《제국의 폐허에서》From The Ruins Of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

(9) Facebook

Sejong Park

7 tFSebhperuahlonsroyungtuomriSu 20r1nead8  · 

김시덕 선생께서 클럽장을 맡은 트레바리 독서 모임 '근대아시아'에서 

《제국의 폐허에서》를 함께 읽고 있다. 몇몇 다른 책을 겹쳐 읽으며 이야기를 나눈다. 

이 책은 근대 세계를 아시아의 시각에서 바라보려 한 책이다. 물론 그 주요 대상은 서구 독자겠다. 저자가 서구에 잘 알려지지 않은 아시아 사상가들("두 주역"은 알아프가니, 량치차오다)의 지적 여정을 중심으로 책을 서술했다고 밝혔으니 말이다. 

하지만 근대 아시아 역사에 익숙하지 않기로는 한국의 여건 역시 크게 다르지는 않을 것이다. 한때 '극동(Far East)'이라는 정체성을 스스럼 없이 수용했을 만큼 서구, 특히 미국 중심의 역사 해석에 익숙한데다, 근현대사를 이해하는 데 있어 친일과 항일의 이분법 프레임이 가장 손쉽게 다가오니 말이다. 

'범아시아주의'나 아시아연대론이 일본을 중심으로 전개되었으니 이러한 시각에서 아시아사를 바라보는 일은 친일사관의 프레임에 걸려들기 십상이다. 이 책은 그러니 실상 한국 바깥의 아시아에서(저자는 인도 태생 저술가다) 당시의 아시아를 어떻게 이해했는가, 이해하는가를 엿볼 수 있는 단서가 되겠다.

'근대화'가 시대적 사명이자 소명의 단계에 오른 19-20세기. 힘의 논리가 최우선순위에 놓인 사회진화론이 광범위한 설득력을 지녔다. 외래의 힘, 다시 말해 서구의 압도적인 무력과 공업·상업력 앞에서 아시아의 사상가·정치가·활동가들은 다양한 갈래의 반응을 보였다. 

"전통에 충실"함으로써 강해질 수 있다는 "반동적 신념"으로, 혹은 "전통"에 입각해 "서구의 몇 가지 기술"만을 받아들이는 "온건한 입장"으로, 또는 "옛 생활방식을 송두리째 혁신"하는 경로가 제시됐다. 

사람들은 한 입장만을 고수하기보다는 내면과 환경의 변화에 따라 여러 신념체계를 교차했다. 힘은 두려움과 동시에 부러움의 대상이었다. 약육강식 논리가 만연한 세계에서 침략과 개화, 수탈과 자선은 서로 뒤섞였다. 사태의 이해가 단순화될 수 없는 이유다.

아시아는 서구의 충격에 직면하여 좌절했고 뒤이어 일본의 발빠른 근대화를 바라보며 각성했다. 

책의 머리말은 이렇게 시작한다. "현대 세계는 1905년 5월의 이틀 동안 쓰시마 해협의 좁은 물길에서 결정적인 형태를 갖추기 시작했다." 서구라는 외래의 강자에 대항하기 위해 아시아의 많은 지식인들은 지역의 강자인 일본을 중심으로 뭉쳐야 한다고 생각했다. 일본을 중심으로 한 범아시아주의가 설득력을 얻어감과 동시에 서구 열강의 경로를 답습하는 일본의 제국주의도 함께 강력해졌다. 시모노세키 조약으로 독립국이 된 조선은 중화제국 체제에서 떨어져나와 현실주의 국제정치의 세계에 그대로 내던져졌다. 

일각에서는 군주가 '민국'을 즐겨 입에 올렸다느니 서울에 노면전차가 다녔다느니 하는 주장을 펼친다. '졌지만 잘 싸웠다'는 걸까? 그러나 대황제는 "무한하온 군권을 향유"('대한국 국제')했고 변변한 간선철도망조차 놓이지 않았다. 이 시기를 바라보는 데 빈번히 쓰이는 렌즈, '친일/항일 프레임'은 전후 성립된 '대한민국'이라는 국가의 통합된 정체성을 확립하기 위한 사후적 도구로는 유용했다. 하지만 이는 당대의 맥락을 이해하려는 시도를 가로막는 장벽이기도 하다.

책의 두 주역 알아프가니와 량치차오는 급변하는 세계사의 흐름 속에서 전통, 혁신, 절충의 사상을 오갔다. 알아프가니는 이슬람 세계를 오가며, 또한 위의 세 입장을 오가며 근대 아시아를 살았던 인물이다. 현대 중동의 이념지형과 정치지형이 형성되는 데 상당히 기여했던, 혹은 적어도 그러한 형성의 기저에 깔린 원인에 폭넓게 천착했던 인물이다. 그의 폭넓은 사상의 범위는 알아프가니가 현재 이슬람 세계의 종파 차이를 막론하고 추앙받는 존재가 되게 했다. 

