I hear people talk about the importance of reading non-Western centric history so often that it’s become cliche. That said, Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against The West and The Remaking of Asia" is the one of the first books to really effectively show me history from a non-Western lens.
Mishra describes the world before the colonial era as one that had settled into some general ideological zones. Every Muslim sect might not have gotten long perfectly, but the many disparate peoples of the Muslim world did have a sense that they belonged to a “shared, overarching moral order.” Likewise, Confucianism ensured a degree of continuity between the empires of China, and Hinduism provided the ideological bedrock for Indian civilization.
As the colonial era upended these time weathered cultures, it also set off a wave of anti-colonial philosophy and calls for reform and development. In the ensuing quest for modernization, aspiring Asian nations sought to carefully learn and draw from the worthwhile elements of the Western world without sacrificing their longstanding cultural identity in the process.
The European Recipe
For much of the colonial era, contemporary thinkers did assume that development required some elements of the European system, broadly meaning: nation states, liberal democracy, capitalism and scientific rationalism. If these principles made the Europeans strong, surely they could do the same in Asia. While Mishra himself refrains from clarifying an ideal model for development, he is consistent throughout"Ruins" in his rejection of this European system.
Mishra's archetypal example of the failings of Westernization is the Ottoman Empire, which sought actively to Westernize their cities and armies, only to become insolvent and dependent upon European banks. Under pressure from Britain, the Ottoman Empire allowed the introduction of countless Christian churches, hospitals and schools from across Europe, all of which upended the longstanding cohesive Islamic culture. Meanwhile, free trade deals brought a deluge of cheap British products into the Ottoman Empire, swamping their markets and crumpling local merchants and artisans. Piece by piece their vast territory was sectioned off around the edges and a once great empire was divided into inherently unstable smaller states.
Broken down into its component parts, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire depicts the four crucial Western failings Mishra emphasizes throughout "Ruins:" the spiritual loss of overturning traditional culture, the failures of liberal democracy, the exploitations of capitalism and the limitations of nation states. I think it's uncontroversial that cultural erasure is a clear wrong, so I want to explore the latter three factors and critically examine modernization through Pankaj Mishra's eyes.
1: On Liberal Democracy and Different Paths Forward
Probably the single clearest thing I'll take away from Ruins is the story of how liberal democracy, once considered a viable model in Asia, fell finally from favor. While Europeans claimed to have built a system based on tolerance and equality, peoples living in the colonized world understood intimately the dark underbelly of liberal democracy, a system which promoted enlightenment virtues at home while rationalizing ruthless conquest overseas. That said, while there were few illusions about the moral character of Western government, it was broadly accepted that a democratic system could foster stable and civilized conditions at home. In fact, reformers from China to India to the Middle East had long promoted democracy as the cure to local despotism throughout much of the colonial era. This idea was contingent, however, on the continued perceived success of the Europeans. World War 1 was to shatter this perception forever by showing the supposedly enlightened Western nations at their most violent - and their most fragile.
In the wake of the devastation of the war, the world briefly believed that the colonial era would end naturally with the collapse of several of the European Empires, alongside American President Woodrow Wilson's claim that he would enshrine national self-determination into a new League of Nations. But Wilson’s promise was an empty one and the ascendant League empowered the colonizers and left their territories untouched.
The sheer violence of the war, combined with Wilson’s betrayal, was to finally strip the last vestiges of moral and social standing from the Western world. It also turned off generations of post colonial intellectuals from our political system, and caused them to turn elsewhere for new forms of self-governance:
“Liberal democracy, long tainted in the East by association with Western imperialism, now looked feeble within the West itself, compromised by the rapacity and selfishness of the ruling elites.
. . .
In the wake of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference, many thinkers and activists began to reconsider their earlier captivation with Western political ideals. Modernization still seemed absolutely imperative, but it did not seem the same as Westernization, or to demand a comprehensive rejection of tradition or an equally complete imitation of the West. Freshly minted ideologies like revolutionary communism and Islamic fundamentalism, which promised to sweep away the debris of the past and initiate a fresh beginning, began to look attractive. And, most fatefully, liberal democracy did not seem necessary to national self-strengthening.”
