2. THE STRANGE ODYSSEY OF JAMAL AL-DIN AL-AFGHANI
Nikki Keddie’s Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din ‘Al-Afghani’: A Political Biography (Berkeley, 1972) remains the most authoritative source of information about al-Afghani’s life and ideas. Elie Kedourie’s Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London, 1966) is marred by some conspiracy-theorizing but is still useful. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s The Arab Discovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, 1963) describes the first generation of Muslims initiated into the mysteries of Western power. Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798 – 1939 (Oxford, 1962) covers more terrain, and has a superb chapter on al-Afghani.
Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York, 2007) and Carter Vaughn Findley’s The Turks in World History (New York, 2004) are helpful primers on a big subject. M. ükrü Haniolu’s A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008) is a very accessible account of nineteenth-century Turkey, whose intellectual currents are described in erif Mardin’s The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, 2000), while Philip Mansel’s Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453 – 1924 (London, 1995) and Sultans in Splendour (London, 2002) richly evoke the world the Ottoman sultans made.
Juan Cole’s Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement (Cairo, 1999) is the best single book on the restless country al-Afghani knew in the 1870s. On the broader political history of nineteenth-century Egypt, see K. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo, 2002). David Landes’ Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) covers the antics of the elites while Michael Ezekiel Gasper provides a view from the streets in The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, 2009). The Cairo of that era is beautifully evoked in Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious (London, 2000) and Trevor Mostyn’s Egypt’s Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists (London, 2006).
David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Delhi, 2003) is a useful study, and for an interesting take on Sayyid Ahmed, see the chapter by Faisal Devji, ‘Apologetic Modernity’, in Shruti Kapila’s edited volume, An Intellectual History for India (Cambridge, 2010). Jacob M. Landau’s The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford, 1990) is an authoritative account, while Cemil Aydin has a fascinatingly discussion of the original motivations of pan-Islamism in The Politics of Anti-Westernism.
3. LIANG QICHAO’S CHINA AND THE FATE OF ASIA
On the Ottoman Turkish and Arab fascination with Japan, see Renee Worringer (ed.), The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity (Princeton, 2007). The best long and short introductions to Japan’s modern history are Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) and Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan (New York, 2003) respectively. American views of Japan and the Pacific have more recently been described in Bruce Cumings’s Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, Conn., 2010).
Liang Qichao’s thought has been well-served by three major monographs: Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890 – 1907 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, 1996). Jonathan Spence movingly describes Liang’s and Kang Youwei’s parallel lives in The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and their Revolution, 1895 – 1980 (New York, 1982). On Yan Fu, see Benjamin Schwartz’s In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
Broader descriptions of the Chinese intellectual scene can be found in Hao Chang’s Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890 – 1911) (Berkeley, 1987) and Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee (eds.), The Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge, 2002). Rana Mitter’s A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford, 2005) is a superbly written account of the debates and controversies leading up to and beyond the May Fourth Revolution. The clash of generations in the 1910s and 1920s is also well-illustrated in Vera Schwarcz’s The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement (Berkeley, 1986). Good general studies of the subject include T. C. Wang’s Chinese Intellectuals and the West 1872 – 1949 (Chapel Hill, 1966), Paul Cohen’s Discovering History in China (New York, 1984) – especially the subtle insights of the chapter titled ‘China’s Response to the West’ – and Jerome B. Greider’s Intellectuals and the State in Modern China: A Narrative History (New York, 1981). For two excellent essays on Liang Shuming and Zhang Taiyan see Charlotte Furth (ed.), The Limits of Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). Wang Hui’s forthcoming The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought will contain essays on all major Chinese writers and philosophers. Joseph W Esherick’s The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, 1988) is an unsurpassed account of the motivations of the Boxers.
Eri Hotta, in Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931 – 1945 (New York, 2007), lucidly details the broad range of Pan-Asianist traditions in Japan. Also see the provocative and stimulating essay ‘The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism’ by Prasenjit Duara in Journal of World History, Vol. 12, No. I (Spring, 2001). Marius B. Jansen’s The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Princeton, 1970) captures the precarious situation of Chinese exiles in Japan. On the political and intellectual crisis in Europe Liang wrote about, the best summary account is Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 2000).
4. 1919, ‘CHANGING THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD’
The Paris Peace Conference has invited close attention from scholars and writers. David Fromkin’s A Peace to End all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York, 1989) is a fair-minded account of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Middle East. Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2002) covers the actual proceedings at the conference. But it is Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2009) that reconstitutes 1919 as the seminal year for all major Asian countries striving for independence. The recent series by Haus Publishing, London, ‘Makers of the Modern World’, contains revealing monographs on all the leading participants at the conference. As a brief and illuminating history of American foreign policy-making, Walter A. McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York, 1997) is without peer. The story of the Comintern is entertainingly told in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (New York, 1985), and the official histories of individual communist parties in China, India and Vietnam are widely available. But the in-depth account of the making of Asian nationalisms-cum-communisms is yet to be written; it exists piecemeal in specialist monographs: Michael Williams’ article ‘Sneevliet and the Birth of Asian Communism’, in New Left Review I/123, September-October 1980, has some useful information. Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913 – 1929 (Delhi, 2011) is a revealing account of the world of an early Indian communist. As is Kris Manjapra’s M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Delhi, 2010).
5. RABINDRANATH TAGORE IN EAST ASIA, THE MAN FROM THE LOST COUNTRY
Tagore’s worldview is best observed through his own lucid prose writings, most of them available in English from diverse sources. The best biography of him in English is Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London, 1995). Few have written as well as Amit Chaudhuri on Tagore’s aesthetic; see his introduction to The Essential Tagore (Cambridge,
Mass., 2011) and the essays collected in On Tagore (Delhi, 2012). Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote with rare piety about Tagore in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London, 1951). Amartya Sen’s essay on Tagore, collected in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Delhi, 2005) first alerted me to his political thought – though I had dutifully read about it at school. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation (Delhi, 2011) is a sensitive intellectual biography.