량치차오는 유교적 전통에서 성장했으나 일본의 영향을 받아 그 전통에서 벗어났고, 진보와 힘을 신봉하게 되었다. 그러면서도 근대화과정에 내재한 양면성을 인식했다. 열강의 제국주의가 통치자의 야심만이 아닌 피통치자들의 동의에도 기반한다는 점을 간파했다. 강한 국가건설을 과제로 내세웠으며, 이것이 민주주의 국가를 자임하는 서구에서도 국가형성기에 벌어진 일이었음을 포착했다. 1차대전에서 저질러진 막대한 규모의 파괴와 전쟁 뒤 '민족자결주의'가 실현되지 않은 데 대한 배신감으로, 량치차오는 유교로 되돌아간다. 그는 급진적 이념과 온건한 지향을 오가기는 했으나 줄곧 '자애로운 전제정'을 목표로 삼았던 듯싶다. 이는 후일 장개석과 모택동에 의해 각기 다른 방면으로 계승될 것이었다. 신해혁명 이후 파편화된 국가에서, 항일전쟁과 국공내전을 거치며 장개석은 국가 상부구조를, 모택동은 인민의 토대를 형성했던 것이다(레이 황, «장제스 일기를 읽다»). 

침략과 혁명과 전쟁을 통해 국가와 국민이 울퉁불퉁한 길을 따라가며 주조되었다. 범아시아인, 반反만주 한족 집단, 광의의 '중화민족', 혁명적 인민 등 여러 정체성이 각축을 벌였다. 이러한 정체성의 경쟁을 친일과 항일과 같은 느슨한 이분법으로 포괄할 수는 없다. 

찰스 틸리는 (서구) 국민국가의 형성과정이 전쟁과 전쟁 준비에서 촉발되었다는 유명한 테제를 남겼다. 전쟁비용을 충당하기 위해 국가는 국민을 통합했고, 국민에 손을 벌렸고 그 대가로 일정한 권리를 부여했다. 국민과 민족은 전적으로 자유롭고 민주적이며 평화로운 방식으로 형성된 바 없다. 

아시아에서 국민의식과 민족의식은 제국주의적 식민관계에서 대두했다. 본래 ‘필리핀인’은 필리핀에서 태어난 스페인인, 즉 크리올을 의미하는 것이었다. 필리핀인이라는 단어가 여러 부족으로 나뉜 토착민을 묶어주는 개념으로 바뀐 것은 식민본국 및 다른 식민지 해방운동과의 교류와 투쟁의 결과였다(베네딕트 앤더슨, «세 깃발 아래에서»). 

사회다윈주의의 각축장에서 아시아 사람들은 자신을 신분이 아닌 민족으로 묶어내기 시작했으며, '자강'을 위해 노력했고, 그 갈등과 협력의 과정에서 오늘날의 세계가 모습을 드러냈다. '세계 유일의 (민족) 분단국가'라는 오해 속에서는 포착하기 어려운 세계.

아래는 트레바리X커넥츠북 다독캠페인 이벤트 참여를 위한 태그. 

#커넥츠북 #트레바리 #다독캠페인 #콜라보인증 #북스타그램

---

From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra – review

An engaging study explores Asia's intellectual response to western imperialism

Emir Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia

Emir Faisal’s (front) delegation at the Versailles peace conference of 1919, including Lawrence of Arabia (to Faisal’s left). Photograph: Corbis

Ben Shephard

Sun 5 Aug 2012 09.05 AEST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/05/ruins-empire-pankaj-mishra-review

The Asian world was in crisis in the late 19th century. From China to India to Turkey, societies that had stood largely unchanged for centuries were powerless to resist western armies and commerce. Appalled by the vulgarity and materialism of the white barbarians, eastern elites nonetheless recognised that something would have to be done. But what? In this erudite and engaging book, Pankaj Mishra identifies three main strands in the Asian response to the threat of western modernism: reactionaries who believed that the continent's long-standing religious traditions would ultimately prevail; moderates who wanted to cherry-pick from the western toolkit while leaving their own societies largely unchanged; and revolutionaries such as Atatürk and Mao Zedong who thought that nothing less than radical secularisation and a new ideology would galvanise their societies to compete in the modern world.

What gives From the Ruins of Empire its charm and richness of texture, however, is that its main focus is not on major players such as Gandhi and Mao, but on two little-known and seemingly ineffectual intellectuals whose writings would inspire later generations. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was a comparable figure to Alexander Herzen or Karl Marx: a peripatetic journalist, teacher and agitator, working in cafes, mosques and homes, expelled in turn from Afghanistan, India, Turkey and Egypt between 1860 and 1900. A contradictory and inconsistent thinker who tailored his ideas and his wardrobe to local circumstances, al-Afghani was a Persian-born Shia Muslim who pretended to be a Sunni from Afghanistan, and in his early days a liberal – critical of the fanaticism and political tyranny that held back many Islamic societies and an advocate of education for women. He "preached the necessity of reconsidering the whole Islamic position and, instead of clinging to the past, of making an onward intellectual movement in harmony with modern knowledge". But he never wavered in his hatred of the British and in his later years became an Islamic ideologue, advocating armed struggle and violent resistance – though not, as with Osama bin Laden, terror. Al-Afghani's only political achievement was to organise a smoking boycott which forced the Shah of Persia to cancel a tobacco monopoly granted to a foreign company. He died prematurely in 1897, a bitter and disappointed man. Yet his legacy was enormous: he coined the vocabulary of 20th-century anti-western Islamic rhetoric.