In the following century, one by one the countries of the East finally threw off their colonizers and endeavoured to build their own nations. Unintuitively, Mishra credits Japan for jumpstarting this process, both by showing that an authoritarian state could oversee development, and by kicking the Europeans out as they expanded their own empire.
Reading "Ruins," you get a sense of just how many ideologies the world was brimming with at this time, all jousting and competing in regions of people struggling to define themselves and their futures. While many were disillusioned with liberal democracy, most post colonial states still drew from Western models and synthesized them with traditional and local systems. China mimicked the Soviet Union and adopted a vanguard centralized government with complete control over the economy. The Ottoman Empire transformed from a massive kingdom which had once strove for pan-Islamism into a tiny, secular nation state. Much of the rest of the Middle East would shatter into independent polities which combined religious fundamentalism with nationalism, while hybrid movements like Indonesia's Nasakom mixed together grabbag principles like religion, nationalism and socialism.
Mishra takes no clear single stance on which is these models is best suited for the modern world. Nor does he explicitly reject liberal democracy as a singular failure, merely insisting on recognizing its inability to stave off even the complete systemic collapse of total war. Likewise, he noes that non-democratic authoritarian systems managed to achieve equal and even more rapid rates of growth. He speaks appreciatively of Lenin's anti-imperialism and ideological consistency, but makes no serious case for socialism and remarks that "Marxism-Leninism lies discredited." The closest he comes to a clear conclusion is the below paragraph:
“We can see that the wholesale adoption of Western ideologies (Chinese Communism, Japanese Imperialism) did not work. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic revolution and Islamist movements continue to have a life today . . . Many new nations, such as Pakistan, never recovered from their birthing traumas; their liberationist energies dispersed into political-religious movements of an increasingly militant nature. Others, such as the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia, despite some serious setbacks, managed their economic growth and sovereignty to the point with their cumulative heft now seems to pose a formidable challenge to the West itself
. . . Of course, as some of Asia’s intellectuals pointed out, Europe’s own transition to its present state of stability and affluence was more than just painful. It involved imperial conquests, ethnic cleansing and many minor and two major wars involving the murder and displacement of countless millions.”
I'm fascinated by this idea of modern countries selectively drawing the best elements from other nations and mixing them with the strongest systems their own cultures have produced. However, the prescription to use "synthetic systems" rather than"wholesale Westernization" is broad enough advice to include countless forms of government, all the way from state capitalism to fundamentalist nationalism. It serves as a useful warning for what mistakes to avoid, but gives us little direction on the path forward.
2: On Capitalism and Trade
While Mishra doesn't offer us an explicit strategy for modernization, it's quite apparent which method he soundly rejects. He consistently depicts free trade in distinctly negative terms, nodding along if not outright endorsing Lenin and Liang's claims that imperialism is the natural endpoint of capitalism. Indeed, one of the repeated themes throughout "Ruins," visible on almost every page, is the role of commerce and trade as tools of colonialism.
Reading history from this lens, it’s easy to hear echoes of modern critics of neoliberalism, neocolonialism and structural adjustment programs. Al-Afghani shunned direct violent confrontation with the British because “witnessing the insidious influence of European bondholders in Egypt and tobacco traders in Iran, he recognized early how the power of the West did not just rest on military force and could not be resisted by military means alone.” Liang Qichao wrote that “a hundred times more than Western soldiers, Western commerce weakens China.” Of British infrastructure and trade, Jawaharlal Nehru said “the railway, the life-giver, has always seemed to me like iron bands confining and imprisoning India.” Nor was this merely the perspective of the victims of colonialism; Woodrow Wilson wrote “since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nation which are closed must be battered down.” And these were the words of a famous anti-imperialist!
