The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

From the Ruins of Empire

Pankaj Mishra's provocative account of how China, India and the Muslim World are remaking the world in their own image - shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2013 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2013 
 
Viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, the Victorian period was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire or burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, it was clear that for Asia to recover a new way of thinking was needed. Pankaj Mishra re-tells the history of the past two centuries, showing how a remarkable, disparate group of thinkers, journalists, radicals and charismatics emerged from the ruins of empire to create an unstoppable Asian renaissance, one whose ideas lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to the Muslim Brotherhood, and have made our world what it is today. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'Arrestingly original ... this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today' John Gray, Independent 
 
'A riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections ... deeply entertaining and deeply humane' Hisham Matar 
 
'Fascinating ... a rich and genuinely thought-provoking book' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Provocative, shaming and convincing' Michael Binyon, The Times 
 
'Lively ... engaging ... retains the power to shock' Mark Mazower, Financial Times 
 
'Subtle, erudite and entertaining' Economist, New Delhi 
 
About the author: 
 
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Butter Chicken in Ludiana, The Romantics, An End to Suffering and Temptations of the West. He writes principally for the Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. He lives in London, Shimla and New York.

Meticulous scholarship ... History, as Mishra insists, has been glossed and distorted by the conqueror ... [This] passionate account of the relentless subjugation of Asian empires by European, especially British, imperialism, is provocative, shaming and convincing

One can only be thankful for writers like Mishra. From The Ruins Of Empire is erudite, provocative, inspiring and unremittingly complex; a model kind of non-fiction for our disordered days ... May well be seen in years to come as a defining volume of its kind

Deeply researched and arrestingly original ... this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today

From the Ruins of Empire gives eloquent voice to [the] curious, complex intellectual odysseys ... of some of Asia's most educated, thoughtful men

Fascinating ... a rich and genuinely thought-provoking book

Superb and ground-breaking. Not just a brilliant history of Asia, but a vital history for Asians

Lively ... engaging ... From the Ruins of Empire retains the power to instruct and even to shock. It provides us with an exciting glimpse of the vast and still largely unexplored terrain of anti-colonial thought that shaped so much of the post-western world in which we now live

Brilliant ... Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population - from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent

Jolts our historical imagination ... a book of vast and wondrous learning and delightful and surprising associations that will give a new meaning to liberation geography

Hamid Dabashi (Professor of Iranian Studies, Columbia University, New York)

After Edward Said's masterpiece Orientalism, From the Ruins of Empire offers another bracing view of the history of the modern world. Pankaj Mishra [is] a brilliant author of wide learning ... skillful and captivating narration

Wang Hui (Professor of Chinese Intellectual History, Tsinghua University, Beijing)

Pankaj Mishra has produced a riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. He follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. In the end we realise that what we are holding in our hands is not only a deeply entertaining and deeply humane book, but a balance sheet of the nature and mentality of colonisation

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Butter Chicken in Ludiana, The Romantics, An End to Suffering and Temptations of the West. He writes principally for the Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. He lives in London, Shimla and New York.

Pankaj Mishra

Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely

This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years

Far from reassuring... his vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking.

This is a framework that pushes aside conventional, familiar divisions of left and right to focus on the profound sense of dislocation and alienation that spawned (and still spawns) movements ranging from fascism to anarchism to nihilism...a short book into which a lot of intellectual history has been packed.

A valuable book. Mishra's ideas are bold and initially discomfiting - it's a challenge to look over the head of the latest terrorist and try to dispassionately trace his rage back to Voltaire - but it's undeniably good to stretch intellectual muscles and test your own prejudices. Mishra invites us to hear the ugly, muffled shouts beneath the "drumbeat" of Western civilisation.

Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts...  no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far we still are from the top.

Around the world, both East and West, the insurrectionary fury of militants, zealots and populists has overturned the post-Cold-War global consensus. Where does their rage come from, and where will it end? One of the sharpest cultural critics and political analysts releases his landmark "history of the present

An original attempt to explain today's paranoid hatreds...Iconoclastic...Mr. Mishra shocks on many levels.

Along with quotations from Voltaire, Rousseau, and other familiar figures of Western Civ, Age of Anger includes observations from Iranian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other nations' scholars; their perspectives complement Mishra's deep understanding of global tensions....In probing for the wellspring of today's anger he hits on something real

Provocative...We'll need new philosophical frameworks to understand the phenomenon of political anger in a global perspective; what's fascinating about Mishra's novel reading is that it draws on familiar philosophical and literary touchstones while turning them on their head...A brilliant work

A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis

A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for 'truly transformative thinking' about humanity's future

Sensitive and illuminating....Makes a powerful case for the influence of a certain group of anti-rational and anti-commercial ideas which have influenced our world.,..Mishra's contribution is to show us how these ideas have become 'viral' and what that means for all of us.

Incisive...Age of Anger, which was completed after the Brexit vote but before Trump's victory, reminds us that the dialectical movement between these two poles - between a desire to be oneself and a desire to belong to something larger than oneself - has been a feature of Western political life since the Enlightenment

Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger...exemplifies his characteristic eloquence and erudition...Leaders who are struggling to process the present backlash against core aspects of globalization would do well to heed Mishra's plea to "remember the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires, and resentments."

An impressively probing and timely work...Highly engaging

Scintillating...Age of Anger looks an awful lot like a masterwork. We're only a few weeks into 2017, but one of the books of the year is already here

A History of the Present

How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present. 
 
He shows that as the world became modern those who were unable to fulfil its promises - freedom, stability and prosperity - were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the 19th century arose - angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. 
 
Today, just as then, the wider embrace of mass politics, technology, and the pursuit of wealth and individualism has cast many more billions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity - with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.

Pankaj Mishra

Praise for Age of Anger

Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely

This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years

Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call

Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely

This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years

Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call

Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely

This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years

Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call

Books by Pankaj Mishra

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