he points out, the debate continues today.

The theme is impossibly large, since each colonised culture and colonial power has its own story. The quite different 20th and 21st century histories of, say, Japan and Egypt show the danger of making generalisations about conditions in the 19th century. Still, in every losing land, the colonialists inspired a mixture of fear, admiration, fascination and fury. Each intellectual from what would later be called the developing world had to struggle with the tempting new ideas, oppressive politics, intellectual hypocrisy and the crude power of history’s apparent winners.

Mishra provides a readable and often illuminating introduction. As he admits, he is not a great scholar – he rarely refers to primary sources and frequently relies on other secondary works. He is more of a clever journalist, but his use of a journalistic technique, to focus on a few key men, including al-Afghani and the Chinese politician and thinker Liang Qichao, works well.

Al-Afghani’s trajectory exemplifies the challenges of clashing civilisations. He consistently disliked the colonial powers, especially the British with their self-serving rhetoric. But his ideas about how best to respond changed as he moved around the world, including stays in Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt and Europe.

At first, he was tempted by those who wished to discard most of the old ways - the secularising and modernising approach which was to prevail in Turkey after the First World War and in China after the Second. Later, he became more sceptical of Western ways, sympathising with the complaint of the Ottoman intellectual Namik Kemal, who said that blind modernisation left ordinary people “stranded, materially and spiritually”, while the elite became only superficially modern: “frequenting ballrooms, being liberal about the infidelities of one’s wife and using European toilets”.

As he grew older, Al-Afghani lost faith in the ability of colonised people to create Western-style modern states which were strong enough to stand up to Western military and economic pressure. Although personally something of a religious sceptic - he had read European philosophers - he decided that Islam could become a liberating political force. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the leaders of the 1979 Iranian revolution were influenced by his argument that politics and religion needed to be closely integrated to resist the corrosive influence of the West.

In the world that Mishra describes, the temptations of the West were great indeed. It offered not only potent technology but the ideal of human equality, the clarity of rational thinking and the practicality of strong governments ruling well organised societies. In contrast, the traditional Asian wisdom often looked like ignorance and traditional authorities looked oppressive and ineffective.

In that world, though, the West was also repulsive. Racism was standard, the colonial powers were cruel and even such enlightened leaders as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson did not think the principle of national self-determination extended to the colonies and near-colonies which accounted for most of the world’s population. The West’s material and military success was also widely judged to by spiritually empty and doomed to end in violent self-destruction. Chinese thinker Yan Fu said, “Western progress…has led only to selfishness, slaughter, corruption and shamelessness.”

The chaos of World War Two seemed to confirm that judgment. When the colonial powers withdrew after that conflagration, the leaders of newly independent countries had no good examples to follow. They and their successors have struggled to reconcile old and new - forms of government, economic arrangement and ways of thinking.

Mishra ends with a brief discussion of the latest developments in the continuing struggle to be both modern and Asian or Moslem. His conclusion is a good starting point for a longer discussion. On one side, “The rise of Asia…consummates the revolt against the West that began more than a century ago.” On the other, there has been “an immense intellectual failure… Much of the ’emerging’ world now stands to repeat, on an ominously larger scale, the West’s own tortured and often tragic experience of modern ’development’.”

[Dilip Varma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Victorian era is considered to be a golden period for Europe that saw immense economic growth in the region. It drew its strength from the Industrial Revolution and converted small European countries into huge empires through rapid colonialization of Asiatic peoples. In the book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra looks at this period through the eyes of the people on the other side. The Asians who saw their empires, economies and beliefs destroyed by the invading Europeans.

Mishra presents this period through the works of various intellectuals of that time from places such as Japan, China, India, Persia, Turkey and Egypt. Though he discusses the views of many personalities, the author chooses to focus on the works of two remarkable persons; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Liang Qichao who are relatively unknown to casual readers of today like me. For a book that re-interprets century old works of others, the originality of the author shines through the strikingly cohesive pan Asian view on Western imperialism, culture and Asian future that he is able to evolve. Mishra also presents an interesting perspective about Japan, a country that according to some, wanted to leave Asia and join the West. In spite of this, the author argues that the resurrection of Asian peoples was inspired by the Japanese rout of Tsarist Russia in a naval battle of 1905 and finally hastened by the humiliation of almost all European powers by the same Japan at the start of the second World War.

