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FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE
By: Pankaj Mishra
The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2012
On Sale: September 4, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 0374249598
EAN: 9780374249595
Kindle: B0071W4UH4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one 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 continentβs anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkersβTagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empireβare seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asiaβs 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 antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. 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 timelyβa book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.
 Media BuzzOn Point - September 24, 2012
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