AN ECONOMIST AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Thoroughly readable…Essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia."—Amitav Ghosh, The Wall Street Journal
A little more than a century ago, independent thinkers across Asia sought to frame a distinct intellectual tradition that would inspire the continent's rise to dominance. Yet this 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 of the Ottoman Empire—are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But as Pankaj Mishra demonstrates in this enthralling portrait of like minds, Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants; rather, it is rooted in the ideas of these once renowned thinkers. Now, when the ascendency of Asia seems possible as never before, 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.