The book comprises of analysis of events that occurred during the period under focus and works of influential people who lived in that time. The first chapter on al-Afghani is an odyssey in itself and can feel a bit dragging. You will also see the same or similar ideas being espoused by multiple people at various points in the book. Still, you cannot fail to be impressed by the amount of research that has gone into writing this book. A book that is definitely a prized addition to a reader's personal library.

[Laika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yet another work of nonfiction I picked up because an intriguing-sounding quote from it went viral on tumblr. This was the fifth history book I’ve read this year, but the first that tries very consciously to be an intellectual history. Both an interesting and a frustrating read – my overall opinion went back and forth a few times both as I read and as I put together this review.

The book is ostensibly a history of Asia’s intellectual response to European empire’s sudden military and economic superiority and political imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it’s focus and sympathy is overwhelmingly with what it calls ‘middle ground’ responses (i.e. neither reactionary traditionalism nor unthinking westernization). It structures this as basically a series of biographies of notable intellectual figures from the Islamic World, China and India from throughout the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries - Liang Qichao and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani get star bidding and by far the most focus, with Rabindranath Tagore a distant third and a whole scattering of more famous personages further below him.

The central thesis of the book is essentially that the initial response of most rich, ancient Asian societies to sudden European dominance (rung in by the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt and the British colonization of India) was denial, followed (once European guns and manufactured goods made this untenable) by a deep sense of inferiority and humiliation. This sense of inferiority often resulted in attempts by ruling elites and intellectuals to abandon their own traditions and westernize wholesale (the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, the New Culture Movement in China, etc), but at the same time different intellectual currents responded to the crisis by synthesizing their own visions of modernity, and tried to construct a new world with a centre other than the West.

I will be honest, my first and most fundamental issue with this book is that I just wish it was something it wasn’t. Which is to say, it is a resolutely intellectual and idealist history, convinced of the power of ideas and rhetoric as the engine for changing the world. Which means that the biography of one itinerant revolutionary is exhaustively followed so as to trace the evolution of his world-historically important thoughts, but the reason the Tanzimat Reforms failed is just brushed aside as having something to do with europhile bureaucrats building opera houses in Istanbul. Not at all hyperbole to say I’d really rather it was actually the exact opposite – the latter is just a much more interesting subject!

Not that the biographies aren’t interesting! They very much are, and do an excellent job of getting across just how interconnected the non-Western (well, largely Islamic and to a lesser extent Sino-Pacific) world was in the early/mid-19th century, and even moreso how late 19th/early 20th century globalization was not at all solely a western affair. They’re also just fascinating in their own right, the personalities are larger than life and the archetype of the globe-trotting polyglot intelligentsia is one I’ve always found very compelling. While I complain about the lack of detail, the book does at least acknowledge the social and economic disruptions that even purely economic colonialism created, and the impoverishment that created the social base the book’s subjects would eventually try to arouse and organize. And, even if I wish they were all dug into in far more detail, the book’s narrative is absolutely full of fascinating anecdotes and episodes I want to read about in more detail now.

Which is a problem with the book that it’s probably fairer to hold against it – it’s ostensible subject matter could fill libraries, and so to fit what it wants to into a readable 400-page volume, it condenses, focuses, filters and simplifies to the point of myopia. Which, granted, is the stereotypical historian’s complaint about absolutely anything that generalizes beyond the level of an individual village or commune, but still.
This isn’t at all helped but the overriding sense that this was a book that started with the conclusion and then went back looking for evidence to support its thesis and create a narrative. Which is a shame, because the section on the post-war and post-decolonization world is by far the sloppiest and least convincing, in large part because you can feel the friction of the author trying to make their thesis fit around the obvious objections to it.

