Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism. – Pankaj Mishra
As the 19th century progressed, Europe’s innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. – Pankaj Mishra
The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out – in 1949, after a four-year struggle – were keen to preserve their inheritance and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers. – Pankaj Mishra
Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination. – Pankaj Mishra
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. – Pankaj Mishra
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. – Pankaj Mishra
After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home. – Pankaj Mishra
After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. – Pankaj Mishra
Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism. – Pankaj Mishra
Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy. – Pankaj Mishra
Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. – Pankaj Mishra
I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain’s old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world. – Pankaj Mishra
Indonesia’s diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages. – Pankaj Mishra
Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria. – Pankaj Mishra
Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village – a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages. – Pankaj Mishra
Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo. – Pankaj Mishra
‘Islamism’ itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey’s AKP party to al Qaeda. – Pankaj Mishra
Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. – Pankaj Mishra
I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village. – Pankaj Mishra
Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities – of class, region, ethnicity, and religion. – Pankaj Mishra
Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies. – Pankaj Mishra
No Muslim country has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state; the country’s westernised elite brutally imposed secularism, among other things, on its devout population of peasants. – Pankaj Mishra
Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. – Pankaj Mishra
In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty. – Pankaj Mishra
Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government. – Pankaj Mishra
Policymakers can draw much from ‘The Need for Roots’: such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education. – Pankaj Mishra
The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way. – Pankaj Mishra
Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which ‘From the Ruins of Empire’ was. – Pankaj Mishra