If free trade and free borders are net negatives, what are the logical alternatives? Do you isolate your country, guard your culture and shelter your industry before entering the winner take all global market? I think the narrative of "Ruins" heavily suggests that that this is at least a preferable model for national self-strengthening, if not the single optimal model.
For the sake of argument, looking at it from another angle, this kind of carefully protected economy (and culture) is a large part of the way towards Trump-style nationalism. The Trump narrative is built on a fear of accepting immigrants with different cultural backgrounds, alongside the belief that cheap Chinese products are hollowing out American industry. This might sound nothing like the anti-colonial strains of thought I’ve touched upon above, but note that this narrative shares significant similarities with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which sagged and crumpled under cheap British products and growing Christian minority groups. But of course Trumpist nationalism sounds backwards to many of us, or at least particularly unsuited for the interconnected and multicultural modern world.
How much of a future is there really in maintaining isolation?
I'm agnostic on free trade as a whole, and willing to have my mind changed. Insofar as economists are good for anything, the overwhelming majority of economists seem to think free trade is a net win for all parties involved. I accept easily that under the right circumstances, unbalanced and predatory trade are real dynamics which have absolutely taken place. But I worry about cherry picking the most extreme examples of this dynamic in history and using it to build a narrative which conflates "free trade" with "brutal exploitation." While Mishra provides salient examples of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt supposedly collapsing under free trade and Western influence, he also acknowledges that Meiji Japan managed to thrive and become a superpower in this same exact context. If I chose to do so, I could tell a different story, selectively emphasizing that modern China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty after adopting fairly standard neoliberal reforms.
3: On Nation States and Empires
Mishra goes further, in fact rejecting the nation-state itself as an inherently flawed model, writing that “The European model of the ethnically homogeneous nation state was a poor fit in Europe itself. That it was particularly so for multi-ethnic Asian societies has been amply proved by the plight of the Kashmiri Muslims, Tibetans, Uighurs, the Chinese in Malaysia, Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Kurds in Turkey and Tamils in Sri Lanka . . . furthermore, the nation state is fundamentally unable to deal on its own with problems such as climate change, environmental degradation and water scarcity, which spill across borders.”
Fair to say. But if we shun economic and cultural openness along with liberal democracy and the nation state, where do we go from here? All these ideas taken together sound almost like a call for a return to older empires. Indeed, it’s not hard to argue that the many sub-cultures of the Middle East might have been better off under the hands-off governance of the Ottoman Empire than as discriminated minorities under the arbitrary modern borders. Likewise, a world ruled by a small handful of expansive empires might have better odds at coordinating on shared problems than two hundred plus countries all working in their own self interest. I would love to dig into this idea more, but in absence of Mishra's own stated beliefs I cannot do so without putting words into an author's mouth. Unfortunately, merely carving away the clay of the ideas Mishra explicitly rejects won't necessarily ever leave me with a fully formed vision of what model he would actually prefer.
Where does all this leave us? It’s true that the supposedly enlightened system of liberal democracy did not prevent imperialism or global war. It’s true that the nation state has severe limitations in its ability to cater to and unify multicultural people, and is ill-suited to address global problems. It’s true that scientific rationalism has not solved the wounds of spiritual emptiness or provided a clear answer to what makes “the good life.” It’s also true, as Mishra acknowledges, that the system which acts as a silver bullet for these problems has not yet been engineered, that: “no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable to large parts of the world.” In a strange way this sentiment, written by a scholar of anti-colonialism, reminds me of the quote from famous imperialist Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
I consider"From the Ruins of Empire" to be one of the most important books I've read in a long time. Perhaps there is no elusive, ideal political system which can perfectly solve the balance between cultural preservation and modernization. But that’s part of what I appreciate the most about “Ruins,” the sense that Mishra powerfully understands the incredible complexity of the problems faced by post colonial countries struggling to define themselves, to modernize and to unify, all in a world where they’ve been pushed down and bled dry for centuries.