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“From the Ruins of Empire gives eloquent voice to their curious, complex intellectual odysseys as they struggled to respond to the western challenge. All were forced to look far beyond home-grown traditions: Liang Qichao attacked Chinese antiquity as an internal cancer and wrote paeans to Washington and Napoleon; al-Afghani was one of the first Muslim thinkers to realise that ‘history was working independently of the God of the Koran”; Tagore became internationally renowned for his English-language poetry (he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913 for his “beautiful verse, by which … he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English works, a part of the literature of the west”).'”
There were some dissenting voices however. In The Telegraph, Noel Malcolm admitted enjoying it but couldn’t help noting that Mishra ‘tends to gloss over the imperialism of the Asians themselves’, even getting historical details wrong while doing so. Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times was less generous; not only was From the Ruins of Empire ‘flat and colourless’ but:‘Like some pound-shop John Pilger, he talks again and again of the “pure plunder” of western imperialism, treating all European powers — the British, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch, the Russians — as though they were part of a satanic monolith. But you do not have to be an apologist for empire to bridle at Mishra’s total disregard for historical nuance.’
Can’t wait to hear Niall Ferguson’s take on it. Fleur Macdonald is editor @TheOmnivore.Because you read about history
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