Which is to say, the book draws a line on the evolution of Asian thought through trying to westernize/industrialize/nationalize and compete with the west on it’s own terms (in the book’s view) a more authentic and healthy view that rejects the western ideals of materialism and nationalism into something more spiritual, humane, and cosmopolitan, with Gandhi kind of the exemplar of this kind of view. It tries to portray this anti-materialistic worldview as the ideology of the future, the natural belief system of Asia which Europe and America can hope to learn from. It then, ah, lets say struggles to to find practical evidence of this in modern politics or economics, lets say (the Islamic Republic of Iran and Edrogan’s Turkey being the closest). It is also very insistent that ‘westernization’ is a false god that can never work, which is an entirely reasonable viewpoint to defend but if you are then you really gotta remember that Japan/South Korea/Taiwan like, exist while going through all the more obvious failures. One is rather left feeling that Mishra is trying to speak an intellectual hegemony into existence, here. (The constant equivocation and discomfort when bringing up socialism – the materialistic western export par excellence, but also perhaps somewhat important in 20th century Asian intellectual life – also just got aggravating).

It’s somewhere between interesting and bleakly amusing that modernity and liberal democracy have apparently been discredited and ideologically exhausted for more than one hundred years now! Truly we are ruled by the ideals of the dead.

I could honestly complain about the last chapter at length – the characterization of Islam as somehow more deeply woven in and inextricable from Muslim societies than any other religion and the resultant implicit characterization of secular government as necessarily western intellectual colonialism is a big one – but it really is only a small portion of the book, so I’ll restrain myself. Though the casual mention of the failures of secular and socialist post-colonial nation-building projects always just reminds me of reading The Jakarta Method and makes me sad.

So yeah! I felt significantly more positively about the book before I sat down and actually organized my thoughts about it. Not really sure how to take that.

[Hamza Sarfraz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is part narrative history and part intellectual biography. It succeeds on both accounts by introducing us, in an accessible manner, to some of the most important but undervalued Asian thinkers of the past two centuries. Through their works and journeys, we get multiple powerful critiques of modernity and a peek into the kind of intellectual activity that underpinned Asian politics and society. This book shows how Asian thinkers responded to imperialism and a rapidly changing world and how they linked tradition to modernity. Though many of their ideas may feel strange, there is a powerful social history embedded inside those very ideas. The scope of this book is spread across a huge geographic space and across time. Worth a read.

[Iris · Rating 3 out of 5]

in high school i was taught that the west was the evil actor who forever altered and coerced the third world, and while this is obviously a huge improvement from the white man's burden thesis that viewed colonialism as benevolent, it fails to give the colonized subjects much agency. through a historical narrative that primarily follows two leading Asian thinkers, but also introduces several others, Mishra demonstrates the inspirations, logics, and motivations behind intellectual movements in Asia and how they *transformed.* the key point is that the thinkers *did* change their mind and often disagreed with each other -- my freshman year of college, i took a history course called Pacific World that introduced me to the self-strengthening movements of Asia and Japan's modernization, but it did not cover them in as much nuance as this book. moreover, mishra made me think of japanese colonialism in a new light. as a chinese-american, i have always viewed japanese colonialism in a very black-and-white lens, so i was surprised to find so many asian leaders who were *inspired* by japan's initial successes and agreed with the broader goal of a pan-asian empire. now, i won't say japanese colonialism was good (obviously it wasn't), but this book taught me a lot that my eurocentric history courses did not.
that being said, i also think mishra makes a lot of sweeping claims in the last few chapters that are unwarranted, based on his own (quite biased) assumptions, particularly regarding china's recent aggressiveness. saying china is aggressive is not what i have a problem with; rather, in several important paragraphs that *need* citations, there just aren't any. this contrasts with the first half of the book, which is filled with citations and quotations that made his argument much more convincing.

[Haaris Mateen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling modern history of Asia that narrates the deeply felt dissonance, disenchantment and disillusionment of a wave of thinkers from the Ottoman Empire to China and Japan as they tackled the reasons for the decline of their respective traditional orders and looked to reclaiming their place and dignity in the international arena of their times, and beyond.

