From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra
A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian navy 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 Yat-sen 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 anti-colonial tradition. But, in this stereotype-shattering book, Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise. 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 anti-modern, neither colonialist nor anti-colonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goals.
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.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2012
THIS IS A USED BOOK IN LIKE-NEW CONDITION. THE DUST WRAPPER IS ALSO IN LIKE-NEW CONDITION.