From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia [Paperback]

AFinancial TimesandThe EconomistBest Book of the Year and aNew York TimesBook Review Editors' Choice

A SURPRISING, GRIPPING NARRATIVE DEPICTING THE THINKERS WHOSE IDEAS SHAPED CONTEMPORARY CHINA, INDIA, AND THE MUSLIM WORLD

A little more than a century ago, independent thinkers across Asia sought to frame a distinct intellectual tradition that would inspire the continent's rise to dominance. Yet this did not come to pass, and today those thinkersTagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empireare seen as outsiders within the main anticolonial tradition. But as Pankaj Mishra demonstrates in this enthralling portrait of like minds, Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants; rather, it is rooted in the ideas of these once renowned intellectuals. Now, when the ascendency of Asia seems possible as never before,From the Ruins of Empireis as necessary as it is timelya book indispensable to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Pankaj Mishra was born in India in 1969 and lives in London and Mashobra, India. The author ofAn End to Suffering(FSG, 2004) andTemptations of the West(FSG, 2006), as well as a novel,The Romantics,he writes forThe New Yorker,The New York Review of Books,The New York Times Book Review, andThe Guardian.

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...Amazing. Orhan Pamuk

Essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia. Amitav Ghosh, The Wall Street Journal

Timely and important...An astute and entertaining synthesis of these neglected histories. Hari Kunzru,lÓ(