Six years after al-Afghani's death, the Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao visited the United States for the first time. As someone who believed that China must make a radical break with Confucianism, he was hoping to find inspiration. Instead he was appalled by the inequalities in wealth and the political corruption he witnessed; the squalid tenements of New York and the way that white Americans treated their black and Chinese fellow citizens. American democracy, he decided, did not provide the model for China. "No more am I dizzy with vain imaginings," he wrote. "No longer will I tell a tale of pretty dreams. In a word, the Chinese people must for now accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom." But perhaps, in 20, 30 or 50 years' time, he added, it might be possible to "give them Rousseau to read, and speak to them of Washington".

Prophetic words – no wonder Liang would influence Mao Zedong. Yet Liang's involvement in practical politics proved as disastrous as al-Afghani's. He was eclipsed by Sun Yatsen during the Chinese revolution of 1911 and, in the chaos that followed, threw in his lot with a corrupt warlord. His last significant act was to form part of the Chinese delegation to the Versailles peace conference, which vainly urged President Wilson to dismantle the western empire in the east, a rebuff that led many Asian intellectuals to turn to Moscow and communism – most famously, Ho Chi Minh, who had hired a morning suit in the hopes of seeing the American president. By then, however, the carnage and savagery of the first world war had taken much of the lustre off western materialism and worship of science: in hindsight, western hegemony in the far east was doomed. Japan's attempt to become an imperial power herself, having once been the patron of Asian nationalism, only accelerated that process.

When he reaches the interwar period, Mishra shifts gear, away from intellectual biography towards historical essay. He gives an excellent outline of the different paths to modernity taken by the main Asian countries, managing to keep thematic control of increasingly divergent narratives, though he does stud the text with too many names that are unfamiliar to the western reader. Just when it seems that Mishra will end in full triumphalist mode, he concludes in a final twist that, while Asian societies have by and large got their revenge for their past humiliations, they have in the process lost many of the values which once distinguished them. Both India and China now have the inequalities of wealth that so disturbed visitors to the west a hundred years ago.

As his hatchet job on Niall Ferguson in the London Review of Books last year showed, Mishra is no mean polemicist, but he is also an intellectual historian who can skilfully paint in background, simplify boldly to open up broad perspectives on the past, and popularise without condescension. Of course, a book of this scope has to be selective – one major omission is the impact of oil on modern Islamic society – but overall it gives a voice to characters often ignored by western historians and makes an eloquent contribution to the "west versus the rest" debate.








---
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
3.98 · Rating details · 1,889 ratings · 246 reviews

A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world

     A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent’s anticipated rise to dominance. 

     Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers—Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire—are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia’s revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia.

 

    Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From The Ruins Of Empire is as necessary as it is timely—a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

(less)

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published September 4th 2012 by Doubleday Canada (first published January 1st 2012)

Original TitleFrom the Ruins of Empire

ISBN0385676107 (ISBN13: 9780385676106)

Edition LanguageEnglish

URLhttp://us.macmillan.com/fromtheruinsofempire/PankajMishra

Literary AwardsLionel Gelber Prize Nominee (2013), Orwell Prize Nominee (2013), Crossword Book Award for Non Fiction (2013), Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (2014)

Other Editions (29)

February 7, 2020 – Shelved

Review Write a review

 

comment

FRIEND REVIEWS

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Zanna

Dec 13, 2013Zanna rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

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! (less)

flag50 likes · Like  · comment · see review

William2

Sep 08, 2012William2 rated it liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: race, 21-ce, india, empire-post-colonial, nonfiction, intellectuals, history

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. (less)

flag36 likes · Like  · 7 comments · see review

Vuk Trifkovic

May 12, 2013Vuk Trifkovic rated it it was ok

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. (less)

flag16 likes · Like  · 2 comments · see review

Muhammad Ahmad

Jul 19, 2012Muhammad Ahmad rated it it was amazing

Shelves: politics, afghanistan, middle-east, pakistan, sociology, history, colonialism, imperialism, international-relations, philosophy

[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. (less)

flag15 likes · Like  · comment · see review

Martha

Mar 05, 2017Martha rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, world, reviews, social-commentary

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.

(less)

flag10 likes · Like  · 5 comments · see review

Omar Ali

Dec 17, 2013Omar Ali rated it did not like it

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).

(less)

flag8 likes · Like  · comment · see review

Jeff

Oct 22, 2012Jeff rated it it was amazing

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. (less)

flag8 likes · Like  · comment · see review

Randal Samstag

Aug 12, 2018Randal Samstag rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

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. (less)