From the Ruins of Empire

By Pankaj Mishra,

Book cover of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

Book description

A Financial Times and The Economist Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A SURPRISING, GRIPPING NARRATIVE DEPICTING THE THINKERS WHOSE IDEAS SHAPED CONTEMPORARY CHINA, INDIA, AND THE MUSLIM WORLD

A little more than a century ago, independent thinkers across Asia sought to…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked From the Ruins of Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

What motivated the great Asian desire to rebuild and revitalize their societies? The simple answer is centuries of humiliation at the hands of the West. Pankaj Mishra tells remarkable stories of how Asians were both humiliated and educated by the West. Every Western policymaker should read his story about how the British and French forces looted and burned the Summer Palace, destroying more ancient treasures than the Taliban ever did.

Pankaj Mishra describes well the emergence of a key generation of Asian intellectuals inspired by Japan’s naval triumph over Russia in 1905, including Rabindranath Tagore and Liang Qichao. American policymakers…

From Kishore's list on the Asian 21st Century.

Published a decade after the events of 9/11, Mishra’s challenging book goes a long way to explaining the response to imperialism of indigenous activists and thinkers, not just in the Middle East, but across Asia. The story begins with Japan’s 1905 defeat of Russia and builds through biographies of original nineteenth and early twentieth-century figures like the Iranian reformer Jalal al-Din al-Afghani and China’s “first iconic modern intellectual” Liang Qichao. From Pan-Asianism, through commitment to their respective countries’ modernization, Asia’s "thinkers, journalists, radicals and charismatics emerged from the ruins of empire to create an unstoppable Asian renaissance."

This is a different kind of history. Rather than retelling the story of colonial conquest and incursion, Pankaj Mishra focuses instead on how colonised societies processed the political and cultural trauma of their encounter with imperialism. Asian thinkers are at the centre of this book, and their attempts to explain, and answer, the rise of the West from the perspectives of their own societies – India, China, or Japan – forms its central axis. This could be an obscure study, but Mishra’s style, sharp and incisive, ensures that it’s not.

From Cees' list on East Asia in the age of empire.

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