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From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia Kindle Edition
by Pankaj Mishra (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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From Pankaj Mishra, author the successful Temptations of the West and Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, comes a provocative account of how China, India and the Muslim World are remaking the world in their own image.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2013
The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a vast intellectual effort would be required.
Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy. Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia and created the ideas which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century.
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Well-researched and crisply written, this scintillating work will help American readers understand the political and intellectual roots of Islamism and other non- and anti-Western thought in Asia today.-- "Publishers Weekly Starred Review"
About the Author
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review, and writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.
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ASIN : B008AUGJ02
Publisher : Penguin (2 August 2012)
Language : English
File size : 4560 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
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Print length : 316 pages
Page numbers source ISBN : 0241954673Best Sellers Rank: 323,085 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)336 in History of India
358 in Colonialism & Post-Colonialism (Books)
466 in History of ChinaCustomer Reviews:
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S.Plaum
5.0 out of 5 stars as ever good qualityReviewed in Germany on 10 September 2024
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on time ans nice quality
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José Macaya
5.0 out of 5 stars Refleja cómo se ve la relación entre Oriente y Occidente desde el OrienteReviewed in Spain on 10 December 2022
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Interesante obra que refleja cómo se ve la relación entre Oriente y Occidente desde el Oriente. Repaso del actuar colonial de Occidente en esa zona en los siglos XIX y XX y el resquemor acumulado que persiste hasta hoy, que está muy presente en el actuar actual de China e India. Interesante el repaso del islam, que está muy vivo, evolucionando y con el respaldo electoral de sus poblaciones. Muchos países se han modernizado y occidente los sigue despreciando, lo que los acerca a China y Rusia.
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maria
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read. A truly illuminating book, beautifully written and hard to put downReviewed in Italy on 27 July 2022
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A must read. A truly illuminating book, beautifully written and hard to put down
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kevan rudling
5.0 out of 5 stars History As You Like ItReviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 March 2017
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Having read and enjoyed The Age of Anger I looked forward to this book with high expectation and was not wholly disappointed. It is a good read; interesting, provocative and instructive in parts. However throughout Mishra furiously waves his Romantic prejudices and that does get a bit tedious but I give it five stars nonetheless if only for it's manifest, unabashed one-sidedness spares the reader from wasting too much time worrying about the narrative's historical fidelity.
Writing history is a rather like playing with Leggo, there is an assortment of historical Leggo facts and these can be assembled in a myriad of ways. As in Leggo the builder has a structure in mind and assembles his pieces, emphasizing this feature while disparaging others, as suits his purpose. In this regard Mishra's narrative is anything but subtle; a reader needs to believe the author is being even-handed, that he doesn't have an axe to grind and Mishra spectacularly fails to do this as attested to in the other reviews, moreover his largely unqualified counterfactual in suggesting that everything would have been much better if ... merely serve to highlight the purposeful nature of Mishra's thesis viz an East oppressed and corrupted by a rapacious and evil West. The truth, as ever, is far more nuanced than Mishra's bipolar account, in effect we are, by nature, given the means and opportunity . as bad as each other.
When writing a history having a preconceived notion before assembling the facts is of course a natural precondition but if the facts have to be so highly contorted in order to fit together as in Mishra's thesis then the resulting structure, while perhaps novel and entertaining, has little academic worth other than reminding the reader that while Asia has evolved Islam remains a basket case wherever it prevails and little has changed in the Muslim outlook from the days of al- Afghani and the Mahdi aka Muhammad Ahmad.
Mishra's dreamy people's utopia is just that; in reality, Western Capitalism is ultimately a destructive and decadent enterprise only marginally less so than Communism, Nationalism and Islamism.
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TB
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book! Well researchedReviewed in Canada on 29 April 2015
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Excellent book! Well researched, and providing a fresh and disturbing perspective of the colonisation of Asia and the consequences of it in todays world.
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Zanna
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December 28, 2017
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!
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Dmitri
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September 29, 2024
"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.
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William2
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January 5, 2013
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.
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Vuk Trifkovic
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May 19, 2013
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.
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Muhammad Ahmad
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February 3, 2013
[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.
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Omar Ali
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December 23, 2017
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).
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Martha
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March 6, 2017
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.
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Randal Samstag
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May 6, 2019
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.
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Jeff
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December 14, 2012
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.
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Marks54
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March 17, 2017
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.
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