The best academic study of Tagore’s political thought is Michael Collins’s Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Writings on History, Politics and Society (New York, 2011). On his differences with Gandhi, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915 – 1941 (Delhi, 1997). See also Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Delhi, 2006) and Ramachandra Guha’s introduction to Tagore’s Nationalism (Delhi, 2010). Tagore’s intellectual background is described in David Kopf’s British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773 – 1835 (Berkeley, 1969). See also the essays of Tapan Raychaudhuri in Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-century Bengal (Delhi, 2002), Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences (Delhi, 1999) and Sudipta Kaviraj’s The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi, 1995).
For India’s links with China, see Madhavi Thampi (ed.), Indians in China, 1800 – 1949 (Delhi, 2010) and Kalidas Nag, Discovery of Asia (Calcutta, 1993). Tagore’s visits to East Asia were first described at length in Stephen N. Hay’s Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and his Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). A recent volume edited by Amiya Dev and Tan Chung, Tagore and China (Delhi, 2011), contains both Indian and Chinese perspectives. The important figure of Aurobindo Ghose has been much traduced by Hindu nationalists and his prose writings have hardly received much scholarly examination, with the exception of Peter Heehs’s writings, in particular his biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York, 2008). Ashis Nandy writes about Aurobindo with characteristic sensitivity in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi, 1988). See also the chapter by Sugata Bose, ‘The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Policy: A Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought’, in An Intellectual History for India (Delhi, 2010) edited by Shruti Kapila. The Aurobindo Ashram’s website has all his prose works in easily downloadable PDF format. And B. Parekh’s Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (London, 1989) and Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Non-Violent Power in Action (New York, 2000) still stand out from among the mass of books on this subject.
6. ASIA REMADE
John D. Pierson’s Tokutomi Soh, 1863 – 1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan is an excellent introduction to Japan’s geopolitical trajectory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shogo Suzuki’s Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European International Society (New York, 2009) analyses how Japan’s socialization into the European system of states was inevitably tainted with violence. John Keay’s Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East (London, 1997) is, like most of this underrated author’s work, a wholly absorbing study about the last days of European empires in Asia. Japan’s occupation of Asia is well described in Nicholas Tarling’s A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941 – 1945 (Hawaii, 2001), William Newell (ed.), Japan in Asia, 1942 – 45 (Singapore, 1981) and Shigeru Sat’s War, Nationalism, and Peasants: Java under the Japanese Occupation, 1942 – 1945 (Armonk, 1994). The two volumes by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941 – 1945 (London, 2007) and Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (London, 2007), set a new standard in history-writing.
Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York, 2007) is the only book of its kind. Readers interested in Bandung can do no better than consult the volume of essays edited by Christopher Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political After-lives (Athens, Ohio, 2010), particularly the chapter by Dipesh Chakraborty, ‘The Legacies of Bandung’. See also Prasenjit Duara (ed.), Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (New York, 2004).
Iqbal has been inadequately translated into English; the one exception is V. G. Kiernan’s Poems from Iqbal (Karachi, 2005). Iqbal Singh’s The Ardent Pilgrim: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Iqbal (Delhi, 1997) is still the best account of him in English. Ayesha Jalal talks abut the poet and thinker bracingly in Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (New York, 2000). Mawdudi’s work and influence has received extended analysis in Vali Nasr’s Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York, 1996). Ali Shariati’s reputation in English has benefitted from a capable biographer in Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (London, 1998). Hamid Algar has translated and introduced two volumes of Shariati’s essays, in On the Sociology of Islam (Berkeley, 1979) and Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique (Berkeley, 1980). Also see Nikki Keddie, Iran: Roots of Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1981), especially Yann Richard’s chapter on Shariati.
John Calvert’s Sayyid Quth and the Origins of Radical Islamism (London, 2010) cuts through all the post-9/II clichés about his subject. Elegantly written, Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (London, 1985) is the most accessible general introduction to the place of religion in Iranian society before 1979. Ervand Abrahmanian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982) is indispensable to anyone wishing to understand Iranian politics up to 1979. And Khomeinism is also best understood through the same author’s Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, 1993). Hamid Dabashi’s Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New Brunswick, N.J., 2006) remains as fresh and revelatory as ever. See also his Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, Mass., 2011) Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Berkeley, 1984) anticipates many contemporary critiques of modern capitalism.
Some refreshingly unprejudiced and suggestive views on Islamic modernism can be found in Mansoor Moaddel’s Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago, 2005) and Roxanne Euben’s, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, 1999). Atatürk’s rigidly secular worldview is carefully explained in M. ükrü Hanioglu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, 2011). Bernard Lewis’s later political absurdities do not mar his early achievement, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1968), but a more interesting take on his subject exists in Carter Vaughn Findley’s Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History (New Haven, Conn., 2011).
Mao Zedong’s own writings, edited by Stuart Schram in several volumes, are the best guide to his intellectual and political evolution – and catastrophes. The scholarly contributions to Timothy Cheek (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Mao (Cambridge, 2010) do well to rescue him from sensationalist biographers. Thomas A. Metzger’s Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Culture (New York, 1986) is a provocative look at the Confucian underpinnings of Communist China. On the Confucian revival, see Daniel Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, 2008).
Notes
PROLOGUE
1 Quoted in Rotem Kowner (ed.), The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (London, 2006), p. 20.
2 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 4, http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL004.PDF, p. 470.
3 Jawaharlal Nehru, Autobiography (1936; repr. edn New Delhi, 1989), p. 16.
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