Mishra makes two important points, neither of which are new but which seem remarkable in the consistency with which they apply in very different milieus, roughly around the same period. First, to understand the present, one needs to understand history and, in particular, a history narrated by the people who, as unwilling recipients, actually felt the turmoil and chaos of the period of rampant imperialist expansion of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a phase interspersed with dashed hopes and betrayed promises.

Second, ideas matter. They may be initially shunted away by the powers that be or they may be rejected by the masses held in thrall by possibly antithetical narratives. Still, the ideas take a life of their own; they guide a new generation of thinkers and doers who may choose to build on these foundations, or mangle them for their own ends. The ideas metamorphose; they mutate. And they determine events far removed from the moment when, and reasons why, their genesis actually occurred.

It's a decent book but it does pick topics that may appeal only to serious readers of world history. Its primary merit is its ability to synthesize disparate fields of scholarship into a coherent thesis and so, it serves as an excellent source of knowledge and understanding, especially for a new-comer to the area. As with all history books, it does venture into the realm of informed predictions, and, as is generally the case, one may question these inferences. The last drawback is that it does not -- probably cannot due to its sheer breadth -- go into primary source material so I leave the door open to more informed criticism by those who have (genuinely) delved deeper into each individual history.

[Abhishek Shekhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Brown Man's Burden is to correct the mistakes done by White Man's burden ? Well looks like that what's the book about. A difficult to read hard to comprehend and random copy paste with excerpts from multitude of books breaks the theme and flow of thoughts just developed to make some sense from the random rumblings of restless mind of the author, there's no rhyme no rhythm whatsoever. Not sure why author picked Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liand and Tagore or could he have focused on one of them or may be have come up with some originality. What a safe player not giving and showing his opinion but just putting what others view could have been on it. Overall a good read but not recommended to anyone.

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Commenting on a nineteenth-century revolt in Egypt, The Times wrote, with typical English understatement, that "a native opinion exists... and is not to be entirely ignored."
It is this "native opinion" of Western high imperialism, still obscure to Westerners, that is the topic of this book.
Departing from the personal trajectories of three Asian intellectuals (Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao, and Rabindranath Tagore), Mishra lays out the conflicts, upheavals, and disappointments that fed their lives of struggle and their shifting, creative responses to a ruthless imperialist world. Instead of presenting a clear-cut verdict on several centuries of wrenching change across a vast area, the author seeks to render the experiences of Asians themselves in all their complexity, from the bitter irony of the Japanese failure to beat the West at its own blood-soaked game, to the descent of secularizing modernization programmes into naked despotism in Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. Women are largely absent in the narrative, and glaring omissions such as the Armenian genocide when discussing Turkey are puzzling, but the project succeeds overall, and is a valuable antidote to the Niall Fergusons and Samuel Huntingtons of this world.

[Kiran Mudumba · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book makes you realize how less you knew about the ideological, intellectual, and cultural turmoil that entire Asia went through during the european colonization, besides the moral, physical and economical suffering. It covers the kind of details that we should all have read in high school...
.....so we would have come to respect more our freedom....
......so we would have gotten the true picture of the west that we only encountered in books and movies and glorified
....... so we wud have grown thankful to the likes of Gandhis and Tagores for saving India from going the same way as the rest of Asia... for saving us from turning into religious fundamentalists, anglophiles, communists, and violent nationalists for the sake of freedom from the white peril.
While the middle east still struggles to free itself from the same military imperialists, we the free countries of Asia are again heading towards a new form of imperialism - corporate imperialism, headed by MNCs which will sooner or later have the same effect on our rural populations as the previous colonization. Alas, this time we don't have any Gandhi or Tagore to save us.

[Aditya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be taught at the University level at all history courses in the country. A fantastic example of well written, nuanced, yet polemical history writing, which while a little overwhelming in places still manages to educate and open up a much needed perspective regarding how Asian societies should learn to think about themselves, their histories and their places in the world.