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From The Ruins Of Empire The Revolt Against The West (2012)

by Pankaj Mishra(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1846144787 (ISBN13: 9781846144783)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Allen Lane

review 1: I really enjoyed the first four-fifths of this book. I found it a deeply motivated popular study on the effects of colonialism in East Asia in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, that most interestingly seeks to redefine modernity as the negotiation of this colonialism with otherwise confident societies that often had very distinct, and rich, intellectual cultural legacies. The last two chapters bring the book up to date, but they lack the analytic judgement Mishra brought to the earlier chapters. It often felt like I was simply listening to a talking head on TV. The rest was great, though, and I highly recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the history of colonialism in the region, and unfamiliar with the nascent intellectual modernity of the region at the ... moretime.
review 2: The author has done a tremendous amount of research to produce this account of how the West accrued its empires in the East and how the East gradually fought back. Spanning the best part of 200 years, Mr Mishra takes us through writings of Al Afghani, Sun Yat Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Liang Qichao and many others I had never heard of before. Educational, informative and interesting, Mishra tries to stay on the academic path by not getting subjective as hard as that may have been as one coming from India, subjected to brutal atrocities by the British. Most of the book focusses on Al Afghani, a Persian born intellectual, and a trio of thinkers from China, the point being to understand how the Egyptian and Chinese peoples became radicalized. The author provides fascinating insights into aspects of history that produces that moment when one says,'oh that's why this happened or that's explains it all.' Although a long read, I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in world affairs, with an emphasis on the East. less

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