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

Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, argues that the central event of the twentieth century was not the two world wars or the Cold War but the intellectual and political awakening of Asia. Part historical essay and part intellectual biography, the book traces this awakening through the lives of Asian thinkers who responded to Western domination, focusing on two figures: the Muslim activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and the Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929).

Mishra opens with the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, when a small Japanese fleet annihilated much of the Russian navy, marking the first time since the Middle Ages that a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war. News of Japan's victory electrified people across Asia, from Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa to the young Ottoman soldier Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk. Despite their different backgrounds, all drew the same lesson, recognizing that white men were no longer invincible. Japan's victory accelerated intellectual decolonization, inspiring constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Egypt, and contributing to the overthrow of China's imperial dynasty in 1911.

To explain how Asia reached this point, Mishra traces the systematic subordination of Asian civilizations by European powers. Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt, chronicled by the Egyptian cleric al-Jabarti as "the beginning of a series of great misfortunes" (18), revealed that Europeans possessed devastating new military and economic power. Islam's centuries-old civilization stretched from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, and China's Confucian order had underpinned government and society for two millennia; both regarded Europeans as marginal. Yet by mid-century, the British had conquered much of India and forced opium on China through two wars. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, though brutally suppressed, revealed deep resentment of British rule. By 1900, a small white minority controlled most of the world's land surface. This subordination was not merely political and military but also intellectual and spiritual, leaving its victims eager to learn the secrets of Western power.

The book's first major biographical subject is al-Afghani, born in Persia but claiming Afghan origins. Educated in Shiite seminaries and in British-ruled India, he witnessed the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny and developed a lifelong distrust of the British. In Istanbul in 1869, he encountered the Tanzimat reforms, an ambitious Ottoman program of Westernization that created modern institutions but also destroyed local industries and widened inequality. In Egypt through the 1870s, al-Afghani mentored future leaders like Mohammed Abduh and Saad Zaghlul, helped found the first independent Arabic newspapers, and urged constitutional reform while defending Indian civilization against British claims of having civilized it. Expelled in 1879, he moved to Paris, where he and Abduh founded al-'Urwa al-wuthqa, the first international periodical calling for Islamic solidarity against the West. Al-Afghani also debated the French historian Ernest Renan on Islam and science, conceding that all religions begin by manifesting intolerance toward science but insisting that Islam could be made compatible with intellectual inquiry.

Al-Afghani's greatest political triumph came in Persia. When the shah granted a British businessman a monopoly over tobacco in 1891, al-Afghani helped forge an alliance of intellectuals, clergy, and merchants that forced the shah to cancel the concession. In his final years, he accepted Sultan Abdulhamid II's invitation to counsel him in Istanbul but found himself trapped, forbidden from publishing or political activity. He died of cancer in 1897, bitter and isolated. Yet his ideas traveled far: His disciples included Rashid Rida, whose periodical al-Manar inspired the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Al-Afghani's formula of Islamic unity and anti-Westernism would be adopted by figures from Ayatollah Khomeini to Osama bin Laden.

The book's second major subject, Liang Qichao, enters the narrative as a twenty-two-year-old traveling to Beijing for civil service exams in 1895, when Japan's defeat of China shattered Chinese complacency. His mentor, Kang Youwei, undertook a radical reinterpretation of Confucian classics, arguing that Confucius himself had advocated social change and popular participation. Their Hundred Days' Reform of 1898 briefly placed them at the center of power, but the Dowager Empress Cixi staged a counter-coup. Liang escaped to Japan; his associate Tan Sitong refused to flee and was beheaded.

In exile, Liang became China's most influential journalist, absorbing Western philosophy through Japanese translations and introducing terms like "democracy" and "revolution" into Chinese. He grew convinced that China must forge a centralized nation-state to survive in a world governed by Social Darwinism, the widespread belief that nations competed for dominance as species did in nature. Tokyo became a hub for Asian nationalists; the Vietnamese activist Phan Boi Chau sought out Liang and serialized his History of the Loss of Vietnam in Liang's newspaper. A 1903 trip to the United States disillusioned Liang: He found extreme inequality, political corruption, and racist violence against Chinese immigrants, concluding that China needed authoritarian rule before it could sustain representative government. The Boxer Rising of 1900, a spontaneous anti-foreign uprising crushed by an international military force, and the chaos following the 1911 revolution, which toppled the Qing dynasty but degenerated into warlordism, confirmed his pessimism.

The pivotal chapter covers 1919 and the Paris Peace Conference. President Woodrow Wilson's wartime speeches about self-determination raised extraordinary hopes, but Wilson, who privately regarded non-white peoples as unfit for self-government, proved unable to challenge British and French imperialism. Japan's proposal to enshrine racial equality in the League of Nations covenant was overruled. Egypt's nationalist leader Zaghlul was arrested and deported, provoking revolution. In India, the British reneged on promises of self-rule; the Amritsar massacre of April 1919 killed 400 demonstrators. The Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, who rented a morning suit to petition Wilson, got nowhere near the president. Most devastating for China, its claims on the Shandong peninsula were denied despite its contribution of 200,000 laborers to the Allied war effort. Liang cabled home that weak nations who take literally the "catch-phrases of the strong" will be "quickly disillusioned" (205). The resulting May Fourth Movement inaugurated mass politics in China and pushed a generation toward communism.

Mishra devotes a chapter to Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and critic of Western modernity, and his lecture tours of Japan and China in the 1910s and 1920s. Tagore's advocacy of Asian spiritual values against Western materialism fell flat in Japan, where he was dismissed as speaking "the poetry of a defeated people" (234), and provoked organized hostility in China, where radical students shouted, "Go back, slave from a lost country!" Tagore's warnings about nationalism and militarism proved prescient as Japan's trajectory toward imperial conquest demonstrated.

The final chapter surveys the consequences of Japan's wartime conquest of European colonies across Southeast Asia in 1941 and 1942, which fundamentally undermined European authority. Decolonization proceeded rapidly after 1945. Mishra traces the intellectual heirs of the book's protagonists: The Egyptian writer and Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb developed a comprehensive critique of Western civilization that inspired radical Islamist movements, while in Iran, Ali Shariati, who blended anti-imperialism with Shiite revolutionary thought, laid the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Turkey's evolution from Atatürk's aggressive secularization to the rise of Islamic democratic politics shows that popular Islam cannot be eliminated by state decree. China's transformation into the world's largest exporter vindicates Liang's vision of state-directed capitalism.

In the epilogue, Mishra reflects that no convincingly universalist alternative to Western modernity has emerged. Gandhi is largely forgotten in India; Marxism-Leninism is discredited; China's model offers economic arguments for the absence of political freedom. The hope that billions of Asian consumers will enjoy Western lifestyles strikes Mishra as a dangerous fantasy, condemning the global environment to destruction and creating vast reservoirs of frustration, making the revenge of the East "something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic" (310).