Kanishk Tharoor writes:

For nearly three decades, Mishra has skewered the pieties of politicians and intellectuals in the Anglophone world (including India, which boasts more English speakers than the United Kingdom), while also bringing his spirited attention to the histories and imaginations of people outside circles of wealth and power. The scales first fell from his eyes during his travels and reporting in Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the disputed Indian-administered territory, he saw firsthand the collision between India’s pluralist liberal democracy—its avowed commitment to democratic norms, individual rights, and multiculturalism—and the reality of military occupation. Indian apologia for abuses in Kashmir, he writes, “prepared me for the spectacle of a liberal intelligentsia cheerleading the war for ‘human rights’ in Iraq, with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy and progress that was originally heard from European imperialists in the nineteenth century.” The remit of Mishra’s work has grown steadily wider over the decades, from an early focus on the dreams and catastrophes of small-town India, to a thoughtful exploration of colonial-era Asian intellectual history in the excellent From the Ruins of Empire (2012), to the sweeping global jurisdiction of his recent books, which directly confront the international order made by the United Kingdom and the United States.

He is steeped in an Indian (and broadly non-Western) intellectual tradition of anti-colonialism that has long highlighted the gulf between the West’s espoused beliefs and the reality of its conduct. The institutions that put nineteenth-century Western powers in a position to rule over vast swaths of the earth—nationalism, centralized bureaucracies, efficient armies, and the capacity to mobilize vast resources—had little to do with the rights of the individual. In the eyes of many non-Westerners, Mishra writes, “liberalism seemed attractive largely because it promised to advance the urgent project of state-led modernization”—a modernization that would better protect them from the threat of ostensibly liberal empires. The early–twentieth-century Chinese thinker Yan Fu claimed that the genius of the West lay in its ability to channel “individual energy into national strength.” Imperial expansion throughout this period (including that by the Japanese) enacted this very tension, with strong states merrily quashing individuals in the service of colonial fantasy.

And then there was the blood. On the centenary of the end of World War I, Mishra lamented how “the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern Western civilization, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilized European powers sleepwalked into after the ‘long peace’ of the nineteenth century.” That reading forgets the apocalyptic violence Western powers brought to other parts of the world in the years before the war. Mishra sketches a sample accounting of the grisly toll of empire: the 200,000 Filipinos the United States killed during its colonial wars in the early twentieth century (in which 26 of 30 U.S. generals had also served in wars against Native Americans), how the Germans slaughtered 88 percent of the Herero people in Southern Africa, and the eight million people who died in Belgian-administered Congo. (He might have mentioned the tens of millions of Indians lost to famines under British colonial rule, death at a scale that dwarfs the number of Ukrainians killed by Stalin’s Holodomor in the 1930s.) A tenuous peace held between the great powers during the interwar period, but the carnage continued elsewhere. Arthur Harris, the British air force officer who led the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, laid waste to northern Iraq in 1924. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” Harris proclaimed in a Royal Air Force report at the time. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

Europeans and North Americans are learning more about this gruesome past, but the history of the West’s dealings with the rest remains largely submerged in a gray zone, allowed little of the harsh light cast on the traditional villains of the modern era (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and so on). Western colonial abuses are still treated as a footnote, a sideshow to the main action of the twentieth century: the confrontation between liberalism and authoritarianism that emerged through the world wars and the Cold War. And they must be treated in this way for the rest of the narrative to cohere and for the binary between liberty and tyranny to take shape.

Mishra insists that liberalism cannot so easily shed this baggage. The chaos, violence, and snarling ideologies of imperial rule in Africa, Asia, and Latin America fed directly into the wars that would dismember and reshape the world. Colonies, Mishra writes, were “the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal twentieth-century wars—racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives—were first forged.” [Continue reading…]